Here's the copy which I have lifted from the Dürer press website:
No records remain of the machine Johann Gutenberg used to print the first books
with moveable type. The question of what this press and other early presses were
like has occupied the minds of generations of historians. It can never be
definitively answered. The person who has probably come closest to a reasonable
reconstruction of a very early press is Alan May, a man who has both the
knowledge of a print historian and the technical skills of a craftsman. Alan
used these abilities to acclaimed effect in 2008 when a television production
company gave him the chance to construct a press to print a facsimile page from
Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible of the 1450s. The process of research, design and
construction of the press was a key feature of The machine that made us,
the resulting documentary presented by Stephen Fry.Following from the construction of this press and from a well-known sketch of a printing press made, probably from memory, by the artist Albrecht Dürer in 1511, Alan made a number of observations about the way presses probably developed from the very first examples. When the Dürer Press Group commissioned a new working press from Alan in 2014, his insights led to a machine that can either be used as a ‘one-pull’ press, as we believe Gutenberg’s was, or as a ‘two-pull’ press. The two-pull configuration is shown in Dürer’s sketch and gives greater output by allowing two pages of a book to be printed without taking the paper out of the press and putting it back in again. It is probable that older, one-pull, presses were modified in this way to give the printer a considerable boost from a machine that would be costly to replace. www.duererpress.co.uk
www.duererpress.co.uk
www.sbf.org.uk
Posted by Justin Hobson 24.11.2014
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