Yes, there is a printed manual in the boxed Gold edition. "Nice, thick" depends on what you are used to. Its pocket book sized, 96 pages, text print a bit smailler the typical paperback. It will get you started smoothly, and if you read carefully it does identify some of the differences between DL and DA.
Note that it is exactly the same as the .pdf version on the disk. AFAIK, neither form of manual has been updated for the accumulated minor version changes since v1.50 (Dark Avatar engine) came out. Mostly bug fixes, but a few nifty features you will have to pick up from the forums, read-meas, and change logs.
The Gold Edition also has a keyboard shorcut player aid/ keyboard map. However, it does not have a revised paper tech tree poster; the original tech tree map was included in boxed DL.
drrider