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The two oldest printing presses

museumplantinmoretus.be

55 pointsjanpot24 comments

Maybe I'm too nitpicky, but I wish that, out of the 8 times that they write "the oldest printing presses", they would at least once mention that these are the oldest (known) surviving printing presses, just to avoid anyone getting a wrong impression. Actually, they're not even the oldest in Belgium by a long margin, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_...), the first printing presses in Belgium started operating in 1473, so 127 years before these.

It’s also a very western view - block printing was a thing in China well before this. I don’t know, but I suspect there are older surviving presses there or in Asia more generally.

As someone who lives in Antwerp, this museum is my number one recommendation for people visiting the city.

It is also a Unesco World Heritage site, which is very unusual for a museum. But that's because the museum occupies what historically was a printing business stretching back many many generations who had -- fortunately -- a bit of a hoarding streak.

Well worth a visit. While you're at it, 'Goodie Foodie' on the same square as the museum serves the best pancakes in the city.

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.

I wonder how true that statement is. Dutch grammar simplified a lot after the invention of the printing press. And while I don't speak Neuhochdeutsch or Mittelhochdeutsch, I imagine the latter is a lot less streamlined than the former.

> The printing press froze the written German language before natural language evolution had a chance to simplify the declensional system.

If natural language evolution had any tendency to simplify the declensional system, German would have been born with no declensional system. There was plenty of time. That just isn't how language change works.

Data point: Icelandic and Lithuanian are very conservative Indo-European languages; Icelandic and Lithuanian are grammatical nightmares.

I visited this museum in Antwerp in late 2023 as part of a trip there and to the Amsterdam area. The museum is fantastic and fascinating. You can also operate a real printing press, inking it and turning the crank, taking home your print. We have it framed on the wall. It's not as "good" as the ones you can buy there, as the inking is not even, but we made it from blank paper, which is pretty special.

One of the highlights of the museum was the foundry, where they made type. As in, hired people to design fonts and create the lead type to print with them. Folks like, you know, Garamond.

There's something fascinating about that middle stage of technology: vastly faster than manuscript copying, but still completely dependent on human rhythm, muscle, maintenance

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.

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?

Mark Kurlinsky's "Paper" covers the early history of printing presses in Europe in great detail. Printers and their presses followed, or instigated, the local paper making industry. There is less focus on the evolution of moveable type there, but I'm also reading "Thinking With Type" by Ellen Lupton which hits the highlights in the history of typeface design.

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…

> 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.

The Chinese printed extensively, but they didn't emphasize movable type, since it had no real advantages to offer. They did block printing.

Bi Sheng had movable type much earlier, but that doesn't necessarily imply a Gutenberg-style screw press as a surviving physical object

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.

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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.

1947 is still old in any practical sense

It took me the entire web page to understand that the display is in Antwerpen, Belgium.

Maybe I am the one and only ignorant to not know it, but I am pretty sure I am not alone.

Nowadays we give a lot of stuff for granted.

The address is on their home page, exactly where I at least expected it to be.

youtu.be is not a Belgian website!

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