Six Centuries of Type & Printing 9780999489772, 9780999489789

Citation preview

Six Centuries of Type & Printing

by Glenn Fleishman

Aperiodical LLC • Seattle 2019

Dedicated to my mother, Audi Fleishman, who encouraged me in all my pursuits

©2019 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Published by Aperiodical LLC in the United States. Printed in the United Kingdom. https://aperiodical.net/ Portions of this book previously appeared in earlier forms, including in a sixpart series at Medium in 2017, “Letter Rip,” and in Wired magazine in June 2017, “How Letterpress Printing Came Back from the Dead.” Editor: Jeff Carlson Proofreader: Scout Festa ISBN: 978-0-9994897-7-2 print, 978-0-9994897-8-9 ebook (v.2019-001)

Introduction Johann Gutenberg invented neither printing nor movable type. That honor goes to many artisans across Asia whose work predated Gutenberg by centuries. Gutenberg’s achievement instead was creating a rapid, consistent process that scaled with little effort. He spent decades keeping his ideas secret. But once they were observed, others could reproduce them. As infrastructure grew to support printers, printing technology spread faster. In Western Europe, handwritten manuscripts were in increasing demand toward the 15th century. Production had risen from tens of thousands of copies per century in the 6th to 8th centuries to nearly five million in the 15th century as manuscripts crested their peak. In the first hundred years following Gutenberg’s inventions, however, 100 million books were printed across Europe. During the 18th century, publishers in Europe and Russia produced a billion books. Today, several billion books are printed worldwide every year. This book traces nearly six centuries of type and printing, from the glimmer in Gutenberg’s eye to the current era. The focus is on the initial flood of technological advancement, through the stagnation of 350 years, and then the mad rush from 1800 onward. In the screenbased era, I look at digital technology as it affects putting ink on paper, rather than pixels on screens. The book is divided into parallel stories of type and printing. Its first part considers type manufacture and typesetting, and the second examines presses and techniques for printing. While the two elements are naturally intertwined, their evolution occurs along different paths. Much that was invented has been forgotten, even while practices, terminology, and technology remain shaped by it — if you know where to look. — Glenn Fleishman, Seattle, September 2019

1

The Master Printer It’s hard to understand from a remove of nearly six centuries how revolutionary the set of innovations that Gutenberg linked together were. He moved European society from a state in which books and scrolls were entirely written by hand and unaffordable by most, to one in which mass production was feasible, producing a good that quickly became within the reach of the merchant class. He is often called the inventor of movable type, but that description covers only a fraction of what he conceived — nor was he the first mover. He spent from the late 1420s to the 1440s thinking about and testing out his ideas. By 1450, he had determined what he needed for a printing workshop, and then had all the pieces manufactured from scratch or adapted from existing parts in Mainz, Germany. There’s no historical record of how he conceived his approach, however, nor of what his tools were. Nearly everything we know about him comes from a handful of court cases; he wasn’t necessarily that litigious, but they’re the only substantive sources that survived. Any portrait you’ve seen of him is an invention of a later engraver or painter starting a century after his life. Even his date of birth isn’t certain — it’s often cited as 1400. We do know he died in 1468. While Gutenberg is largely known by inference, his works reveal aspects of the methods of printing that were required to make them. 2

It’s only later that printers and others began to document how the art and craft worked, and it’s assumed that what they described evolved from Gutenberg’s roots. Historians believe that following decades of tests, Gutenberg rapidly built working presses, found the right ink mixture, and cast metal type. He immediately set to work printing papal bulls, indulgences, and a grammar book before beginning on his wellknown Bible. He started printing by 1450 and continued through 1456, when he lost financial control. Despite how new his methods were, by the time he printed his Bible, he could execute it well and make it beautiful. Gutenberg’s approach to printing relied on casting individual pieces of metal type that could be assembled to form words and reused later. Paper, ink, and a press weren’t secondary, but their specifics arose from the particulars of his type. No one is sure exactly how Gutenberg conceived of printing types and printing in multiples, and he may have thought he was first. But antecedents abound across Asia. No later than the 4th century CE, artisans in China carved characters, illustrations, or entire pages or parts of scrolls on wood blocks; the earliest that survives is from the 9th century. Wood-block printing was also practiced for artwork and a small number of books in the first part of the 15th century in Europe. Both in Asia and Europe, wood blocks were printed by applying ink and then rubbing across paper placed on top. It was time consuming and produced inconsistent results. Just after 1000 CE, a blacksmith, Bi Sheng, carved and cast type in baked clay in China and printed from it. He could arrange it as desired, fix it into position to make prints, and then reuse it. Movable type in metal appeared in China by the 12th century, and the first book known to be printed from movable metal type dates to 1234 CE in Korea. One 30-volume work was printed this way. Examples around Asia increase as we approach Gutenberg’s era. It’s possible Gutenberg never saw this older technology for making books or printing, even though Mainz was a major trading hub. It’s plausible he saw printed works and worked backward to derive their methods and improve upon them. But regardless of his influences, Gutenberg’s work benefited from his apparent genius and from the combination of factors he brought together, as well as from some cultural and typographic distinctions in Western Europe. Europeans required only a small number of unique characters to represent their written languages. The logographic script originating in China can encompass tens of thousands of characters. At least a few 3

thousand different ones could be required in a single work. Besides numerals and punctuation, Latin relied on just 23 unique characters, while German and other European languages needed a handful more, plus diacritical marks like umlauts or accents. Some historians also argue that, at least in China and Korea, governments and courts controlled efforts at printing and they weren’t interested in allowing the general spread of printed words. Rather, they wanted to disseminate a few standard texts to ensure religious or regulatory consistency. Otherwise, printing was used for currency and playing cards. While most of Gutenberg’s early works were made under contract for or subscribed to by the local powers in the Catholic Church, he managed his own affairs and owned his business, as did most printers who came after him. He printed the Bible because it was popular and he thought it would be profitable. (He paid the price, though, as he lost control of his workshop by 1456, when he couldn’t manage his key investor, Johann Fust.) It remains a mystery to historians how cultures that were advanced in science, engineering, and the arts elsewhere in the world, and which had modest numbers of characters in their scripts, didn’t produce printing types. The Islamic Golden Age, spanning the 8th to 14th, centuries CE, was ripe for such exploration, but it didn’t take hold. Cultural impediments may have contributed. We don’t have certainty about what let a German printer spark a revolution. But we do know the centerpiece of his engine of change: the knack of casting well-designed characters over and over again.

4

The Mold That Shapes the World The heart of the origin of letterpress printing wasn’t the press, despite its key role; it was cast metal type. To work on a press, type must meet tight tolerances and be consistent from piece to piece across hundreds of thousands, and later billions, of castings. The core that made that all possible is the adjustable hand mold. Prior to Gutenberg, even the most advanced forms of movable type were made for relatively low reproduction rates. Bi Sheng’s type was fired clay. Later metal-type printers in Korea used a bronze casting method, first carving raised wooden characters, then pressing them into sand, and finally pouring in heated metal to pick up the pattern. That method isn’t fast or consistent, although it was used extensively and is still used today for some crafts. The hand mold ensured each cast piece was square across its sides and bottom, and that the printable top was of uniform depth from face to feet. The cast type required some finishing, but the mold provided the consistent form. Gutenberg’s development was a striking advance. In The Gutenberg Revolution, John Man wrote, “This was truly something new under the sun, something so simple to use that it became a standard piece of equipment for typefounders over the next 500 years.” 5

It also allowed sheer quantity. Historians variously estimate that Gutenberg’s Bible required 20,000 to 100,000 pieces of type to be in use at any given time. Those numbers exclude worn and broken type that had to be replaced, making the count of type cast even higher. To make a piece of type (a sort), a caster locks a type mold (a matrix) into the hand mold. Every hand mold is built for a particular type size, comprising all the characters in a font, originally meaning a set of all characters at that size. But the hand mold is adjustable for each character’s unique width. Most of the body of a piece of type is solid metal formed as a shaft that allows it to be locked in place. A printer pours in a metal alloy heated to liquid form, giving the mold a quick jerk to ensure it fills the face of the matrix and the cavity above it. The metal almost immediately hardens. The mix Gutenberg used was likely a form of pewter, an alloy made mostly of tin with a little antimony and lead added. Pewter was in heavy use for tableware, like plates. In later centuries, the typemetal mixture shifted the balance: Lead was now 75 to 85 percent of the mix, with the remainder made up of antimony and tin. Lead offered malleability and a low melting point, antimony provided sharpness, and tin promoted flow while casting and resistance to wear. The mixture also arrested shrinkage after casting. Copper and zinc might also have been added, especially in later centuries. Each foundry varied its recipe and kept it secret. The mold is next cracked open and a piece of type emerges with a jet at the bottom that’s left from the funnel through which the metal was poured. Type is handed off for finishing, while the caster repeats their operation as fast as hundreds of times an hour, swapping matrices and adjusting the width when they produce enough of a given character. 6

