Have you seen the size of the full size Oxford Dictionary?
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The second edition, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, was published in 1989.
Work began on the dictionary in 1857 … 1884 that it began to be published … The first edition in TEN BOUND volumes was in 1928
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No computer.
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According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to "key in" the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread them
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Wikipedia.
Though the Z1 computer was in 1939 and Lyons Tea & Cake shops ran its first business application in 1951, computers were not used much before mid 1960s in publishing and book preparation. They gradually crept in during the 1970s, with the first Home Computers being from about 1976, five years before the IBM PC.
Some authors still use CP/M, developed in the 1970s.
I'd not go back to paper or a typewriter. I had to type my reports on a purely mechanical typewriter in the mid 1970s.
Some Bible Concordances were done in about 2 years by one individual. Commentaries have taken several life times to complete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Henry He didn't actually quite complete it and he used other sources without crediting them, including Jewish Commentaries.
See Mishnah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishnah and Gemara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemara
So anyway, putting any species of Bible translation, concordance and dictionary together and publishing it used to be VERY expensive. Starting point now is cut off binding, sheet feed on industrial scanner and OCR. Then you can tell the difference between proofed properly and just hacking it out from IA / Wayback machine. Unless you are crowd sourcing, proofing that, even with computers, is expensive.
I remember in the 1960s my dad getting "plates" made for the illustrations and photos of a magazine. Different company to the one typesetting (with real moveable type).
Ah, we don't know how lucky we are! You ever tried writing and reading cuneiform on clay tablets, or a bamboo brush on rice paper? I've made and used a quill, actually easier than a cartridge fountain pen to write nicely with, if you can cut the quill with your … penknife. The ones sold today as penknives are useless, a scalpel or similar craft knife is good.