Gutenberg’s invention was the printing press, not moveable type.

Moveable type is a component of the press, and if you have blocks of type (I have a big box in my garage from my grandfather’s newspaper), you can set them in order in a frame, paint them with ink, put paper on them and run off copies. It helps if you have a roller to press the paper down onto the inked type with, but it’s a bit of a slow process. You can still see this process done sometimes in letterpress studios, particularly if one wants to hand-ink type or a design into a small press run or into a few colors.

The difference between moveable type and the printing press is that moveable type is a component of a hand press, which usually takes the type block and uses a lever mechanism to turn a screw that will press the type block onto a piece of paper firmly and uniformly. You can print off copies much faster than with just a type block and a roller, with an assistant putting paper down as fast as the screw can be raised and lowered and inking as needed. (It’s also with pointing out that the Latin alphabet, even with the characters used in vernacular German of Gutenberg’s day, had an order of magnitude fewer characters than those used in written Chinese dialects. Counting majuscule and minuscule characters, even with diacritical marks, you’re looking at 50-60 needed rather than thousands.)

The “press”’part of the press is the screw mechanism, which is derived from presses used to extract juice from wine or oil from olives, or similar mechanisms. Combining ink, paper, the press and type was Gutenburg’s innovation, in an era when demand for reading materials was by far outstripping supply from scribes.