Type needs to be tidied up before use. As foundry processes became specialized, this came to involve a breaker, who removed the jet, and a rubber, who rubbed the sides on a stone or fine file to remove burrs. These two roles were filled by boys (later also girls) prior to child labor laws. A dresser then finished the job by careful examination and additional filing, and then planed a groove in the bottom to remove any trace of the jet and create two feet. A finished piece of type has many identifiable parts, as shown in the figure. We talk about the body of the type — divided into face (printable surface), shoulder (non-printing relief at top), and counter (spaces within the type) — as well as beard (the sides of the face sloping to the shoulder) and nick, one or more identifying notches on the side of a sort. Some characters spaced best with adjacent letters if they had an overhang, such as a lowercase f. In finishing those letters, a kerner undercut the body, leaving a fragile cantilevered part of the face, called a kern. The body’s depth measures from feet to face, and was a bit above 0.9 inches. It could be called type high or height to paper. This measure, like type size and several others, wasn’t standardized and held to a precise amount until the late 1800s. It varied from foundry to foundry, and even from font to font. We don’t know how Gutenberg conceived of this mold. Among other biographical facts we lack is any certainty that he was a goldsmith, even though that’s claimed by many histories spanning centuries. His parents occupied a mixed rank in society, and he may have been allowed to apprentice at a profession. His father had an administrative position at the Mainz mint, and Gutenberg certainly knew the art of goldsmiths. Goldsmiths and other metalsmiths had long stamped letters or words into their work. And by Gutenberg’s time, mints produced 7

currency by making master carvings, creating molds from them, and striking coins from the molds. Prior to his hand mold, Gutenberg had a stint in Strasbourg manufacturing hand mirrors with two partners. Pilgrims believed that the mirrors captured light from holy relics, and that they could be used to heal. It’s possible his experience in producing the mirrors gave him the flash of insight to create the elements of printing. A 1439 lawsuit in Strasbourg related to the failure of the mirror venture mentions an item from 1436 held together by screws that could be taken apart, probably referring to an early press, and nothing is mentioned about a mold. And that’s all we know about it. Gutenberg’s mold was almost certainly more primitive and required more effort to produce type than did those that are known to have appeared within decades. But it was good enough to cast the massive amounts of type he needed and produce the beautiful results we can see in the Bible and other works.

8

Each Letter, a Work of Art Gutenberg had no form to follow for movable type, so he aped manuscript handwriting to create something appealing to the Church and his other potential buyers. We call this heavy type style black letter, although it’s often referred to as textura or gothic. He had to take the many variants a scribe might use by hand and normalize them into a few forms of a letter. To better space text in a line, he created variants of letters that were wider or narrower than each other. Gutenberg also produced dozens of ligatures, common combinations of letters carved as a single unit to take up less space and look more harmonious. In his Bible, he had 290 unique single characters and ligatures. Gutenberg arguably created both the first typeface and the first font. A typeface uses the same design approach for thick and thin strokes, proportions, and other elements, no matter the size and style, like italic. In metal and wood type, a font is a single size of a typeface, and refers to a physical set of material. (In the digital era, a “font” usually refers to a single file containing the typeface in one style.) While I say “Gutenberg,” he relied on his craftspeople for the massive task of turning designs into metal type. These artisans were called punchcutters, because they created punches. A punch is a stamp carved in hard metal as a mirror image of the character that will 9

ultimately be printed on paper. A punch is struck into a mold of softer metal, the matrix, to form a recess from which the face of the character is cast. The matrix is placed inside a hand mold into which a molten alloy is poured. A piece of type then emerges that can be inked and printed from. Creating a punch is an intricate and lengthy process. Patricia Cost notes in The Bentons, “The quality of the punch depended as much on the artistic sense of the punch-cutter as it did on his skill and precision.” Across the centuries in which punches were cut by hand, it’s possible that as few as a thousand people ever mastered the trade. The blank for a punch was a squared stick roughly two inches long and worked on or against a wooden shelf on a pedestal that had useful corners and edges for bracing the punch. A magnifying glass would be mounted to leave the artisan’s hands free. A punchcutter used an array of files, chisels, and other tools made of hardened steel to carve softer punches. These tools included other punches that had cross-strokes and bowls, known as counter-punches. (Counter-punches in turn were made using counter-counter-punches.) Other sharpened tools could scrape minuscule shreds of steel. They were so precise that they could make fine adjustments at a scale of 3/10,000ths of an inch (.008mm), or the equivalent of 2,500 dots per inch. Oddly enough, that’s about the resolution of 21st-century laserbased devices used for etching printing plates. Punches were held near a candle to coat them in soot, or lampblack, and were touched to slightly moist paper to test progress. They were also proofed as sets to ensure harmony among different characters. A typical font for a Latin script in metal type’s mature period would have had about 140 different characters. Punchcutters worked slowly, taking from half a day to two days per punch. That speed remained accurate through the last hand punchcutters in the 1900s. Smaller sizes took much longer. An entire font might take a year or even two, some records show. When perfected, punches were heated to a high temperature and then quenched in water or oil, which hardened them for the next stage: making matrices. A matrix is a mold from which type is made. It’s made of a softer metal than is the punch, often copper, formed into the squared-off shape that will be used in the hand mold. The punchcutter or another worker would hammer the punch into the raw, unjustified matrix, also called a drive or a strike. Getting the depth right was critical, as having matrices in which the type varied in depth would produce uneven type. A matrix would deform after being struck, and required fitting to bring it back into shape and be suitable for casting. The fitter could 10

adjust the depth by filing the face down if a matrix was struck too deeply. A fitter could prepare several matrices a day. While the punch defined the printed width of a character’s surface, the matrix determined the width as the type fit in a line with other letters — its set width, or left-to-right dimensions — as well as the placement of the character within that width. Punches and matrices obviously wore out. Tempered steel was hard, but could be brittle. If dropped, struck incorrectly, or even used normally, it might shed broken pieces or shatter. A punch might survive making a number of matrices, but its fine detail wore down in use. However, punches as far back as the late 1500s have been preserved. Matrices, being of softer metal and constantly exposed to a liquid lead alloy, eventually “burn out,” losing detail and form. But based on the demands of type foundries, it must have been possible to make tens to hundreds of thousands of pieces of type from a single matrix. In later days, that number increased through the use of brass, stainless steel, and nickel-plated matrices. The type cast from these matrices could be quite resilient, too, if handled well and made of hard-enough alloys. In The Practice of Typography, a manual by Theodore Low De Vinne, he writes, “With kind usage a font of pica [modern 12-point type] may receive a million impressions before it will be condemned; with the same treatment a font of pearl [5 point] may of the face be worn out with less than a hundred thousand impressions.” Those who engaged in the art kept their mouths shut and left few insights, as was common in guilds. Joseph Moxon, in his 1683 Mechanick Exercises, which details how to run a printing workshop, notes that “Letter-Cutting is a Handy-Work hitherto kept so concealed among the Artificers of it, that I cannot learn any one hath taught it any other.” The rest of the chapter provides what detailed observations and instructions Moxon had acquired. Historians don’t know if Gutenberg relied exactly on the above process. There are suppositions that his studio may have carved punches in other metals. A computer scientist’s analysis of the 42line Bible led to his conclusion that Gutenberg used sand casting. While he presents compelling evidence, it’s difficult to imagine how the Mainz workshop could have cast type quickly enough with that method. Also instructive are the times in which a piece of type slipped out and wound up unnoticed on the face of the forme. In several early books, you can see the side profile of a sort inked and printed on top of the intended type. These examples have confirmed that early cast characters largely resembled later ones that have survived. 11

Mind Your p’s and q’s For as little as we know of Gutenberg’s working methods, we do know through inference that he had typesetters, also called compositors, because type doesn’t magically leap into the right order. Michael Clapham estimated, in A History of Technology: From The Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, that the studio must have had about 25 workers across all professions by the end of printing the Bible, and that fully six were setting type. From Gutenberg’s workshop through the mid-1800s, all type was set by hand. It shifted from “all” to “nearly all” as the century proceeded and inventors tinkered with labor-saving mechanisms. Because handsetting was the only method, it had to suffice both when a printer required thoughtful and artistic composition and when speed was the driving force. In either case, it’s both a meditative and deeply repetitive task, which could lead some to feel like machine clockwork. That became more so as specialization drove printers to specific duties. Instead of composing, preparing paper, and printing, a worker might spend 12 to 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week, setting type. To put yourself in the shoes (or hands) of a typesetter from the 1400s to 1800s, picture a cramped room of wide cabinets. You pull out a set of drawers, called type cases, and place them in an angled frame. 12

