The two oldest printing presses(museumplantinmoretus.be) |
The two oldest printing presses(museumplantinmoretus.be) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
The Chinese printed extensively, but they didn't emphasize movable type, since it had no real advantages to offer. They did block printing.
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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.
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.
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."