In 1322, eighty years prior to the erection of the Autumn Enchantment, the emissary sent to the library city of Ummaktabah flung the doors open to the office of then-Archchancellor of Asterwyrth, Rolf Higgins. In the bursar’s hands was a sheaf of papers in a manilla envelope. He spoke of a machine–in the bursar’s woods, “great, wooden, and wet,” that produced books and manuscripts of unnatural precision and speed, which “you, Rolf Higgins, could even read without your glasses–which look splendid, might I add.” He also brought several books on local Ummaktaban fairy tales and stories, more as proof of concept than any intended cultural exchange.

The folder contained blueprints the librarians of Ummaktabah had decided to gift the city of Horlav as a show of good faith. Rolf Higgins immediately ordered the production of a prototype of this machine. While Higgins would suddenly die of Right-of-Stone the following month, three months later a working example was put together.

It was, as we know it, the printing press.

One can imagine how this is relevant to the business we run. In the scope of our new hire, it is only pertinent to provide a textual history to this noble profession. Personal feelings of Mr. Tenebris aside, his presence is likely to attract new readers, to which I bid welcome.

The printing press’s introduction to Horlav, it could be argued, was one of the single most formative events in the city’s history, despite its relative rarity in the modern day. While Rolf Higgins went down in history as little more than a small, petty man given power, this is the sole thing he did in his lifelong political career which could be considered to have benefitted anyone at all.

Oddly specific historical grudges aside, it took less than a year for Asterwyrth to refine the printing press to what was, for the time, its logical conclusion; an enormous beast capable of churning out several ordinary books within an hour; or, as the old jokes go, one textbook a week. It had an entire new wing–not named after Higgins–created and dedicated to the machine.

This is the extent of the public’s familiarity with Asterwyrth’s printing press. Academic insight goes little further. The press would be debuted to the nobility at the Ninth Grancourt Exhibition in the coming years, who would, for commission, buy these printed books at exorbitant fees. Recovered transcripts of the presentation reveal the following quote: 

“Gone are the days of the foreign manuscript! The days of scribes laboring for days, months, years to present you a single book are gone!. With the blessed power of Alchemy, what once took months of effort now takes but a single day. Allow me to demonstrate.” 

The press Asterwyrth debuted differed greatly from the one gifted to the emissary from Ummaktabah. The Ummaktabah printing press utilized large sheets of metal type, corresponding to one page. For example, one sheet would be the prior page of this article. Upon printing all necessary copies of that page for the batch, the sheet would be washed, and the sheet for this current page would be placed. Ummaktabah would later introduce large mechanisms which would allow the user to load in multiple sheets at a time and print several pages at once, and eventually, at some ill-defined point in the 1730s, produce at an industrial scale.

The thing shown at the Ninth Grancourt Exhibition was what amounted to a chemical sink, where a page would be lowered in and pressed on either side with a metal sheet. The chemical bath would interact with alchemical components in the print sheet and create not only text, but coloured illustrations as well. However, it was highly toxic to even breathe in the fumes–at least ten attendees of the showing died of corrosive gas reaching their lungs. Several others would grow ill over the following years and pass from an aggressive cancer. The presenter, one Jezemiah Stephen, was beaten to death by Maurice’s Boys a month later, hired by the widow of one of the attendees.

Asterwyrth would use the print mostly for its own purposes, presumably building its library. This is likely why the Asterwyrth library is so massive today. Some receipts have appeared which show Asterwyrth did manuscript commissions until about 1591, where it fell out of style in favour of “Mur de Tableau,” an architectural style among the nobility denoted by immense blackboards upon which entire book’s worth of contents would be alchemically branded into the wall.

The press stayed isolated to Asterwyrth until, in 1642, they gave up the patent on the original blueprints gifted to Rolf Higgin’s assistant all those years ago. The only taker was the Horlav College, who kept the original design, albeit with some enhancement from local engineers and craftsman Timothy Phoque, a man with an unfortunate name and a mustache befitting the name who was responsible for inventing industrial lubricant, to the eternal dismay of all employees at Phoque’s Lube. 

The College, as a public institution, lent out its printing services to any who could afford to use them. This led to a newfound boom in literacy among the common crowd and a stark reduction in costs of books, allowing the general Horlavvan to actually begin to build a library of their own, provided they were of middling income and not blacklisted by the College.

There were growing pains in this, of course. The College’s ambition led to them having a backlog roughly a decade long, often passing books to the estate of deceased customers who had paid upfront. The nobility, needless to say, was not a fan of this, as prior to this the benefits of access to literature was restricted to the well-to-do. It didn’t take long for the nobility to begin a counter movement, going back to handcrafted manuscripts made by a human hand. The new belief was that a book bound and written by a human hand was closer to God. To quote socialite and twice-convicted felon known as Biscuit Vespa, “a book written by the sure hand of a godly man would be ashamed to be on the same shelf as one of those printed book, inbred and borne of grinding metal and sheets of thin ink, not the laborious love of a traditional scribe.” I do not need to point out the hypocrisy and inconsistency with their own beliefs here, especially considering this all took place in one lifespan. In fact, Vespa himself was raised on several collections of fairy tales printed on the Asterwyrth press. Something to note, however, is how he phrased his criticism, clear enough to condemn the press, but just specific enough to absolve the Asterwyrth press of any such associations. By describing the press as an “infernal machine,” as he did in the same letter, he handily disparages the College press while simultaneously praising the Asterwyrth press as an ‘enlightened’ machine, above such criticism. Of course, the motivation behind this is clear. He hates poor people. He said so himself.

The introduction of the press, despite the protestations of the wealthy, tripled enrolment to the College and, later, lead to the foundation of the Autumn School Division, Horlav’s second school division and only one available to the public at the time.

The Horlav Press entered the scene about forty years ago, a startup no one can quite trace the origins of, be it the College or any Private Investigators. They further opened printing up to the public, and even writing itself, allowing manuscript submissions for publishing and distribution in it’s retail location of the same name, at the intersection of Gallen and Pettigrew Avenue in Karnsten. 

It is unknown when the Horlav Press acquired their suite of presses. I’ve seen them–this massive chamber of roaring mechanical devices, at least a dozen. I’ve asked the Editors and they refuse to tell me.

Of course, this is all merely an abridged history of the printing press in Horlav. There are dozens of good books going into each of the histories, such as Wentworth’s “Great, Wooden, and Wet” regarding the origin of the Ummaktabah blueprints, and Isaacs’ “Contrarianism of Horlav Nobility” (although no longer in print for self-evident reasons, any self-respecting scholar and activist has a copy).

It is my hope this history provides to our readers a more enriched understanding of the history of reading, an appreciation of how far we’ve come, and a healthy skepticism. It warms my heart we’ve come far enough to actually use ink on matters of fiction, even if I disagree with it.