On the upper portion farther away, you put the majuscule or upper case letters. The minuscule, or lower case, letters sit closer to you. You will need other cases for a combination of styles, sizes, or typefaces. Each case is divided into rectangular cubbyholes. The exact layout varies by era and language. In English, a common lower case design persists from Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises through the 1900s. That layout clusters the 12 most common letters roughly in the center: etaoinshrdlu. More common letters have larger compartments. (In the later part of the 1800s, a layout called the California job case combined upper and lower cases in a single drawer.) The room in which you work might have windows. But because workdays are long, most of the year for most of the day you work by candlelight; in later years, gas lighting replaced candles. Typesetters preferred gas lighting even when electricity was introduced, as it produced a better light, but it rapidly exhausted the oxygen in rooms that lacked proper ventilation. (The average lifespan of a typesetter in America in 1850 was 28 years, far below other adults of the period.) You hold a composing stick in your hand, a device of wood or metal either fixed to a certain line width or adjustable to a range of widths. You stack letter and letter into a line in the stick, and then stack lines until the stick is full or too heavy to hold. If you’re an experienced compositor, you pick characters from their cubbyholes more or less without looking, as with touch typing. Apprentices have to memorize the lay of the case, or where each char­ acter resides. Some type has one or more nicks positioned to aid by sight or feel that type is oriented correctly. The stick is always held in the left hand, even for lefties, and type picked from the case with the right. You glance at a piece of paper covered with handwritten words and notations and, with a practiced motion, rapidly grab pieces of metal. You build up a line from left to right — from your pinkie to thumb — and your thumb is used to hold the type in place so it doesn’t tip over. Vertically between lines, you may add leading, which are literal strips of lead used to increase spacing. Or the type may be designed — early type was — to be set solid with no interline spacing. Among Gutenberg’s many early accomplishments was that his Bible was set fully justified; that is, lines were flush left and flush right, forming an even column. This was difficult for scribes to do without elaborate planning, and rare for hand-written manuscripts. It’s unclear how Gutenberg’s compositors handled spacing words in lines of type, but later typesetters started by assembling words with standard spaces between them. That spacing evolved to a three-to-anem space, one-third of the capital letter M in the font (in early days) or the square of the point size (in later ones). 13

You briefly look at this line to ensure it matches the text — this avoids the time and irritation of correcting it later — and then begin justifying. That might involve reducing all word spaces to tighten a line, hyphenating a word at the end, or slipping in thinner spaces. In early centuries of printing, a typesetter could change the spelling of a word or, less frequently, rewrite the text on the fly! As you fill composing sticks, you shift lines to a galley, a tray with an edge on two or three sides. With metal galleys, the bottom’s thickness is the same to that of the composing stick, so the set type can be slid directly onto it without a bump or drop. You use string to tie up type on the galley. Pages were often composed in galleys and then slid onto a composition stone, an even surface that allowed the type to be planed, or made level. One or more pages are placed into a metal chase, which is designed to fit snugly into a press. Into the chase goes furniture, wood or metal that fills the empty places between type and chase, including thin strips or reglets, along with wedges called quoins. Altogether, the chase, type, furniture, and quoins create a forme. A well-composed forme is locked up, using the quoins to adjust pressure in an exquisite balance. Too little tension, and type falls out of the forme when moved. Too much and the material may burst out. The type in formes was often kept together only for as long as a quantity of pages was printed. Printers always balanced the cost of how much type they had on hand against the size of job they could accomplish. The amount of standing type, or type left in galleys or formes, reduced their ability to print other work. Distribution brings the least joy to your day, as generations of typesetters can testify. This is the business of returning the type you so carefully set to the case’s cubbyholes. Newspaper typesetters might set type for 8 to 10 hours overnight, then arrive before the start of their active work the next day to spend an hour or two distributing. 14

Typesetters worked long shifts and worked fast, because as with many trades, they were often paid as piecework. This kind of pay lasted for typesetters longer than for many industrial professions, partly because union members liked it. It rewarded compositors for work performed rather than tying it to a required speed that could be changed at will. Payment was by the 1,000 ems in the US; in the UK, it was often measured in ens, which are half as wide. The measurement of a day’s work was by a set of pasted-together proof sheets, which compositors called a string. In standard type sizes, that was roughly 250 to 400 words. That would be a portion of or a full page in a book or part of a single column of a newspaper page. Across their early centuries, newspapers were set in surprisingly tiny type, as the speed and size of presses constrained the number of pages publishers could print each day and the number of copies of each edition. An hour’s work was a very small part of the copy that needed to be set even for just a few newspaper pages. You can immediately see the problem: The human eye hasn’t changed in centuries, and tiny type was more difficult to set than the larger, more legible faces used in books. And the one rate included total payment — not just setting, but however long it took to make corrections caught by a proofreader, foreman, writer, or editor, and for distribution. Thus, by the 1800s, nascent unions developed elaborate and lengthy surcharges and adjustments to a base rate of payment for size, language, special work (like math formulas), footnotes, and a thousand other factors. The string was measured and examined each shift for exceptions that necessitated special rates. An average typesetter in the 1800s might average 750 to 1,000 ems an hour across a 10-hour shift, or about 2,000 to 4,000 words. A more efficient, more skilled one could peak near 1,500 ems an hour. But the truly extraordinary, known as swifts or fire-eaters, could pass 2,000 ems an hour in races held in front of paying audiences for significant purses in the 1880s. As the speed of printing increased in the 1800s, typesetters couldn’t keep up, and new printers weren’t being hired and trained fast enough. Printers’ lifestyles and working conditions led to early deaths, too, depleting the workforce. What if a machine could take the expertise out of a worker’s hand and make them more of an interchangeable cog? Ah, the constant dream of capitalists, but one that would benefit typesetters as well, with more regular wages and hours and, as it turned out, much longer lives. We’ll come back to this two chapters hence. 15

Printing Stands Still; Type Diversifies From 1450 to the mid-1800s, both type manufacture and typesetting effectively stood still. Rough wood and metal was replaced with better-cast, stronger, and more precise versions, but that was about it. Contemporary writers felt the stagnation strongly. At the present day, [the setting up of types] is practically in nowise different from what it was in the time of Gutenberg, 400 years ago. — Chambers Encyclopædia (1873) …it should ever be borne in mind that all printing types from Gutenberg in 1440 downward to the year 1827 — nearly four hundred years — were cast by the pouring process or hand or spoon dipping… — The Inland Printer (1890) A typecaster from Gutenberg’s workshop who showed up in 1830 at the door of Blake & Stephenson in Sheffield, England, would have required no more than a few hours of training before he could get down to work. Likewise, a compositor on the 42-line Bible could walk into a newspaper on Fleet Street in the early 1800s, attach garters to his sleeves, learn the lay of the case, and start to typeset as if no time had passed. Just a few decades after Gutenberg, a historical record begins that lets us trace the slow pace of development in some detail, as printers’ workshops shift from a combination of publisher, type foundry, and press operation into just typesetting and printing. 16

In the 1470s, William Caxton was already purchasing types for his press, and by the mid-1500s, type founding was well established as a separate kind of business. (Caxton’s use of Dutch or German types is why English lost a few unique letters: the ash, eth, thorn, and yogh.) Some publishers continued to make their own types, but it became less common. However, centralization didn’t improve efficiency, even as it increased volume and consistency. Type was cut and cast the same way across centuries, and that type was set in nearly the same fashion, too. The real change came in the appearance of types. This advances with remarkable speed following Gutenberg’s early works. Hot on the heels of Gutenberg’s textura, Nicolas Jenson creates the first Roman printing type in Venice about two decades later, relying on a combination of Roman inscription capitals and Carolingian minuscule, or littera antica, for readability. His face was so beautiful that it continued to be admired and copied centuries later. The clever publisher Aldus Manutius works with punchcutter Francesco Griffo to create the first italic, a style based on the cursive chancery hand, one developed at the Vatican that derived from the same source as Jenson. Manutius wanted a compact face to print smallformat editions of books. He also printed the deeply inscrutable and erotically frank Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. (The book you’re reading is set in Monotype Bembo, derived from Aldine roman, while Bembo Italic draws inspiration from a later Italian italic.) While Roman and italic took over Europe and spread to other countries, Gutenberg’s textura remained popular for religious works and in some places — like England — for fancy texts. It evolved into Schwabacher and Rotunda, which were largely superseded in the late 16th century by Fraktur. That style remained in use mostly in Germany until WWII: The Nazis first embraced its continuation and then banned it on racist grounds. Many other changes took place in commonly used styles in centuries that followed, and hundreds of books can summarize the change of nib type, the development of slab and sans serif, and much more. Since our interest in this slender volume isn’t in design, we move on to the great changes in technology that begin during the industrial revolution.

