Want to see a REALLY old press in action?
The University of Virginia has the Rare Book School. They are concerned with all things book (totally worth checking out their website)..but they also have THIS!
"The following documentary describes the scope of RBS’s “Presswork” program—charting how the project began with RBS’s commissioning of a wooden rolling press, modeled and designed after diagrams published in Denis Diderot’s famousEncyclopédie(of which UVA owns a unique copy, annotated by Diderot himself). We know of no other university, whether in the U.S. or farther afield, that has two eighteenth-century period presses positioned side by side, allowing faculty, students, and visitors to compare, in a hands-on research setting, the intaglio and letterpress technologies that were necessary for producing the illustrated books that Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries read. As the documentary illustrates, these presses were essential for interpreting how early modern and Enlightenment-era printers worked, how books and prints were fashioned, and how those processes influenced the culture of learning that fostered the growth of libraries and universities." (from the Rare Book School website)
