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.
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.
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…
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."
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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.