17

A Bicycle for the Hand Type manufacture had limitations at the two ends of the process. The first, discussed earlier, was the speed at which punchcutters carved steel punches. While that limited the new releases, sizes, weights, and the like, it also affected keeping existing fonts available for casting due to the burden of replacing broken punches. “Each punch was an individual work of art. If it broke, the punch that replaced it could never quite be the same,” wrote Frank Denman in The Shaping of Our Alphabet. A 1915 issue of Scientific American said quite starkly that “when a single letter punch was broken the whole set was rendered valueless, and moreover people who owned matrices from this set of punches could not obtain duplicates to replace losses and wear.” That’s clearly overstating the case, but the reality is somewhere in between. As the 1800s progressed, newspapers grew in size and they wanted more varieties of typefaces for advertising and headlines. The same was true of job printers for posters and waybills, which led to the introduction and spread of large, often ostentatious wood type. Foundries’ ability to feed this market was held back by the overhead of making punches. At the other end of the process, casting type was also a bottleneck. While accounts vary across the centuries of hand casting, it seems a 18

good worker could produce 300 to 500 sorts an hour, or about 4,000 in an average working day before the later finishing steps. A host of improvements arrived from the 1830s onward to cast type and make punches more rapidly — and with much less specialized expertise — but they swept over traditional type founders so quickly that the American industry ironically received a severe wound. Throughout the remainder of the letterpress era, it never quite revived. While the hand mold remains an incredible innovation, it was limited by the hand portion of its name. Improvements in the mold held matrices better and allowed for adjustments. A spring lever could lock the form and eject type more quickly. Foundries could hire more people to cast type faster, but that doesn’t lower per-unit expenses. The hand mold also relied on a snap of the wrist to fill the matrix’s face with liquid lead. Without that flick, the sort could have internal voids or a pockmarked surface. This manual step prevented casting larger type sizes consistently, though some foundries used hand pumps to inject alloy instead of hand pouring. Many inventors and printers tried to automate the process, but the first one who succeeded was David Bruce. He patented his pivotal typecaster in 1838 after experimenting while working as a partner at his uncle’s New York type foundry. His invention was recognized immediately as a game changer. The pivotal caster was a modified hand mold that pivoted back and forth. In one motion, it closed the mold and a motor-driven pump injected lead from a reservoir. The pressure was higher and more consistent than that of a hand motion. It then rocked the other direction, opened the mold, and ejected the type. A single machine could produce 50 to 100 pieces of type a minute — 3,000 to 6,000 an hour — for book sizes and smaller. Larger display sizes, of roughly 24 to 72 points, required more cooling and reduced rates to several a minute. A day’s work by hand suddenly happened by machine in an hour or less. One skilled operator could also be responsible for multiple machines running simultaneously and worked by those with less training — including child labor, yet again. Boys often provided the motive power of turning a crank in the initial hand-powered models. They were later adapted to steam power. De Vinne says in his 1902 The Practice of Typography that, by 1845, no American foundry relied solely on manual casting. That seems an exaggeration, but records show foundries in the US, England, and beyond shifted quickly because of the Bruce machine’s efficiency. However, the Bruce machine and ones that followed didn’t provide a complete solution. They mechanized the hand mold, but not the finishing and dressing steps. 19

It wasn’t until 1888 that the next shift happened. Henry Barth, then president of the Cincinnati Type Foundry, patented a machine that “breaks off the jet, ploughs a groove between the feet, rubs down the feather-edges at the angles, and delivers the types on the channel in lines ready for inspection,” wrote De Vinne. The Barth machine still relied on matrices and a mold, but it moved side to side on bearings, was cooled by circulating water and blasts of air to be able to eject type faster, and was designed from the start with the option to be motor driven. Sources are thin on speed and vary wildly, probably because it depends on the point size, as with the Bruce. The range appears to be from 10,000 to 15,000 an hour of essentially finished types. The Barth wasn’t the last improvement, as others followed with variations, though Bruce machines remained in use side by side for smaller runs. One machine, the Wicks Rotary Typecaster, allegedly produced up to 60,000 sorts an hour — 17 a second! — by using a continuous belt of matrices to cast a repeating series of characters for newspaper handsetting. The number of foundries in the US never exceeded 50 even in the 1880s, and fewer than 50 appear to have existed in the rest of the world at the time. Developing, manufacturing, shipping, and maintaining typecasters involved a lot of capital and ongoing costs. You might wonder: Why did so many typecasting machines proliferate when the number of foundries was so small? The answer was a technological improvement that both benefited foundries and nearly doomed them: electrotyping.

20

A 19th Century 3D Printer We think of 3D printing as a modern invention. But two centuries ago, a clever electro-chemical process allowed the ready duplication of objects. The 3D printing of the 1800s era was known as electrotyping. It relied on the new availability of electricity in industrial processes. It was widely used by the end of the century in the printing industry as well as to make duplicates of works of sculpture and metalsmithing that were then distributed to museums around the world. In printing, electrotypes were a boon to reproducing illustrations, as they picked up the fine details of woodcuts. Printers began to use electrotype around 1840 to that end, and later duplicated entire pages and individual pieces of type. Starting with an original, such as a locked-up forme of type, an electrotyper brushed the page lightly with graphite, and then used a press to force wax or similar malleable material onto the type under great pressure to fill every crevice and stroke. They removed the wax mold, and coated its interior form even more thoroughly with graphite. The mold was then hung in a bath full of a copper solution through which electricity flowed. The electricity causes the copper to precipitate out of the solution and deposit onto the graphite. As it covers the graphite, copper then grows on itself to form a solid shell. 21

The electrical source for the approach relied initially on a battery, which could produce only limited amperage, or current, and electrotypes could take a dozen or more hours to make. Later, electric dynamos delivered far higher amperage, and the time required to deposit a copper shell could be cut by 90 percent. For a page of type, when the shell reached the necessary thickness based on its purpose and how long it needed to last — from 1/128 (.008) to 1/32 (.031) inch — it was removed for backing up and finishing. That involved filling the shell with something like the type metal used for casting type. The finished electrotype could be mounted in a variety of ways to make it the right height to paper. But I use the example of a page of type for easier visualization. For typecasting purposes, electrotypes were rather different. Techniques for replicating type were perfected by around 1845. Instead of making a copy of something to print, both printers and foundries employed them to make matrices by deposition instead of by striking a punch into a metal blank. To create a matrix by electrotype, a worker had to recess either a punch or an existing piece of type into a negative space. That started with a planchet, or piece of copper or brass, just as with regular matrix making. However, these were thinner for electrotyping. The planchet had a rectangle routed out of its face where the recessed mold in a matrix would normally sit. Underneath that region, the type or punch was clamped and the space behind it filled in. Prepared and placed into an electrotyping tank, copper would grow over the type or punch and fill the rectangular hole. When the copper passed the level of the other side of the planchet, the electrotyped piece could be taken out of the tank. The type or punch was then removed, leaving a perfect mold in its place. Another, thicker piece of metal was riveted underneath the matrix to strengthen it and the whole item finished square and level at its surfaces. It looked in most ways like a standard matrix. This offered foundries a number of advantages. If a punch was lost or broken, it became a straightforward engineering process to make one or more new matrices from existing type. Type founders also started having their cutters engrave faces into type metal or brass. This much softer metal could hold more detail and be carved more quickly. This led to a profusion of ornamental and complicated display faces. It also solved a problem in casting larger sizes of type, as the steel punches above book sizes were more difficult to cut and strike with. With the Bruce and Barth machines, casting larger and fancy faces was no longer a difficulty; the two innovations paired neatly. 22

This era was oddly effaced from history, as David MacMillan notes at his site Circuitous Root. Many modern writers skip this story, and jump from steel punches to the next topic at hand, the pantograph. But it’s critical to understanding why type foundries, given a remarkable new tool, began to suffer financially, a development that contributed to consolidation and bankruptcies. The reason is piracy. Printers bought typecasting machines of all sorts, because electrotyping — performed in house or by one of the many electrotyping plants that sprang up — allowed them to purchase a font or acquire or borrow matrices and create their own molds. Other foundries got into the act, too. Despite patents and other protections, duplicating fonts was more of a socially and commercially awkward situation than an illegal one. An owner of the Central Type Foundry (founded in 1870), Carl Schraubstadter, Jr., tried to set the historical record straight — in 1887! He wrote in the trade journal Inland Printer that electrotyping was in heavy use, something confirmed by later historians examining specimen books and type. A competitor, James M. Conner of the James Conner’s Sons foundry, angrily replied in his company’s in-house publication: “… little reference is made to the piratical custom of many founders in using this process to copy original designs cut in steel…” Schraubstadter replied in early 1888: “A good thing is not to be condemned because it is put to a disreputable use.” By the time he published that, however, Conner was dead. And in five years, both Conner’s and Schraubstadter’s firms were absorbed into a single corporation comprising nearly all the remaining type foundries in the country to avoid falling prey to bankruptcy. Piracy was one cause. The pantograph was the other.

