InfoSubstrate Print (Gutenberg 1450)

Class card for the Gutenberg-era print substrate (~1450–1830): the dominant civilizational means of producing and distributing public information via movable-type press, commercial booksellers, and state-regulated printing industries. Johannes Gutenberg's screw-press with cast metal type (Mainz, ~1450) industrialized text reproduction: by 1500 roughly 30,000 incunabula editions had been printed across Europe (~20 million volumes, Eisenstein). Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1494–1515) standardized the octavo format and scholarly italic editions; the Frankfurt Book Fair (~1480–) became the continental trade hub. Luther's 95 Theses (1517) spread across Europe in weeks — print demonstrated its political force through the Reformation and Wars of Religion. The Enlightenment book trade (Defoe, Richardson, the Encyclopédie 1751–1772 in ~25,000 sets) confirmed the substrate's capacity for mass knowledge commodification. Substrate is [corporeal, semiotic, cognitive]: the press-and-type infrastructure is corporeal; the printed page is semiotic; the reading- and-interpretation capacity of the literate public is cognitive. pace_layer is culture: print reshaped doctrine, natural philosophy, and vernacular literacy faster than governance or commerce could absorb — the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1559) and state censorship apparatuses confirm that governance was a downstream reaction, not the organizing layer. machine_type = corporeal because the press, type, paper, ink, and bound book are all physical artifacts, even though the payload is semiotic. heavy_or_light = heavy: the press infrastructure (capital-intensive foundry, paper mill, distribution warehouses) is heavy; the pamphlet itself is light — the asymmetry is noted in HeavyOrLight enum as heavy, consistent with how the JSC Mercantile is classified despite some light outputs. Plasticity = rigid for 1450–1800: typesetting workflow stable from Gutenberg through stereotyping; reset toward plastic post-1800 with high-speed steam presses and iron hand-presses (those form part of the substrate-break into InfoSubstrate-NewspaperBroadcast-1830). Typology break at ~1830: rotary press + steam paper-making + telegraph distribution + advertising-funded penny press fires input_set_replacement (subscription → advertising revenue) + output_category_replacement (books → real-time news agenda) + coupling_typology_shift (state censorship → market advertising) — spawning InfoSubstrate-NewspaperBroadcast-1830.