Paper remained one of the most expensive ingredients of book production during the eighteenth century, which ends when they were just beginning to recoup their investment in industrialization and when their customers in the book trade were just beginning to notice its effects. To give credit where it is due, the paper manufacturers' accomplishments should be viewed not so much as triumphs of technology, but as daring speculations, requiring financial acumen and managerial skills as well as mechanical ingenuity. Like the friends of Henry Fourdrinier, this chapter traces the development of the papermaking machine. It concentrates on the business conditions that made this invention possible, especially the robust growth and rising profitability of the paper trade during the eighteenth century. The Victorians would later lose their faith in the Industrial Revolution, but in 1837 they were enthralled with inventions like the Fourdrinier, which was finally producing significant savings in the book trade, after consuming an enormous investment in the paper trade.

The advent of printing heralded changes that have rightly been described as revolutionary. The invention of printing, its subsequent course, its effects and the ways in which it was exploited, raise issues that have little to do with the more immediate circumstances of invention. The application of metallurgical, chemical, calligraphic and engraving skills to the production of a printed page. Documentary sources, and close examination of surviving copies of books, have revealed a great deal of the background and financial and practical details of the beginnings of printing at Mainz in the 1450s. In general, printing was slow to take root in university towns; and where it did, as at Paris and Cologne, the earliest printers either showed little interest in local teaching needs, or moved on to other themes once a patron's initial enthusiasm waned. The potential of printing technology, linked to the exploitation of paper, was rapidly recognised for its religious, scholarly and social value.