23

A Motor for the Mind The pantograph wasn’t new when type founder Linn Boyd Benton applied it to metal type; it dates to 1603, and had already become the primary way of making wood type earlier in the 19th century. It’s an interlocked set of levers that form parallelograms. A pantograph has a tracing arm on one end and a cutting or drawing arm on the other. This can allow an exact-sized reproduction, but adjustments between the two arms allow the tracing to be proportionately enlarged or reduced. To make wood type, a designer cut a pattern at a relatively large size, and traced it with a horizontally laid out pantograph with a high-speed router at the cutting end. (Wood type thrived from the mid-1800s to the 1920s to fill a need for large and unique sizes for newspaper advertising and posters that couldn’t be cast in metal, because metal warped at larger sizes, among other factors.) Benton turned this idea to punches. It was a difficult problem, because punchcutters had learned over centuries the intricacies of ensuring balance among letters so that they appeared optically the same size and retained similar properties while working at a 1:1 scale. This had to be translated to drawings several inches tall that preserved these relationships and nuances as they were converted into smaller patterns, and then into type in small to medium book point sizes. 24

Benton’s type-cutting pantograph wasn’t the simple-to-visualize apparatus used for wood-type cutting. Instead of the pattern and material to be carved being laid out flat and side by side, the Benton pantograph arrayed them on tiers because of the precision and scale required. A worker traced the pattern with a pointer that moved freely and was attached through a series of levers and gimbals to a cutting system above. In Benton’s process, type design became abstracted from the cutting. Type design emerged as a fully independent profession, though some later designers were strong atavists — like Frederick Goudy and Rudolph Koch — and worked from design to punch on some faces out of a commitment to older methods. A designer’s drawings would be turned into patterns in brass or other metals through a pantograph, of course, although a simpler one. With specialization and abstraction, pattern makers and pantograph operators required more mechanical and less artisanal skills. Benton had apparently not excelled at punch cutting by hand, but succeeded wildly at replacing an age-old process without destroying it. Some put Gutenberg, Barth, Mergenthaler, and Benton in the same pantheon for the shocking advancements they brought. Benton designed his device around carving punches, seeing that stage as a major roadblock in producing more type. A lost punch could be quickly and closely reproduced. Then an owner of Benton, Waldo, and Co., Benton cut punches in type metal because the foundry produced its matrices through electrotyping. Benton later developed a matrix-cutting machine that worked in a quite similar fashion to bypass the fussiness and generational imperfections in electrotyping. Among many machines he developed was the Delineator, which let type cutters fiddle dials for weights and adjustments for size, much like digital type designers today can do with OpenType variable fonts. Benton wrote in The Building of a Book, “…from a single design, say Gothic, pencil tracings can be made condensed, extended, italicized, and back-sloped, as well as an enlarged facsimile.” No one besides Benton and his son, Morris, could later operate it, however, and the interrelationship of the adjustments is such that the Delineator has never been reproduced as a virtual device. While Benton’s machines made it easier for a greater variety of typefaces to flourish in a far greater variety of sizes and styles, and made it more affordable for printers and periodicals to acquire more type, the real breakthrough was how it complemented the Eighth Wonder of the World, created as an evolution of his punch-cutting pantograph: the Linotype — the cause of Benton’s type foundry merging with 22 others to create the American Type Foundry (ATF), and the subject of the next chapter. 25

Type Heats Up Information’s Speed Mired in more or less 15th-century methods of composition, publishers couldn’t feed a public maw hungry for books and newspapers, and job printers could barely keep up with demand for increased commercial production. A 1929 US Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that a composing room in 1896 required 40 people to set type and compose pages for a four-page newspaper, which was then printed in an edition of 10,000. About 16 of those people were typesetters, who spent seven hours each edition typesetting and about half that again in distributing type. The introduction of machine composition, discussed in this chapter, shrank composition staff by 60 to 80 percent, the report said: It multiplied the output of each typesetter and eliminated type distribution. (If you wondered, many workers were rehired quickly due to subsequent growth in typesetting.) One newspaper grew its daily edition from 12 pages in 1896 to 36 pages by 1926, went from 48 to 60 pages on Sundays, and produced more editions each day — “Extra! Extra!” isn’t just a movie newsboy’s cry. The number of copies printed went up dramatically as well. The first attempt at mechanical typesetting wasn’t the Linotype, a name you may have heard. But the Linotype machine was the first 26

that successfully changed and radically sped up the process, requiring new skills and inevitably bringing competitors with distinctly different approaches to market. It’s also where the interests of type manufacture and typesetting collide, to the detriment of type foundries but to the benefit of publishers and readers. Across the 19th century, many inventors created contrivances that could compose lines with handset type. A number of them involved pressing keys to release type from a magazine — a vertical holder divided into channels — sometimes directly into a composing stick. Others required modifications to type to grab the right letters. (Inventors were also in a mad dash at the time to create a typewriter.) Because women were largely excluded from typographical unions, they were often hired to operate these frequently breaking-down machines, and at much lower wages than men. These type selectors generally neither justified lines nor distributed type, which together could consume 40 to 50 percent of composition. From accounts at the time, a reader might think early typesetting systems were widely used. Rather, patents abounded, but few of the systems described provided enough advantage to move from prototype to real production. Many had higher throughput than handsetting, but required multiple people to operate! Hardly a savings. Others, like the Paige Compositor — the machine that bankrupted investor Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) — could carry out all composition needs, but were too temperamental in operation. In the wonderful book A Collation of Facts Related to Fast Typesetting, written in 1887 by three of the fastest typesetters who ever lived and likely will ever live, the authors noted apropos of many devices then in development, “…what is wanted is a piece of mechanism that can think, and the numerous efforts to secure this phenomenon proves the sure foundation on which the compositor’s art is based.” The Linotype arrived in 1886 and didn’t yet warrant a mention. While the Linotype couldn’t think, it used mechanisms to mimic the hardest parts of typesetting. Ottmar Mergenthaler designed several models of typesetter at the behest of James Clephane, a celebrity stenographer of the 19th century who was friends with Abraham Lincoln and other statesmen; he developed shorthand systems and was famed as a court reporter. Clephane beta-tested the typewriter that Christopher Sholes and James Densmore had underway in the 1860s, and destroyed one experimental model after another, sending back detailed, “caustic” critiques. (They persisted, came to market, and sold their production interests to the Remington company.) 27

The typewriter answered Clephane’s need for quick and clean text, but not for copies. He first envisioned typing onto a sheet that could be reproduced by lithography (see “Painting Images with Ink”). Mergenthaler, then working at a machine shop, produced a version, but didn’t like it. He moved on to make a device that would punch molds into paper for casting, like stereotyping (see “Copy and Paste in Metal”), and felt that was a dead end, too. Mergenthaler finally came up with the notion of a keyboard that lined up matrices to set and cast type in hot metal on a single machine. Clephane agreed, and the first model went into a newsroom in 1886. But Mergenthaler still wasn’t satisfied. He quit the company that was making his typesetter, redesigned it, and rejoined with a new model that became a juggernaut. (Mergenthaler saw only part of its success: He died, at 45, in 1899.) The Linotype is an absurdly complicated all-in-one device that was allegedly named after the exclamation that it set a literal “line o’ type,” called a slug. Like a hand-set composing machine, it relied on a magazine. But a typesetter released matrices — not pieces of type — from the magazine when they typed on an attached keyboard. Matrices drop into the machine’s assembler one at a time, forming a line with the mold facing away from the operator. The typesetter could spot-check a line by reading the labels printed facing them, however, as well as make corrections or drop in special characters by lifting out and inserting matrices in the assembler. When the line nears its maximum length the operator pulls a casting lever, which shifts the line of type over to a mold disk. Each Linotype had its own heated pot of type metal. In casting, the device pumped metal to fill the matrices for that line of type. The mold disk then rotates and releases the solid, cooling slug into a galley tray that accumulates lines of type. That injection happens just to the left of the compositor. If something goes wrong, such as the mats not being properly aligned, the machine could produce a squirt of hot lead. Most operators wound up with burns and scars. Slugs are immediately ready to print, and a compositor might cast a few lines at a time or entire stories or book pages. You might say at this juncture: This is all very slick, but how does it solve justification and distribution? When an operator needs a word space, they press a space bar, which releases a spaceband, a special expanding wedge. When a line is complete and shifts to the mold disk, it’s held within vise-like jaws, which are set to the desired width of the line. A justification block pushes up from beneath, driving the spacebands, which expand until they fit the space snugly. Because the spacebands are wedges and pushed with equal pressure, each resulting space is identical. 28

