Printer's Guild
A fairly new guild and one of uncertain future for various reasons, not the least being the low demand for their skill.
"Printing is not a new technique, it has been around for millennia. The process of printing stuff has not changed for a long time, and why would it?
A special paste is applied to a piece of fabric and left to dry. Then the semi-dry paste can be scraped off the fabric to leave behind whatever the printer wants on the material printed on. The paste has to be completely dry for the print, else the pictures and letters would deform during the actual printing.
The fabric is then fixed to a wooden board, a metal plate or something like that, the intended ink is rolled onto it. The plate is then pressed upon the paper, parchment or whatever. The ink sticks to the surface and the print is done. The process of inking and pressing is repeated for each copy needed.
The most modern innovation is the change of the carrier for the semi-dry pasted fabric from the, still standard, flat plate or board to a drum of metal or wood and let it dry completely then. This makes it possible to have the paper on a slide and the drum fixed in a rack. The drum is inked continuously while it rotates and a mechanism feeds blank pare to the slide and another removes the printed sheets so the ink can dry. This makes it possible to print about 5-10 times as fast as the standard method. A book could be printed in a few weeks instead of months and with that kind of speed it might soon be possible to even do more copies so a printing run could be fifty or even a hundred books instead of ten to thirty that are done today."
"The wonders of modern times - inventions" by Don Dani el'Dysentrib
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