BERLIN — On a recent Saturday afternoon, a hush fell in the bright, airy “reading-aloud” room at Krumulus, a small children’s bookstore in Berlin, as Sven Wallrodt , one of the store’s employees, stood up to speak. Brandishing a newly published illustrated children’s book about the life of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, he looked at the crowd of eager, mostly school-aged children and their parents. “Welcome to this book presentation,” he said. “If you fall asleep, snore quietly.”

Everyone laughed, but no one fell asleep. An hour later, the children followed Wallrodt down to the bookstore’s basement workshop, where he showed them how Gutenberg fit leaden block letters into a metal plate. Then the children printed their own bookmark using a technique similar to Gutenberg’s, everyone was thrilled.

Fares Aldaryousi, who is 6 and knows how to read, said, “How you print, I didn’t know that!” His best friend added that he had not known it was possible to make a stamp out of metal. Matthis Ritter, who is 9 and owns a lot of books, learned that printing used to be called a “dark art,” because the ink got on your fingers, while Mithuni Hopp, also 9, was most impressed with how monks used to make a certain kind of red ink: “They smushed snails!”