…One famous source of such work is Joseph Moxon, who produced a series from 1677 to 1684 called Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises. Different installments dealt with crafts like smithing, sundial manufacture, and carpentry.

Moxon was a printer, and his most significant volume was the installment on The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing. It effectively told a reader—who was assumed to have already learned a variety of crafts, perhaps from previous volumes, or to be able to hire artisans—how to build an entire printing shop from start to finish. Once complete, the reader could ostensibly just start printing, with the help of the specialized staff the book also described hiring and training.

Moxon’s collection on printing is the first comprehensive guide on the topic, but he wrote out of a growing need to spread technical information in an ever more complicated world, in which traditional structures were breaking down and literacy in Europe had picked up enormously. Cities were growing in size, the demand for production in many fields had increased, and technical information—typically kept close and secret—had to be better disseminated.

https://increment.com/documentation/historical-tech-doc-and-how-to-build-a-civilization/