Although Don Quixote wasn’t the first great novel (that honor belongs to the Tale of Genji, written by an 11th-century lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court), it was the first to do something important: capture a new world of print.

That world had begun when Johannes Gutenberg improved upon Chinese printing techniques and combined them with paper, itself an invention that had arrived from China via the Middle East and Arab-occupied Spain. (We still count paper in reams, from the Arabic rizma.)

These two inventions, brought together again in Northern Europe, encountered a rising merchant class and the alphabet, which made print with movable type much more effective than in China. Cheaper literature led to rising literacy rates, which in turn increased the demand for printed matter, beginning a virtuous cycle that has lasted until today.

Don Quixote was an early beneficiary. This irreverent story of an aristocrat who reads too many chivalric romances was perfect for a broader readership. After a first printing in 1605, new editions were produced across Castile and Aragon, resulting in 13,500 available copies in its first 10 years. Don Quixote became popular abroad as well, with editions in far-away Brussels, Milan, and Hamburg. Most significant was an English translation, which Shakespeare liked so much that he wrote a play, Cardenio (apparently co-authored by John Fletcher, and since lost), based on one of the novel’s interpolated tales. People started to dress as Don Quixote and his wily servant, Sancho Panza, fiction spilling over into the real world.

The new technologies came with significant side effects. So popular was the novel that an anonymous writer decided to write a sequel. Cervantes, who felt that he owned the famous character he had created, was dismayed. He depended on the novel to solve his perpetual financial troubles (he had been accused of defrauding the state while working as a tax collector raising funds for the Spanish Armada, and put in prison). With few legal means at his disposal, Cervantes realized that he had to fight fire with fire and write his own sequel. In it, he made Don Quixote defeat an imposter drawn from the unauthorized rival version—Quixote’s false double—showing who was really in charge of the story.