
The Atlas of Early Printing in Europe - benbreen
https://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu
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OliverJones
Pretty cool stuff.

My high school had one of those big flatbed lever presses. It took four strong
teenagers to run it.

One, with clean hands, to put the blank paper in the truck. One, with clean
hands, to take the printed paper from the truck. One, usually an ink-stained
wretch, to use a hand roller to ink the form. One to push the truck into the
press, pull the lever, and pull the truck back out of the press.

We could usually get three or four pages a minute out of the thing.

It took us a semester to compose and print a 48-page literary magazine. But
the result was fine.

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IndianAstronaut
Very interesting. I read the biography of Gutenberg sometime back. He put a
lot of his life and effort into the printing press and his traveling and
contacts when he was younger helped enable the spread of printing.

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Kinnard
I was shocked by how eurocentric this is. Expected to see China SOMEWHERE . .
. since printing was invented there . . . it is cool though, if incomplete.

~~~
AvenueIngres
Not to disparage one of the four great inventions of the Chinese but Europeans
invented the printing _press_ which is kind of the crux here: massive
partially automated distribution of knowledge.

~~~
douche
The Chinese did have movable type and all of the building-blocks centuries
earlier, though.

Unfortunately, much of the head start the Chinese had in printing seems to
have been chewed up by their devilishly difficult writing system. Learning the
thousands of characters necessary to become literate in Chinese is a steeper
task than the couple dozen of Latin letters and the few tens of ways that they
combine phonetically. Not to mention the purely prosaic result that a Latin
script requires far, far fewer different varieties of type for printing.

On the other hand, I am not sure that European literacy and printing would
have exploded so quickly without the Protestant Reformation inducing demand
for the printed word, or rather Word.

