Friedricher König brought about the first major changes in mechanized printing since the innovations of Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. Since Gutenberg's time, there had been a number of changes in the nature and the readership of printed material, many of them caused in part by Gutenberg's development of mass printing itself. Increases in population, the spread of newspapers and periodicals, the rise of the novel as a literary form, the growth of leisure reading, and the need for print communication in the increasingly complex world of trade factors that spurred a drastic increase in the demand for sheer numbers of printed pages, a demand which became increasingly hard to meet. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, printers were using essentially the same techniques as their medieval counterparts--setting a matrix of moveable type, then using their own hands to feed paper into...