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 &quot;sufficiently&quot; ? 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 is the advantage of the screw press? From an outsider&#x27;s perspective, it _sounds_ slower?

I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t put the two together.

Considering movable type was in China in 1040 (Bi Sheng, inventor) I wonder if there are any extant presses there.

Vandercooks are really the ideal small press. Simple to operate, none of the danger of crushing fingers that you would have with a Chandler &amp; Price or the necessity¹ to dampen pages that you get with an old-school cast iron hand press.⸻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.

I have a vandercook 325g press from 1947 and I thought that was old.

The two oldest printing presses