Printing

Describe a major technological breakthrough and the impact it had in your world.

For many centuries the Marivan Empire had communications based on the spoken word and manuscript - each iteration a separate performance whether as a recitation or a scribal act. Its latter years saw several innovations but probably none with the breadth of impact of printing - a technology which took inspiration from and leapt ahead of what the Dromemel Tooth seal had delivered for the merchant for many years. Two approaches thrived in those last years of the empire and have continued in use in the years since, spreading with the Marivan diaspora to the lands of Tarusia. Seal printing takes the idea of the dromemel tooth seals used in combination to record a sale and uses separate blocks that can be rearranged for different purposes, while plate printing uses a single plate inscribed with the text or image to be reproduced.

Manufacturing

There are four key components required for printing:-
The Plate or Seals: Thin, flat sheets of metal are inscribed with the text or image to be printed (remembering that this needs to be done in reverse) to make the plate. The production of large flat sheets was always difficult and this meant that plate printing was more favoured for images and small runs of repeat business. The image could be cut into the plate directly, which gave the best quality and most durable plates, or into a wax coating followed by etching in acid to eat away the metal wher the wax had been removed. This gave lower quality but faster production. Seals were cast from soft metal and assembled into frames to produce the text. More intensive in set up this technique gave faster production for large quantities and allowed the full size of the press to be used.
The Paper: The paper used for printing is functionally the same as that used for manuscript but there were challenges to be faced in the manufacture of sheets able to make full use of the typical cider press and maximise the volume produced.
The Ink: Normal writing ink was unsuitable as it was too fluid, but this potential hurdle was one that the merchants had already solved with their seals and the use of an ink made from lamp black and oil used for their seals on packaging.
The Press: Used to bring the together three together and create the print the printing press was developed from the presses used in the making ov cider in The Vale of Arabour with the typical press able to print several pages at once on a single sheet that is then cut and bound.

Impact on Society

Although it was often argued that the ease of printing was a strong contributor to the increasingly bureaucratic late empire administration the introduction of printing greatly spread literacy across the empire and standardised knowledge. Surviving examples from the days of the empire cover works of myth and legend, collections of recipes, works of history and law and so on. A common lament in many towns was that people were often so engrossed in reading a pamphlet or book that they would not look where they were going causing collisions of people and vehicles as well as other accidents but the improvements in knowledge and skills from this were generally held to outweigh the increase in bureaucracy and accidents. The main sufferers from its introduction were the story tellers who found demand for their tellings dropping off as literacy spread and as people came to expect the same story to have the same details regardless of who told it.

Inventor(s)

Like many of the cunning devices developed towards the end of the Marivan Empire , printing has links to Hieron Nollerute who in a disputation on writing suggested that as two Dromemel Tooth seals could record a transaction on 20 containers so larger collections of seals could record longer texts for multiple recipients.

Access & Availability

By the time of the empire's collapse all towns and even some of the larger villages had crafters able to produce prints by one or other of the techniques. If more than half a dozen copies of a document were needed then it would tend to be printed. Earlier, when the empire was more able to dictate within its boundaries the availability of print was less due to the desire to control communications and information - it wasn't known as the Paranoid period without good reason and the penalties for unlicensed printing could be harsh.
Despite this, the craft flourished as the ever burgeoning bureaucracy of the state and its constant stream of new laws created considerable demand for printed material.

A Variation

One variation on the technology was embraced at the personal level where only a small number of rough copies were needed - this involved using the hard wax used for seal impressions cast as thin flat layer into which the user would scratch their text. Some would be scratched a writing, creating prints that were back to front; others scratched in reverse to print "true". This was particularly widely used in the empire's bureaucracy where triplicate documents were widespread (copy to receiver, copy to sender, copy to central archive).