@bitassassin, I agree with both ideas you have, being the printing press as an endgame or advanced machine as well as having the idea of someone recording your villages progress as it grows from nothing to sprawling.
Something I posted a little while back, which I think is very similar to this idea was having a scribe and a scholar as two levels in a tech tree. As such, I think this could be a solution to having a recorder at the beginning, which keeping the press endgame. The bard can arrive with your village, or at least be easy to devote a village to, and have him recording a diary of the cillage at the beginning of the game. As the game progresses, the bard can level into the scholar who has access to a press.