Wednesday, January 27, 2021 Portrait of a Young Man, by Bronzino, c. 1530. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H.O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. It is impossible to measure the odds of someone else inventing printing if Gutenberg had not, but I suggest that they were high. Claims of a simultaneous invention by Laurens Janszoon Coster seem grounded only in a sixteenth-century attempt at burnishing the reputation of Coster’s hometown of Haarlem, in the Netherlands. But all the elements were readily available, as well as existing demand for what printing could offer, so the idea could plausibly have occurred to someone else around the same time. We now appreciate that printing by both woodblock (xylography) and (more rarely) movable characters (made of wood or porcelain but also metal) was in use centuries earlier in multiple East Asian contexts. Nevertheless, there is no good evidence of a westward transmission of printing from Asia to Europe, although gunpowder and papermaking clearly were transmitted in that way.