Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
So, to rephrase my original post.
Excuse me for my naiveté, but don’t you need commercial electrical power generation capabilities in order to produce paper on the scale necessary to print a best seller, or even a newspaper with a commercially viable distribution?
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If I remember correctly, the best paper in the late 1700's was made from/with French rags. This caused problems with a little revolution making it un-patrotic to use (and dashed difficult to obtain) high quality paper. At that time they were just starting up newspapers (both sensible and the engraved equivalent of the gutter press as well), and had a thriving print industry. Whilst the volumes were not in the millions of, say, JK Rowling, they could produce 1000's of copies. That's as many as a lot of books get today, and they didn't have a commercial electrical power structure -- in fact a number of the books printed were talking about the first european discoveries of electricity.