The Victorian Printing Press

A Victorian printer would take their type, create the writing they wanted printing, then rest it face up on the bed of the press. They’d gently dab it with ink (enough so the raised letters would leave an impression, but not so much that it would drown out the letter), then add paper to the top. The paper would the be mechanically pressed down on the inked type. Type would be stored in a case, with capitol letters at the top and smaller letters at the bottom; “printers often call this upper case and the lower case letters,” (24:30, Victorian Farm) a term that’s still in use today. This system was largely based upon the work of Johann Gutenberg, who “first brought together the complex systems and subsystems necessary to print a typographic book around the year 1450” (Meggs and Purvis, 2016, p. 337).

The first development in Victorian printing came in 1800, when Lord Stanhope utilized new materials to create a printing mass made almost entirely from cast iron. Mechanically pressing “reduc(ed) the impressionable force by 90% while doubling the size of the printing area” (Stanhope Printing Press – Alexandria Library information board, 2019). With less labour, greater quantities of printed material could be created.

Further automation came from Friedrich Koenig’s stop cylinder printing machine in 1811. Paper would be wrapped around two steam-powered cylinders that would rotate against ink type laid on a flat bed. The machine worked in two phases; in the first, rollers inked the type automatically. In the second phase, paper would be fed into the machine and carried by a cylinder which would press the paper into the flat bed. The bed would move forwards and backwards, printing multiple pages at once. One cylinder would rotate, followed by the second, based on the position of the bed, allowing for twice as much paper to be printed at once.