What type of machine did Leonardo da Vinci sketch for printing text with movable type?

Leonardo da Vinci sketched a printing press intended to improve the efficiency of printing text with movable type.

His notebooks include studies of presses, type, and mechanisms for moving a forme or platen. These ideas belong to the period after Johannes Gutenberg’s mid-fifteenth-century development of European movable-type printing, so Leonardo was refining an existing technology rather than inventing printing itself.

The press designs show his interest in reducing manual effort and making repeated operations more regular. Some drawings combine a screw mechanism with a carriage or bed that could position type beneath a pressing surface.

Leonardo’s sketches were not the basis of a documented mass-printing system built by him. The common mistake is to credit him with inventing the printing press; Gutenberg’s printing innovations came earlier. Leonardo’s contribution was the study and possible improvement of press mechanisms.