After a line is cast, the Linotype raises the matrices via a mechanical elevator to a distributor above the magazine. Each Linotype matrix has a unique pattern of teeth jutting out from a V-shaped slot on the side opposite to its mold. This is effectively a 7-bit binary code allowing for up to 128 combinations. The distributor bar carries matrices along until the right set of missing teeth are encountered — one of as many as 124 channels, as four codes are reserved — and it drops back into place. (Later machines could handle several magazines and two characters per matrix, allowing access to up to 850 unique characters.) Yet distributing matrices isn’t really distribution — it’s more like sorting. Distribution wasn’t required at all. Linotype slugs were largely used for perishable work, like newspapers, and immediately melted after printing. The Linotype’s keyboard, casting, and justification sped up composition by an extraordinary amount. A trained operator was required to compose at a minimum of about 5,000 ems an hour in standard sizes under the rules in many composition rooms, or at least five times that of a skilled handsetter. However, speeds above 10,000 ems an hour were common. The Linotype also never ran out of type, didn’t require storage of expensive type bought in advance, and eliminated distribution. An operator needed training, but far less apprenticeship than a handsetter. Not inconsequentially, typesetters lived longer on average after the Linotype’s advent, meeting the national average of around 50 years by 1905. What Linotypes did need were matrices, and in vast quantities. The first Linotype went into use in 1886 at the New York Tribune; dozens 29

followed in the next two years, and then hundreds after Mergenthaler developed his improved version. Each magazine required hundreds to thousands of matrices. Mergenthaler and associates began by using electroformed matrices, excellent for casting a lot of type, but a slow method to make a mass number of matrices. The company quickly switched to steel punches and struck its matrices. But punch cutting is a slow business, and punches are subject to break. Even with six or seven punchcutters on staff at the Linotype company by 1890, it could barely keep up with the matrices needed for the machines in use. Some critics said it was noticeable when punches were replaced, seeing variations even in a single line of type depending on when each matrix was made. This cycles us back to the pantograph. Benton designed his pantographs to cut punches in soft type metal for electrotyping matrices. But could he cut in steel instead? In 1884, before the first Linotype went into production, the company’s patent attorney visited Benton’s foundry to ask that question. (There’s some dispute about whether it came this early.) Benton quickly proved it could. His firm made punches for the Linotype company under contract for a few years, and agreed to lease his machines. Perhaps due to the work of getting the Linotype into full production and repairing those in the field, the first engraver wasn’t delivered until early 1889. The quantities required were staggering. In a 1919 publication, what was then the Mergenthaler Linotype Company said it offered 250,000 unique characters for its machines worldwide, and produced one million matrices a week. Without Benton, the Linotype would have stalled. As De Vinne wrote in Plain Printing Types, “The success of the Linotype…composing machine is largely due to the accuracy of the matrices made from Benton machine punches.” The patent on Benton’s equipment expired around 1900 in the US and UK, allowing Linotype and others to manufacture punch-cutting pantographs. Linotype didn’t exist in a vacuum, however. Patents allowed the company to keep direct competitors out until the Intertype arrived in 1917 with innovations of its own. But Linotype didn’t have a monopoly on hot-metal type. Within just a few years, it was joined in the market by a company that took a different tack, aiming for a slower-speed and more diverse market than that of newspapers.

30

Enter the Matrix Tolbert Lanston, Monotype’s creator, also wanted to solve the problem of fast, keyboard-based composition with full justification and no distribution. But he conceived of an entirely different relationship among compositor, mold, and casting than did Mergenthaler. Around the same time Mergenthaler neared his breakthrough model of Linotype, Lanston was readying an early prototype. He made every choice differently than Mergenthaler, partly due to patents. Where the Linotype required many matrices, expanded wedges to make even spaces, and produced solid lines of type, the Monotype relied on a single matrix for each character, set type as separate sorts in a line, and had a far more complicated system of justification. Lanston used math, instead of the physics of wedges, to calculate the right word spacing. Characters were designed for an 18-unit width, no matter the point size. Each character was a whole number of units wide: for example, five for an “i” and 18 for a “W”. As a compositor keyed in text, a Monotype keyboard counted widths and noted word spaces by advancing a chart-covered drum on a spindle, the justifying scale. A bell rang when the end of line approached its specified width. The operator consulted the current position on the chart for a code to punch in to justify that line. 31

This approach separated keyboard from compositor, a kind of foreshadowing of the abstraction of the computing age. The textentry unit had an enormous keyboard with exchangeable and customizable components for different purposes and languages. With multiple keyboards and casters, work could continue even if one device required repair. As an operator typed, the keyboard punched holes in paper tape in what was effectively binary. This technique was similar to that already used in Jacquard looms and player pianos, and which Herman Hollerith developed in punch card form for the 1890 US census. (Lanston collaborated with Hollerith before Monotype, and Hollerith’s company later merged with other firms to become IBM.) After a text had been punched in paper tape, it was fed into the caster, which relied on a single set of 225 matrices held in a 15-by15 format in a die case. This quantity allowed upper case, lower case, small capitals, lining and old-style figures, an array of punctuation, and ligatures and other marks. As the casting unit automatically advanced the paper tape, pins that passed through punch holes triggered movement to position the correct row and column of the die case. A centering pin pushed the matrix in that spot into a mold for casting as a single sort. The matrix was then pushed back into the die case. The caster ran as fast as 140 characters a minute, according to a 1912 Monotype manual — that’s two sorts cast per second in this method. A complex series of wedges cast spaces of precisely the units entered by the compositor. Given that a compositor entered those units at the end of a line, how could the caster read them while casting 32

the line? By starting backwards. The paper tape is fed tail end into a compositor, which sets up the wedges first from the spacing numbers, then sets type in the reverse direction from its entry. The company also pushed the message that type should always be cast fresh and then dumped into the hell box for melting down immediately after its use was over, avoiding distribution. Monotype equipment appealed to book publishers, as it allowed setting type in galleys for proofing, and making small corrections instead of entire lines. It also meant a single font in a die case could cast type from multiple keyboards, requiring less investment in type. And a caster could be used as a mini-foundry during its down time, producing type for in-house handsetting and to sell to other printers. Handset work continued alongside machine composition through the end of letterpress printing, even though it was substantially reduced. Monotype’s production system — first demonstrated in 1897 and shipping more widely by 1900 — could cast rules, spaces, borders, and type in body sizes. It eventually added machines that produced individual sorts up to 72 points, including the Giant Caster and the Super Caster, introduced in the late 1920s. It also purchased the Thompson company in 1929, which had a more versatile Barth-like caster, and could handle nearly every maker’s matrices directly or with adapters. (Competing for displaytype composition at newspapers was the Ludlow, which cast large type as single slugs, like a Linotype, from hand-set matrices.) 33

The use of a single matrix and individual sorts required extreme precision to cast justified lines. Monotype began by using Benton’s punchcutting pantographs and quickly moved to make its own gear. Monotype built up an extensive and well-regarded library of original and licensed types, especially at the UK division, which eventually became a separate company in the mid-1900s. The small number of matrices needed for each purchaser allowed for greater investment in type design. The version of Monotype that became popular didn’t go into substantial production until around 1900. Like Mergenthaler, Lanston died before his machines had entirely taken over their part of the typesetting market — in 1913, at 69. The Monotype was a body blow to type foundries, coming after pummeling from electrotyping piracy, the Linotype, and severe price-cutting engaged in by competitive foundries. To survive, Benton’s foundry and 22 others formed the American Type Foundry (ATF) in 1892. ATF shuttered the less-profitable outlets, and spent too long consolidating the fonts and plants that composed the rest. ATF eventually shifted to display typefaces and printing equipment, while gradually shrinking foundry staff until the 1980s. Its assets were sold off at auction in 1993, mostly for scrap. This was seen as a travesty, as there was heavy interest from printers, museums, and collectors. Linotype stopped making hot-metal gear in 1975 and went through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Lanston Monotype of America was sold to ATF in 1969 and stopped making its version of the hardware. Its matrices passed through multiple hands until they wound up on Prince Edward Island, where they were destroyed by a tidal wave. A small New York firm currently owns the digital rights to its fonts. In England, Monotype kept supplying the hot-metal world, shrinking but still extant, even as the company navigated into the digital era. However, in 1991 it announced plans to shut down metal operations, and then went into bankruptcy the next year. The Type Archive of London acquired all the last-stage equipment and most historic machine archives of the company. A small coterie of former employees still cuts new punches and makes replacement matrices as needed for Monotype users worldwide.

