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Printing
The written word fist came to Battal shortly after the Darkstorm at the hands of the Encients. Text appears in thier ruins carved into stone walls and in scrolls that are just lying around. However no mention is ever made of how the Encients did anything, just all the stuff they left behind.
When the Ooamp arrived they developed a writting style that was the precusor to human writting done entirely by carving pieces of trees, which slowy developed into wood carving.
In -30,796 man, searching for a more Epic way to write, developed the technology to carve words into stone.
In 26 TMSK Brother Dranor has the ingenious idea to write things down in books with ink. Previously books were just used to store paper for kindeling. Brother Dranor then creates order of Clerics and Rune Knights to spread and utilize this ability.
In 1,032 TMSK the first "Ink Blocks" are made. These are pieces of wood the size of a page with the complete text of a page carved out (in the negative) and pressed into ink and then a blank page. This enables much greater proliferation of literature.
In 17,982 TLFotUM a High Elemenstor teaches Enchanters how to create items which copy books, thus making the whole thing alot easier.
Discussion
| Books appear frequently in ELotH, and given Brahe's tendency toward authorial in-jokes they often play important roles. It seems clear that by the time of the Elemenstor Cycle movable type is in common use, as books are an everyday fixture of life. Can someone with better resources come up with a coherent timeline of printing technology? I think scribes were around from the -28000's, woodcut-style printing came in sometime before the MSK period, and movable type came in before the Longest Moment, was lost (except to Willestria) prior to the Unsundering, and was rediscovered somewhere in the mid-18,000's, but this is mostly guesswork. |
| Are you sure mass production of Books was acomplished though machinery? I'm not sure myself but I think that they were either written by hand with cheap labor (possibly something even cheaper then peasants) and just lasted for millenia, or that there was some generic magic item that copied books. |
| Wasn't there a Printing Press furniliar that turned a Penthouse letter into a religious text after a night of heavy drinking? |
| I don't think that counts. A printed book can just a block of carved wood that is inked and then pressed against paper to duplicate the image. That is very different from a mechanical printing press which has movable type and perhaps a paper feeder. |
| Yeah, I recall reading that GST's book was printed by a line of peasants armed with carved, inked wood. Being "merest peasants," they couldn't read what they were printing. Clearly peasnts were METAPHORS for the unthinking and mechanical printing press, but were not actual printing presses. -Jute Mill |
| What about the Wang-Kingdom presses mentioned in passing when Gragnakas is perusing some of the scrolls? He talks for a little while about how stream-elemenstrated ink fonts were used to make some of the more.... precise erotic picture scrolls? I know that's kinda questionably canon, so I hesitate to cite it. |
| Well I know scrolls like that existed. I'm not sure how they were produced but inks anf fonts don't nessairily mean automation. |
| A Grottoling printing press with movable type and a paper feeder is described in Tales of Yorn, but given the character's reaction to it, I believe that it was a unique invention, rather than a common contraption. |
| I'm almost certain they mentioned that the press in question was summoned from another plane. |
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