Book printing

Earlier this week on Wednesday we went to tour the book printing museum. Each room was in chronological order of the advances of book printing. The first room had wood block printing, which was passages in books carved out of wood. This was not a very good method because the wood took long to carve and would wear out rather quickly. This room also talked about how the monks would copy down books. If I remember correctly around the time of the Renissance more people would read, and the monks couldn't keep up with the order. Then the printing press came about. What took monks nearly a day to finish now took less than two minutes. There was several steps to the printing press. First a man would take steal carved letters and write the page, except the letters were backwards so when they printed it looked correctly, and he had to do it from the bottom of the page up, so the letters would stay in place. Then using ink and dog skin ( poor doggies, I didn't like this part :(    ) would ink the page of steal letters. A board with parchment was then flipped on top of the letters and another man would use a lever to press down, thus creating the page. To clarify the two minutes started after orginizing the steal letters. Then we talked about improvements to the printing press, we saw how newspapers were made with copper drum rolls and spools of paper, and we ran short of time so we looked around some rooms with giant cameras and old computers. That was our tour!