This post is the fourth installment in a series on how books were made in the15th-18th centuries.
Since I was an elementary school student in the early 90s, printing has been as easy as clicking control-p on the keyboard of a desktop computer. Today, we can all publish text for a global audience instantaneously with a few taps of our thumbs. In today’s digital age, we have become accustomed to the ease and convenience of sharing our written ideas with others, so this post intends to instill some appreciation for the time, resources, and skilled labor involved in the printing process used in previous centuries.
The initial three posts in this series explain the processes of making paper from rag pulp, creating moveable type by casting metal in a mold, and composing galleys of text from cases of individual letters. This post will explain how press operators used a printing press to produce multiple copies of identical text for wide distribution. Although this process may seem slow and cumbersome to contemporary readers, remember that printing replaced the hand-copying of manuscripts by scribes. It is impossible to overstate the degree to which printing technology revolutionized communication in Europe when it appeared in the 1450s.
Let’s head back into the traditional printing workshop.

The previous post concluded when the compositors finished setting a sheet text and transferred the forme — a heavy metal frame containing blocks of composed text — over to the printing press. The printers would place the forme onto the press’s central marble slab called the “coffin,” “press bed,” or “press stone.” Attached to the press stone were two hinging flat panels called the “frisket” and the “tympan.” The frisket holds a stretched sheet of parchment that would be cut to frame the text. For example, the frisket for a quarto would have four rectangles cut out in the size of the pages in the forme, while the frisket for a folio would have two rectangles, as seen in the image below.
The tympan would be packed with cloth to soften the pressure of the press; otherwise, the type would “bite” into the paper and punch through. The tympan would also be fitted with “points” that secure the sheet of paper in place. All of this preparatory work, called “making ready,” requires careful calibration by the press operators at the outset of a printing job. The printer would use “ink balls” to apply the ink evenly onto the type. The ink balls were made by packing wool inside leather, which was then pinned onto wooden handles.

The earliest black printing ink, called “lampblack ink,” was made from a combination of linseed oil and the soot of burning resin. This thick, tacky ink is unaffected by oxidation and does not fade over time. As a result, the deep black inks we see in our oldest books remain as dark and pronounced as when they were printed half a millennium ago.

The printer would put a dab of this viscous ink onto the ink balls and then rock them together to smooth the ink across the leather surface. The printer would then press and roll the balls onto the block of prepared text to apply the ink evenly across each line of type.
Once the text was inked, the printer would fold the frisket down over the paper pinned to the tympan. Then, the tympan likewise would be folded down to rest on top of the text in the forme on the press stone. The paper is now positioned above the inked block of text; this paper would be dampened the night before to help it absorb the ink more effectively.

The press operator would crank a handle to roll the press bed bearing the forme under the press. When the “puller” leans and pulls the bar across the press, a screw called a “spindle” lowers a heavy block of wood, called the “platen,” that would descend and press into the tympan over the type. Most presses required two pulls to ink the full forme, so the puller would crank the handle again, rolling the second half of the forme under the platen, and then pull the bar a second time.

Now that the full forme has been pressed, the puller would reverse the crank to slide the press stone back out from under the platen. The press operator lifts the tympan and hinges up the frisket. The printed sheet of paper would be detached from the points and laid out for the ink to dry; this task was done by a young worker called a “printer’s devil” (so-called because he would be covered in the messy black ink). After an initial “proofsheet” had been printed and reviewed for errors (proof-reading), the team of press operators would repeat this whole process every 15 seconds to print roughly 250 sheets per hour.
Let’s say the shop has been contracted to print 750 copies of a book. The printers would spend three hours printing the first forme. You might recall from the previous post that the “imposition” of a quarto meant that the forme would contain the text of pages 1, 4, 5, and 8. The printers would then spend the next three hours on the second forme, printing pages 9, 12, 13, and 16. Once the first set of sheets were dry, the printers would print on the back of that sheet the forme containing pages 2, 3, 6, and 7.

To print on the back of a previously printed sheet, they would need to align the punctures made by the tympan points to “register” the text, making sure that the text block on the back precisely aligns with the text block that had been printed on the front of the sheet of paper. At the end of a 12-hour day of non-stop labor, the printing shop would have printed a full run of 16 pages. It would take about a month of uninterrupted labor to print a 350-page book (assuming the workshop would be closed on Sundays).
These complex processes and specialized workflows were created and refined for maximum efficiency during the century following Gutenberg’s innovations in moveable type and printing in 1450. The rise of the printing industry created a range of employment opportunities (as we’ve seen over the course of this series of posts), ranging from door-to-door rag collectors, highly educated compositors, artistic type cutters, savvy paper merchants, and brawny press pullers. There was a job for everyone.
The rise of printing, in addition to revolutionizing communication, disrupted the stratified economy of the medieval guild system. The labor networks that emerged to support this new technology existed outside of formal trade structures, allowing for dynamic entrepreneurialism, free enterprise, and rapid growth. Within the first fifty years of printing presses, every major urban center in Europe had a printing workshop. These businesses might be as small as two people or as large as one hundred workers. The average print shop employed around half a dozen people: a master printer/publisher, two compositors, an inker, a puller, a devil’s boy, and a proof-reader. Together, this team would produce around 2,500-3,000 pages of printed text per day.

When a worker was ready to take on the challenge of a new role, that person could either seek promotion within the workshop or leave and become a “journeyman” for another press. This sort of freedom and mobility allowed workers to share the innovations and best practices of one workshop with another, leading to industry-wide improvements that spread rapidly across Europe.
A capable and driven person could rise more quickly through the ranks of the printing industry than was possible for workers in other trades that were restricted by the medieval guild system’s prescribed years of apprenticeship and rigid program of promotions. The first century and a half of the printing industry resembles our era’s tech boom and entrepreneurialism, as ambitious individuals possessing new ideas might leap the ladder rungs of a traditional career to success.
So, when you press control-p on that next essay, consider the dozens of people and hundreds of hours of skilled labor that were once required to put words onto paper. And try not to be impressed.
Sources and Further Reading:
Dane, J. A. (2012). What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books. University of Notre Dame.
Finkelstein D., McCleery A. (2013). An Introduction to Book History. Routledge.
Moran, J. (1973). Printing Presses: History and Development from the 15th Century to Modern Times. University of California.
Werner, S. (2019). Studying Early Printed Books: 1450-1800. Wiley Blackwell.
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Comments (3)
Wonderful post. Will share with my classes.
This is an amazing series. Thank you. Looking forward to learning more about the history of the book,
Thank you for the fantastic overview of the traditional printing workshop. I sympathize with the “devil boy.” I used to work for a newspaper and I learned very quickly that I needed to wear black shoes while on the job.