The Triumph of the Printing Press

Or, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about

Kerning and Serifs, But Were Afraid to Ask….

Kip WheelerEnglish 328Fall 2008

Printing is not a new idea

We give all the credit to Johannes Gutenberg, but he wasn’t the first Printer--just the first in Europe to make the innovation practical.

The Phaistos Disk

Discovered in Crete, 1908. If it isn’t a fake, it dates to 1850 BCE.

Woodblock Printing

Used as early as 200 A.D. in China,(but economically not feasible without paper and

without a phonetically based alphabet)

Movable type first appears using wooden blocks (and then later ceramic fired letters) in 1020 CE under the direction of Bi Shang in China. It becomes a standard competitor of calligraphy a good 400 years before the technology permeates Europe. It quickly spreadto Korea and Tibet.

Here are the directions for a Zaju play from the Yuan Dynasty of China, printed via wood block printing. The play is entitled Zhuye Zhou.

Tibetan Monks using rubbing technique to create a Woodblock Print in Sera

Monastery, Tibet

Metal movable type first appears 20 years later (1040 CE) in Arabic Egypt, sixty-some years before the Crusades. The technology doesn’t become known in Europe until about 1450. European crusaders are far too busy slaughtering Muslims (and vice-versa) to trade printing technologies.

Here, we see a metal type-letter (a “sort”) and the image it stamps on a page.

A typesetter would align hundreds of these “sorts” in rows, lock them in place, and reverse-stamp them to print an entire page at once.

Metal sorts wouldn’t crack under pressure the way ceramic sorts would. Metal sorts would not absorb and hold excess ink the way pores in wood, much less messy. While each wood block had to be carved by hand, it was easy to reproduce metal type.

Gutenberg (originally a goldsmith) was familiar with using a matrix to stamp a negative impression into a hand mould made of lead, tin, and antimony. This left a hollow impression of the desired stamped image. This hollow mould could be filled with liquid metal, cooled, and the the sort snapped out after excess casting stuck on the end and edges (“tang”) were trimmed away.

Advantages?

Gutenberg’s Debt to Olive Oil and Wine?

He figured out the same mechanism used in winepresses to crush grapes and in oil presses to crush olives could be used to press ink against sheets of paper in rapid succession.

RenaissanceWinepressc. 1450

Its daughter,TechnologicallySpeaking--

The PrintingPress (exampleFrom 1598)

Its great-grand daughter: The Koenig Platen Printing Press of 1823….

Its Basic Anatomy:

Reproduction of medieval manuscripts Hybrid forms!Vignettes!Ligatures!Majuscule becomes “Upper case”!Miniscule becomes “lower case” (originally applied to the drawers in standard workshop design that held each letter!Kerning!Catchphrase!

The Rise of Typeset!

Sans Serif Font

Serifs!

Serif Font

Serif Font with serifs painted red.

Traditionally, American printers use serif fonts for long passages or “body text,” and they use sans serif fonts for titles or short phrases. This rule is the opposite of most European publications.

The Rise of Fonts!ArialBaskervilleBauhausBraggadoccioChicagoCooper Black

GenevaHelveticaNew YorkTimes

Finis!

“Wine Press.” The Clutterbug Photography. 7 October 2008.<http://www.theclutterbug.com/Photos/index_photos.html>.

Serif and Sans Serif. Wikimedia Commons.

Citations: Under Construction!