With no 'how to' guide, Schulich students build their own historic Gutenberg-style printing press

History has been brought to life in a unique way in the University of Calgary’s Book Arts Lab in the Faculty of Arts.

Sitting in a room usually used by students making paper by hand or doing letterpress printing, a historically accurate Gutenberg-Style printing press is now available for their use.

It was created by a group of fourth-year Schulich School of Engineering students as part of the annual Engineering Design Fair.

In an event known for its ingenuity and innovation with new technology, the massive press captured the imagination of many passing by, including the judges who awarded them a bronze medal in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering.

“I was incredibly impressed,” says project advisor and Schulich Vice-Dean Bob Brennan. “I thought it was really an excellent project for the students, who learned a lot from an engineering perspective but also quite a bit about the history of the press.”

He says the transdisciplinary project will leave a lasting impression on the school as, like many other design fair creations, it will be available to others for years to come.

A lesson in reverse-engineering

Invented by German craftsman and inventor Johannes Gutenberg, the apparatus revolutionized book production by using a movable type and a screw press to print up to 3,600 pages per day.

Faculty of Arts Department of English professor Dr. Maria Zytaruk says none have survived the centuries, and even documentation on how they were built is limited.

About a year prior to the fair, she met with Brennan and they began discussing what it would take to get one built.

“From a sustainability perspective, we thought it might be good to build this press with wood,” Zytaruk says. “Engineering students can think about how to reverse-engineer a mechanical piece of equipment using traditional and modern methods of manufacturing.”

Brennan, Zytaruk and long-time local papermaker Brian Queen worked together to propose a capstone project for Schulich students to work on in 2024-2025, and went on to become project co-supervisors.

Information hard to come by

Over the next few months, the student team – including Pranab Barua, Aaron Jackson, Karaninder Kumar, Beerinder Mavi, Kaushik Natarajan and Jared Nelson – spent hundreds of hours perfecting the press.

It started with gathering research on how the press was designed, which was no easy feat with no 'how to' guide to be found on YouTube or Google.

“Since no direct blueprints of the original printing press survived, it was a challenging task to go through old books and infer what it might have looked like,” Jackson says.

Once they were able to draw up plans that seemed viable and worked to their instructors’ specifications, he says they then had to overcome the challenge of not having a lot of woodworking expertise.

“Some of us had prior experience, but this project was well-beyond the scope of those skills,” Jackson says. “We acquired a significant amount of woodworking knowledge in a very short amount of time.”

The integral screw, and the head that it threads, provided the biggest challenge, due to its complexity and the intricate level of precision needed to make it all come together.

While it might have been tempting to use sensors and batteries, the team aimed to be historically accurate in building the press.

What’s old is new again

As the award winners were being announced after the Engineering Design Fair, Jackson says he wasn’t exactly expecting to win any medals.

“I know the project had a presence, but I thought it might fall short of other projects in terms of raw engineering analysis and design, like rockets and drones,” he says. “Going into it, I was hoping its aura and scale were enough to at least competitively place.”

Jackson says they were ecstatic to hear their names called as it gave validation to the long days and nights of working on the press.

Equally thrilled were the team’s two academic advisors, as Zytaruk says their new Gutenberg opens a new world of opportunities for her students to try different things.

“This allows us to print multi-page layouts, replicate historical forms of folios and quartos (short books or pamphlets), and poetry chapbooks (a single signature of pages, folded in half and bound at the fold with thread),” she says. “We will also be acquiring type in languages other than English for printing on the press.”

With the physical structure complete, Brennan says he would like share the team’s learnings from the project widely.

He and Zytaruk are now preparing the designs for the press to share on GitHub and other open-source platforms.

“This will allow for any other book lab, publisher or historical press-maker in the world can download the material and make their own press,” he says. “No one else will have to start from scratch.”