🧵1/ You'd expect the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) to have wiped out German printing. It's stranger than that. The cities that were sacked or besieged saw their presses collapse, but neutral cities boomed. The trade didn't die. It moved. 2/ Magdeburg, sacked in 1631, fell from about 430 German editions a decade to 40. Neutral Hamburg rose about 26-fold to nearly 2,000. And not just those two, across the sacked cities (Augsburg, Heidelberg, Frankfurt/Oder) presses collapsed. The neutral ones (Köln, Gdańsk, Zürich) soared.