The Printing Press
For whatever reason, the age of the printing press astounds me. In learning about medieval Iberia in another class (FYSM1405), we briefly touched on how the printing press and the growing availability of paper revolutionized the documenting of the past.
I was given the opportunity to touch and examine a leaflet that was printed in Venice, 1503. The paper felt thicker and the typeface felt like something I would see now. I couldn’t believe the precision they were able to achieve nearly 600 years ago. The master printer explained to us that the speed of which they were able to operate the printing press was extraordinary, too, and it just kept improving until the late 1900s.
We got to use a 1960s printing press in the Book Arts Lab, each of us was able to use it to print out a cake (see image below). It felt like a reward for showing up! I can’t imagine using these presses every single day (it certainly made me appreciate our modern technology), but I also am so impressed by how early these machines came to be.
I decided to look into it a bit further, and in reading Robert Hoe’s Short History of the Printing Press (1902), it was interesting to see how this machine was improved upon every few decades, and also to see how much larger they got. There are so many different models featured and what purpose they served, including the impressive “Double Sextuple Press” built for the New York Journal (page 83 of the book). As the book was published in 1902, it does not comment on the further automation and more compact machines that came into existence as the century moved forward, but it was still an interesting read that was written from the perspective of someone in the industry as well.
