JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This is what printing looked like, once upon a time, a great and giant mass, tended by works, massive sheets of paper flying this way and that, smoke from a steam engine drive (somewhere)--heavy, loud. Accurate. A temple of texts (apologies to William Gass). The illustration is from Robert Hoe's A Short History of the Printing Press and of Improvements in Printing Machinery from the Time of Gutenberg up to the Present Day (1902) and exhibits a ten cylinder rotary type-revolving press
In addition to being a state-of-the-art (and above that, really) printing press it is in image a generator of metaphors--there's certainly plenty to go around, even on just a surface investigation of the woodcut. You can easily see a feeding-the-beast scenario in there--for news or for technology or steam or motion or whatever else), as well as darker interpretations, making the printing press into a spider as well; also, there's humans being subservient to the god of technology from whom all good things come, and so on. I'd really just like to feel one of those gigantic newspapers in my hands, fresh off the press...
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