4 ms·

The Atlas of Early Printing in Europe

28 points by benbreen 10y ago

Kinnard 10y ago
I was shocked by how eurocentric this is. Expected to see China SOMEWHERE . . . since printing was invented there . . . it is cool though, if incomplete.
- ddoran 10y ago
  > "The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century." [https://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/about.php https://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/about.php]
  - sctb 10y ago
    Thank you, we've updated the submission title to make this clear.
- AvenueIngres 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
OliverJones 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
IndianAstronaut 10y ago
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.

28 points by benbreen 10y ago

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

ddoran 10y ago
> "The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century." [https://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/about.php https://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/about.php]
- sctb 10y ago
  Thank you, we've updated the submission title to make this clear.
AvenueIngres 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

OliverJones 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

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.