I don't think the Chinese had presses like Gutenberg invented. Type was set in a frame, inked, and the paper pressed over the inked type manually. Gutenberg's great innovation was coupling the screw press, already in use for pressing olives and grapes for oil and juice, with movable metal type. The Chinese didn't put the two together.
Screw presses were also used in binding codexes and that’s more likely the model for what Gutenberg used for his printing press.
What I find interesting is the speculation that Gutenberg didn’t quite have type like what spread through Europe after he made his Bible, but it was something more akin to using punches to make plates. Now if I could only remember where I read this thirty years ago…
It's fast. Two skilled pressmen working together could do 200 to 250 impressions per hour or about one every 15 seconds (which might be 4, 8, 16 pages on each impression depending on page size). That was the speed text was put to paper from Gutenberg all the way until steam presses arrive at the start of the 19th century. The screw press also applies an even uniform pressure across the whole page; that's hard to do manually and impossible to do in 15 seconds. Screw-press you can do drunk, and many printers did. (Just read Ben Franklin's account of how much his fellow printshop workers drank: [0]) Source for all this: I studied early modern history and especially history of the book.
Movable type is an amazing invention, without which the whole history of the world would look utterly different. Everyone who has the slightest interest should try setting some movable type if you can find a printshop in your city offering classes (I did; it's fun). It's harder than you might think and you learn why skilled compositors and printers were quite well-paid by the standards of early-modern craftspeople. But you also see the enormous efficiency gains because once that type is set up, the marginal cost of producing each copy is low.
[0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2013/06/18/strong-beer-that-he... : "My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner; a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he supposed, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labour."
Vandercooks are really the ideal small press. Simple to operate, none of the danger of crushing fingers that you would have with a Chandler & Price or the necessity¹ to dampen pages that you get with an old-school cast iron hand press.
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1. Although dampening pages will still improve the quality of impression. You just don’t have to do it as much as you would with a hand press where you end up squeezing buckets of water out of the pages as you print.
The printing press froze the written German language before natural language evolution had a chance to simplify the declensional system.
So, language nuts: how much time would have sufficed for German to simplify "sufficiently" ? Another couple of hundred years ?
A two hundred year delay in the introduction of the printing press certainly would have changed German and European history.
Considering movable type was in China in 1040 (Bi Sheng, inventor) I wonder if there are any extant presses there.
I don't think the Chinese had presses like Gutenberg invented. Type was set in a frame, inked, and the paper pressed over the inked type manually. Gutenberg's great innovation was coupling the screw press, already in use for pressing olives and grapes for oil and juice, with movable metal type. The Chinese didn't put the two together.
Screw presses were also used in binding codexes and that’s more likely the model for what Gutenberg used for his printing press.
What I find interesting is the speculation that Gutenberg didn’t quite have type like what spread through Europe after he made his Bible, but it was something more akin to using punches to make plates. Now if I could only remember where I read this thirty years ago…
What is the advantage of the screw press? From an outsider's perspective, it _sounds_ slower?
It's fast. Two skilled pressmen working together could do 200 to 250 impressions per hour or about one every 15 seconds (which might be 4, 8, 16 pages on each impression depending on page size). That was the speed text was put to paper from Gutenberg all the way until steam presses arrive at the start of the 19th century. The screw press also applies an even uniform pressure across the whole page; that's hard to do manually and impossible to do in 15 seconds. Screw-press you can do drunk, and many printers did. (Just read Ben Franklin's account of how much his fellow printshop workers drank: [0]) Source for all this: I studied early modern history and especially history of the book.
Movable type is an amazing invention, without which the whole history of the world would look utterly different. Everyone who has the slightest interest should try setting some movable type if you can find a printshop in your city offering classes (I did; it's fun). It's harder than you might think and you learn why skilled compositors and printers were quite well-paid by the standards of early-modern craftspeople. But you also see the enormous efficiency gains because once that type is set up, the marginal cost of producing each copy is low.
[0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2013/06/18/strong-beer-that-he... : "My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner; a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he supposed, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labour."
Do you have any recommendations for books on the history of movable type?
I have a vandercook 325g press from 1947 and I thought that was old.
Vandercooks are really the ideal small press. Simple to operate, none of the danger of crushing fingers that you would have with a Chandler & Price or the necessity¹ to dampen pages that you get with an old-school cast iron hand press.
⸻
1. Although dampening pages will still improve the quality of impression. You just don’t have to do it as much as you would with a hand press where you end up squeezing buckets of water out of the pages as you print.