34

The Coming of the Light In the early 1900s, a form of printing appeared that relied on thin metal plates, called offset lithography (see “Printing with Light”). The printed surface of the plate could only be created by direct contact with existing materials. Within a few decades, however, photosensitive plates were developed that allowed for photolithography — essentially “printing from light.” This worked well for photographs and illustrations, as a process developed in the later part of the 1800s allowed the use of a camera, negative, and etching by acid to make relief plates. The new offset plate approach was familiar to production staff who handled images. Type was a different matter. It required intermediate steps. It could be printed by letterpress and a resulting print exposed as a plate. By 1945, the Brightype appeared , which used a special camera and a bank of lights to capture relief material without making a print first. But you still had to start with and deal with inconvenient amounts of metal. What was really needed, of course, was a flat method of creating type in the first place. The last time around, in the mid1800s, a mismatch of printing surfaces and printing methods led to stereotyping and then hot-metal composition. This time, something different was needed. The earliest discussion of phototype came not long after the 35

invention of photography in the 1830s, long before the Linotype existed. In 1892, the first phototypesetting patent was issued, and experiments abounded. In History of the Phototypesetting Era, Frank Romano et al. noted, “By the 1920s, [a] half-dozen photographic typesetters were in development.” The key aspect of phototype is the “photo” part. Type was no long­er a receptor of ink pushed into paper, but a hole in a negative — a clear space knocked out of all-black film. This character element had to be exposed onto a photographic medium to “set” it. The character could be on a sheet, a strip, or a disk, and had to be rotated or moved into an exact position so that a light could shine through at the right moment to expose its cut-out form. A system that did this for successive characters produced a line; one that advanced lines produced galleys. Later generations switched from physical negatives to a CRT that exposed pixels to film or paper. Phototype had many advantages, but a key one was optical scaling. Even with Benton’s remarkable Delineator for making multiple styles and sizes from a single master, fonts were still mired in metal and matrices. You needed one unique matrix for every size of type. With a photographic master, any type size was possible through enlargement and reduction of the original. Leading could theoretically be set to any amount (even character by character) by adjusting the film advance. (Because of human perception and issues with ink and paper, type should be drawn a little differently at each size. Phototype often relied on a single master for all book sizes, though some firms had separate masters for smaller and larger ranges.) Those features allowed the creation of more typefaces with more characters without increasing the complexity of composition, and provided more variation and precision in setting straight copy. In the 1940s, devices that could set headline type photographically began to appear, answering at least that need, especially for advertising. They were awkward and bulky, often requiring rotating a wheel or sliding a strip to find the letter to pick — sometimes only in capitals — and then triggering exposure. But it was still faster and more versatile than the metal alternative, especially in getting it into the necessary format to print. They were also sold as an in-house solution and marketed as easy enough for an office worker to operate. But while the advantages were many, the drive to phototype was held back by both technology and labor. Unions retained strong control of printing in general and typesetting in particular. Compositors’ skills were in demand, and there were few people outside unions to perform work on hot-metal systems. While typesetters may have ridiculed the quality of early phototype, the smartest ones knew that it would eventually improve 36

composition efficiency so dramatically that it would have an employment or retraining effect like the switch from handset type to Linotype. (Some unions negotiated jobs for life for current workers, such as at the New York Times, in exchange for allowing a switch to phototype in the 1970s. The last printer with that deal retired in 2016.) Even before phototype was reality, newspapers sometimes tried to break strikes by using justifying typewriters — the typewritten copy was made into zinc plates — often hiring women to produce this inferior composition and paying them half the cost of the largely male typesetting workforce. (That pattern of pay and women replacing men was a defining part of phototypesetting, too.) Publishers and job printers wanted to produce more work. Labor practices and shortages held them back. Into that mix, phototype became practical and necessary. John Seybold wrote in The World of Digital Typesetting that by 1950 “The need for a photocomposition device was readily apparent.” Then in 1950, the logjam for photocomposition of solid text broke, just as on the printing side a stable prepared offset plate advanced that transition. Harris Intertype came first, followed by Monotype and Linotype. Each used photographic negatives of characters in place of type molds. A notable sign of the future was a fourth firm, which created the Photon. The Photon was a primitive computer, while the other three companies’ systems were still mechanical. This first generation recapitulated hot-metal composition. But the field quickly moved on to devices designed from the ground up for photocomposition. Integrated keyboards coupled with either spinning discs or film strips — used in a flat reader or attached to a rotating drum — allowed quicker access to any character in a font. This allowed the font’s character set to grow and eventually for multiple styles or fonts to be available at once. The shift in typographic complexity came along with the rise of computerization. Blind keyboard input — typing without viewing your entries — shifted to input paired with video-display terminals (VDTs), which allowed compositors initially to see in a coarse form what they typed and by 1970 to make onscreen corrections. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) became the next frontier in 1977, providing a rough preview of multiple fonts, sizes, and positions. This continued to improve as well. The distinction between phototype and the digital era that followed has to do with how the type was created and imaged onto film or specially coated papers, rather than marking a sharp division in how it was used. Phototype designs in most ways followed the same initial principles as type design as it began to be practiced in the late 1800s when the 37

Benton pantograph came into use. Type designers still drew the characters of fonts, which had to be transferred to another medium. In fact, early phototype designs came directly from the font libraries and existing metal patterns at the companies making the machines. They could use pantographs to create drawings, or make impressions or photograph the patterns. Later, workers would design intentionally for phototype, taking into account limitations of particular machines, and produce masters for each character using opaque film, like Rubylith. In the last generation of phototype, designs shifted from photo masters to CRT-based ones. Early CRT systems were very primitive and low resolution, but could form any programmed character and drive output without the requirement of physical reproductions of the font masters. Every character had to be designed as a bitmap — dots on a grid — one at a time and at a fixed size, an echo of the metal days. Phototype lasted nearly two human generations, and equipment invented across that range often survived into later periods. While CRT-based systems absolutely ruled the roost by the 1980s, I worked late in that decade in a small design and typesetting shop in Oregon where we relied on two workhorse filmstrip-based Compugraphic EditWriter 7500s. These models from 1977 cost $16,000 when introduced (nearly $70,000 in 2019 dollars), used eight-inch floppy disks, and were shockingly reliable. As phototypesetting eased into the market, all the factors that made it necessary also meant metal went out the window — sometimes literally. Designer Erik Spiekermann says in his biography that, in the late 1960s, printers in the Kreuzberg part of West Berlin threw cases of metal type right out the window, where he collected them. Newspapers switched as soon as feasible away from Linotypes; many had shifted to offset printing years or even decades before using photocomposition. Some reports say smaller newspapers switched over sooner, because of the labor issues noted above. Because phototypesetting was effectively an office job compared to hot-metal typesetting, they could hire and train a larger variety of workers, and often bypass unions. Smaller job shops couldn’t afford early phototype gear, but they could turn to service bureaus, like the one I worked for. But then the same quick end happened to phototype. Trends in the late 1970s for fourth-generation equipment that was all digital turned into a full-scale switchover by the late 1980s — I was there for it. There was no sentiment around phototypesetting, as there was about the tactile pleasure and smells of letterpress. Linotypes, Monotypes, and other casting systems remain in use worldwide, and hand type still abounds. But you will be hard pressed to find a phototypesetting device anywhere outside a handful of museums. 38

PostScript, Ergo Propter Script In 1985, Apple CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated his company’s Mac­ in­tosh computer running Aldus PageMaker page-layout software using Adobe Systems’s PostScript fonts, and printing to the Apple Laser­Writer II. Each of these was a revolution in itself, enabling the creation and spread of desktop publishing (DTP). The introduction of consumer-approachable DTP was the culmination of 40 years of phototypesetting progress and nearly a decade of work toward fourth-generation systems. It put professional typesetting and page composition in the hands of designers working outside job shops and printing plants, as well as giving amateurs access. The drive for this change came from the printing world. By the late 1970s, laser imagesetters began to hit the market, starting with the Monotype Lasercomp, and followed in 1980 by models from Linotype. Many more appeared by the early 1990s. The imagesetter part of the name is the key, rather than the laser, as lasers had appeared in some previous equipment. The switch to CRTs first allowed exposure from a tube. But the difference between a CRT and a laser imagesetter wasn’t the light source. It wasn’t even that imagesetters were standalone devices, rather than attached to a keyboard; some systems already worked like that, shades of the Monotype hot-metal keyboard/composition split. 39

