She leads Luthien over. 

"Hello the house!" she calls.

The door opens after a minute.

Feanor doesn't look like most of the other aristocratic Noldor they've passed in Tirion - his hair's a hastily braided mess, his clothes look slept in, and he has a mark on his cheek like he fell asleep on a book recently, with small ink smudges near his hairline and on his nose (though his hands are very carefully cleaned, fingernails trimmed short). His expression - or perhaps something about the way his gaze focuses - is odd and intent, eyes narrow, fingers tapping against each other.

"What do you want?"

"We'd like a second opinion on a design for a writing machine."

"What sort of writing?"

"...As in what alphabet? Or the topic?"

He waves a hand, movement a bit sharp. "The central use case. Notes, drafts, calligraphic art, dictating things to be written when your hands are busy, creating a formal paper, writing a book. Utilitarian or decorated writing. Is the machine portable or fixed." Quick pause to reorient, and his gaze flicks to the case Mygwainor is carrying. " - Do you have a draft?" He speaks quickly, sentences tumbling into each other, only stopping for breath toward the end.

"Maybe we could go inside and sort through things?"

"Sure."

He turns sharply on his heel, striding into the library. Presumably that's an invitation to follow him? The door isn't swinging shut too quickly behind him, at least.

...In they go, she guesses. He's a little brusque, but at least he hasn't started throwing things.

He leads them through the foyer - light, with glittering tree-light flowing through stained glass windows - and through a corner of a library full of books and unbound manuscripts and stacks of notes, lit by grand and ornate windows high in the wall - and into a large, rather dark office, not much better lit than the starlight that shines over the forests of Beleriand right now. There's two drafting tables, a few extinguished lamps, boards on the wall for attaching papers to (currently a bit crowded), and a few somewhat precarious stacks of paper. A desk shoved into a corner has nearly two dozen books of varying thickness stacked on it, only a small bit clear, enough for a single open book, with a few boards that can be slid out to the side of the desk, one currently curled around the chair to hold a scattering of notebooks, a tray for ink and brush on a lowered piece past it. There's a very faint light over the desk, shielded so it can only really be seen in how it shines on whatever book is being read.

Feanor stops squinting and relaxes a bit once they're in the office, his posture and tone's annoyed brusqueness fading notably, replaced by an agitated curiosity.

"What notes do you have already?"

"Concept drawings and intended operations." She takes the first set of prints from Mygwainor. "Ah- where is good?"

He turns to look at his drafting tables, then picks up the papers on one and dumps them on the other. "Here."

She spreads the plans out. "Printing press. Arrange a page of letter block stamps, coat in ink, and multiple pages can be copied in quick succession."

He scans through them, gaze moving quickly.

Then, almost to himself: "Ideal for producing a large number of copies of the same book - useful, we don't have many books yet, in terms of content written or copies of each book, and many of them are in high demand - the moving parts and stamps should be simple to create, the easiest is cast metal... Though you'll want a metal with good tolerance for stamping - this would put the bottleneck on creating the page block in the first place and on creating the paper and binding the book, though that problem reduces with unbound writing... It's not ideal as presented for any text requiring illustrations, which is many, unless you left some pages blank for whole-page illustrations, or..."

He pulls some blank paper and a brush to him. "Wood block printing isn't very popular, but if you're printing the letters anyways it doesn't matter if you also print the illustrations - you could create standard illustration sizes, either have specialized page blocks for each of several common ways of integrating illustrations with text, and then fit a wood block stamp in with the letter stamps, or create blocks that can slot into multiple letter slots... The first is likely much easier. The problem then would be the durability of the wood blocks - though how much of an issue that is will vary with how much fine detail each illustration includes and how many copies you would want for each book..."

He flips through some of Mygwainor's notes. "The inks described here will need some work to get produced widely, but shouldn't be hard - I'll need to develop a standard typeface for the tengwar that's ideally suited to printing, too, the current one is best for hand writing..."

"The largest issue I see is in convincing people to read printed books, if there's perceived imperfections - wood block printing has issues sometimes with stray ink marks - or out of a general dislike of purely utilitarian items... Some of that can be alleviated, especially if the first printed books are ones that are currently in high enough demand to overcome hesitancy..."

"We might also produce new treatises and only distribute those via printing."

He hums. "The exact nature of those will shape some of the technology's early reputation... But, yes, that might work... Might stop people from bothering me to ask if I can tell them something I already published, because they can't easily get a copy of the book and think repeating myself is somehow a valuable use of my time..." His voice is a low grumble by the end. "Also could shift exchange of new information away from being centered on presentations at society meetings..." That perks him up a bit.

"So you like the idea?"

"Yes."

"Excellent."

"Next, the typewriter."

He makes a curious noise and collects the printing press documents into one pile and - not finding a place to put them - absent mindedly hands them to Mygwainor.

Luthien smoothly intercepts them. "How about you two just swap?"

"...Hm?"

"The other things she's carrying are the typewriter designs."

Mygwainor sets them down on the table with a smiles, then accepts the printing press papers from Feanor.