The Atlas of Early Printing in Europe
atlas.lib.uiowa.edu
atlas.lib.uiowa.edu
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.
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.