I have seen that Euclid's Elements was written 300 BC and first set in type in 1482. Are there scans of that old versions available?
How were formulas / images added to the books created with printing presses?
Can / could formulas / images also be printed automatically or had they to draw every single image again for every single new book?
Best Answer
Euclid's Elements of Geometry (1482)
In the 1455 Gutenberg bible the illustrations were hand-drawn after printing.The illustrations in the 1482 Elements were printed. [In some copies the diagrams were colored in by hand, see right image above.]
In a foreword the printer Erhard Ratdolt attributed the prior lack of printed mathematical works to the difficulty produced by the diagrams, and adds "Having perceived, that it was this alone that formed an obstacle to something that would be useful to all, I have achieved, by applying myself to the problem and not without putting in much hard work, that geometrical figures can be composed with the same ease as movable type".
There appears to be some uncertainty on the nature of Ratdolt's method, which he did not explain any further. The common practice in the 15th century was to use woodcuts for illustrations, as discussed by Bowers. Alternatively, according to this source, Ratdolt had devised elementary geometrical forms in type metal which could be combined to form figures which, being in metal, could be printed at the same time as the typeset page.
The OP asks also for early printed formulas. The earliest appearance of + and - symbols appears to be Johannes Widmann (1489), see image below. Notation that would need subscript or superscripts (such as exponents) was generally avoided, as were fractions with a bar. A quote: The bar is generally found in Latin manuscripts of the late Middle Ages, but when printing was introduced it was frequently omitted, doubtless owing to typographical difficulties. This inference is confirmed by such books as Rudolff's Kunstliche rechnung (1526), where the bar is omitted in all ordinary fractions but is inserted in fractions printed in larger type and those having large numbers.