The Forefront of Technology

The smell is ink. You've smelled ink before plenty when you learned writing from the Madre Angeletta and taught it to Vittorio; but the scent was a chemical whiff them. Here it is heady, almost overpowering; burying beneath it the smell of olive oil lamps, parchment, binding glue and salt.

The whole operation of the printing press is just two rooms; a large 'factory floor' is the first, where two large wood and iron machines full of levers and plates are operated by apprentices with ink smeared aprons and black-stained hands. They rearrange typeface with swift, meticulous little movements; mechanically operate the pressing mechanisms, peel sheets of parchment away to set to dry, and a dozen other small but critical operations which you would miss if they weren't being pointed out to you.

The little business is remarkable, and seems to have three streams of income. The first is obvious - the mass production and binding of certain volumes at speeds unthinkable by a manual amanuensis. Currently they are creating a batch of volumes - a classic, four hundred year old philosophical treatise about the nature of the world and its denizens; Forma di Malevola by Marcelli Verdallo. Some book seller elsewhere in the city awaits this stack of nearly identical copies. A book written hundreds of years ago, suddenly proliferated today! What a marvel!

The secondary income is the small bookshop they run themselves; a small number of volumes from every print run, they keep for a library and direct sale from the shelves lining the walls of the second room; a kind of foyer-bookstore-viewing room for the factory beyond. From here, there is also access to a smaller, more prototypical press which has been decommissioned from major work and now serves only to print letters as souvenirs for visitors with silver to spare - the tertiary, tourism income stream. A helpful, fair skinned and ginger haired girl not much older than you explains these things as part of a penny tour Cestié paid for. Her name is Phillipa.

"...and with two machines, we can create over two thousand impressions a day! Depending on the size of the book in demand, that might be anywhere between one and four books worth of content. We are still limited by parchment supply, mostly - occasionally a wealthy client brings a shipment of paper from Cathay, which is even more lovely - but it will change the way information gets around the world. To think, one Sigmarite fellow in Middenheim conceived of this machine a couple of years ago - and now, we stand here in Trantio at the dawn of an age where all mankind will have books to read!" She does a good job of being very excited about this mundane process. Bella is interested in the books on the shelves; but Cestié is almost overwhelmed by the chance to look at the machines themselves. Near to giggling.

Spoiler: OOC: Behold! The Fuuuuture!
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Normally printed books are 100gc. Here, at the source, you can buy from a selection of printed books at a mere 50 duro - or with a haggle role, perhaps even cheaper on some damaged or misprinted stock!

You can also, if you want, have a letter printed on the small press.
Travellers often write a template, get the type set for it, then personalize several printed copies for family and friends, having them all sent home as a novelty. Having a bundle of letters printed in this way and delivered to Bella Collina would cost 10 scellini, plus 1 scellini per additional copy.