Rather, it was how imagesetters uncoupled themselves from type altogether. An imagesetter was not a typesetter. Rather, it allowed a designer or compositor to produce a galley or page of type that was converted into a bitmap, a collection of dots that were either on or off, and then it used the laser to image that bitmap onto specially coated high-contrast paper or film negative. An imagesetter could produce type, illustration, and halftone images on a single page, and create the separate layers of output required for color printing. But as we’ve found so many times with printing technology, some advances come way before others: Monotype lacked page-composition software and user-scalable type when it introduced its imagesetter. “Although the Lasercomp imaged whole pages of text and graphics​ it was five years or so before good graphics software was made available, and a further three years before Monotype released a graphics terminal,” Andrew Boag wrote in “Monotype and Phototypesetting.” Monotype shipped the device with pre-rasterized, fixed-size fonts on a disk. The device wasn’t very successful, although it fit into existing typesetting workflows by allowing galleys of type that could be pasted up, as with previous phototype equipment. It took the advances at the Jobs announcement to flip the imagesetter from an oddball idea with promise into the thing that entirely changed type design, typesetting, and prepress. The imagesetter isn’t actually driven by page-layout software. Rather, the flow is from a page-layout program to a page-description language, like PostScript, and from there to a raster image processor (RIP), which produces the necessary bitmap, and finally to the imagesetter. Adobe’s PostScript is device-independent page-description language, as it is more or less a language that graphics apps speak. These apps produce what are effectively programs to reproduce designs. PostScript relies on Bézier curves, a mathematical way to describe arcs and straight lines that can then be calculated and approximated onto a grid, or raster. It also incorporates images and tones. The program created by graphics software is passed to a PostScript interpreter on a RIP. The RIP’s software interpreter turns the pagedescription program into dots on a grid. Proprietary equipment isn’t required to run PostScript, though initially a license from Adobe for the PostScript engine was. (PostScript pioneered and still dominates this approach, but other languages remain in use, as well as independently developed PostScript-compatible interpreters.) PostScript is also resolution independent: Everything described mathematically on the page — like characters in a font or vector artwork that also relies on Bézier curves and lines — can be made infinitely small or infinitely large without any loss of smoothness. Bitmapped 40

images do have a scale: If sized too large compared to the amount of detail captured in them, they become blurry or even pixelated. The RIP takes a PostScript or similar program and plots the output against a fixed grid from 1,200 to 4,800 dots per inch. Curves are converted to dots, but at such a fine scale that the eye is fooled into seeing them as curves. As noted earlier, when the technology crosses 2,000 dots per inch, it’s at the scale of refinement used by master punchcutters for metal punches. The RIP passes the bitmapped page it creates to the imagesetter, which then exposes film or paper one tiny dot at a time, moving the laser across a line and then advancing the material. The Apple event marked the first time the general public and most business users saw everything in action at once. The Mac operating system supported PostScript typefaces, and allowed PageMaker to produce pages that were truly WYSIWYG (to the resolution of the low-res monitor at least). PageMaker produced PostScript, which allowed a Mac to print a proof copy on the 300 dpi LaserWriter II, which also spoke that language. A user could also photocopy the output or take it to a “quick printer” for short, cheap print runs. But the same PageMaker file’s output could also drive a highresolution imagesetter, producing results perfectly suited to offset. PostScript fonts were later joined by a slightly different approach, called TrueType, and ultimately almost everything shifted into the modern OpenType format. OpenType fonts can have not just Gutenberg’s 290 glyphs, or distinct characters and symbols, but tens of thousands — even hundreds of thousands. In the 2010s, Google underwrote the Noto project, to design a single typeface that contained every character of every language’s script supported in the global Unicode specification. Designers making digital typefaces still often start with paper and pencil, pen, or brush, and then use some kind of modern pantograph: a graphics tablet that lets them trace over a type outline with a stylus, or a font-creation program that allows automatic or manual tracing onscreen of a scanned image. The profession of typesetter has largely disappeared by name, as pages are composed as a whole with typographic refinement by digital-layout artists, who combine skills that used to span several specialties. With scanner, digital camera, keyboard, proofing printer, and screen, the typesetter lives within a broader set of expertise. So far, this method of type creation, typesetting, and page composition reigns supreme, because there’s no further development that could make aspects better or faster. On the printing side, there is still room for efficiency. But we appear to be at the end generation for type and composition as long as ink hits paper. 41

A Press That Lasts Centuries It wasn’t enough for Gutenberg to have determined a method of reliably casting printing types in massive quantities. He also had to have a way to transfer a fast-drying and slightly viscous ink from his types onto a medium. That kind of ink didn’t exist, the medium was in the midst of change and not suited for printing, and presses hadn’t historically been used for book block printing. As with everything Gutenberg, we don’t know exactly how he did this. However, because the ink on his works and the paper and parchment onto which the ink was forced survive in the form of copies that remain extant, we can analyze them for composition and derive clues about the press. Because printing lacks the multi-step complexity of type cutting and casting, it’s easier to reverse-engineer insight. Gutenberg’s press also doesn’t appear out of a vacuum, unlike his ostensibly revolutionary hand mold, which resembles nothing preceding it. Rather, he adapted the principles of existing grape, oil, and papermaking presses, which had different properties depending on the kind of pressure needed. The first known drawing of a press appears in 1499, and it’s widely believed that it bears a reasonable resemblance to what Gutenberg must have created. 42

The press comprised several parts, and was largely made of wood. Metal available at the time would have been too brittle to withstand the pressures and constant use, and not been able to be cast and shaped as needed. James Moran in Printing Presses says that just some parts of what was known as the common press began to be cast in metal over the next century; the platen, or pressure plate, may have been made in metal as early as 1481. The object of the press was to hold the type set in a forme, which could be inked, have paper placed on top, and then put into position for the platen to push the paper using even pressure onto the inked forme. The paper would then be removed. Printers adapted or invented unique names for every part of the press. Many of them sound quirky or twee to the modern ear, even if you’ve worked in printing. The forme was placed on top of a flat surface, likely originally a smoothed piece of wood, which was set into a bed of bran (grain husks) and then made level. It would have braces in the corners to keep it from moving. (Later, this surface would have been made of stone, and called a press stone, just like the composing stone on which a forme is planed, or made level.) The level surface lay inside a box called a coffin. It was hinged on the end away from the press to attach the tympan, the surface on which paper would be fixed with pins. This kept the paper in place and could be used to register colors across multiple printing passes to align them. The tympan was packed with flat blankets, typically wool, to cushion and distribute the pressure applied through it to the paper and forme. While open, the tympan rested on a support called the gallows. 43

The tympan also bore a hinge on its far side to which the frisket was attached. Printers created a unique frisket for each forme by printing a sheet and then cutting out the spaces through which printed surfaces in the forme should be pressed to paper. This kept non-printing areas of the paper clean. The coffin was mounted on the carriage, which could slide along the plank that ran from one end of the press to the other, and which moved by leather straps connected to a winch like a windlass, known as the rounce. (The frisket, rounce, and aspects of the carriage may not have appeared until a few decades after the Gutenberg workshop.) A forme was inked by hand using ink balls. A ball was made of leather sewn into shape and stuffed with wool. Each night the leather was soaked in urine to keep it supple. (Yes, the ink balls stank to high heaven.) A ball was attached to a cup-like handle. An inker laid out ink on a table with a knife and thinned it with a handled roller, or brayer. The inker would rub the two balls in the ink, and then against each other to make a smooth layer. Before each print, an inker would daub ink on the forme with both balls. Paper was attached to the tympan and the frisket folded over the paper, and then the apparatus folded onto the top of the coffin above the forme. A printer would then move the carriage under the far end of the press, where the printing occurred. The action of the press is for a printer to push the heavy, flat platen onto the tympan. Gutenberg’s action relied on a central screw that was pulled downward by a long lever attached to the screw by a collar — the nut. The screw tapers to a point, or toe, which presses on the platen. However, to keep the platen from twisting when the screw turns, it’s hung from a square box or collar, the hose, that floats around the screw. (A later improvement passed the hose through a fixed board with a square hole. This till further kept the platen aligned and square.) The pressure from printing is so intense that the sheer weight of the press and the type, already prodigious, wasn’t enough to hold it in place. Presses were typically braced to the ceiling to keep them square and prevent wood components from being skewed around their axes by the force. Even with that much pressure, the press couldn’t print sheets as large as printers wanted, such as those large enough to fold down into eighths — eight two-sided leaves or sixteen pages — to make octavo volumes. The forme would typically contain enough material for two passes. Printers would slide the carriage in for the first half, print it, then slide it over to the second half and repeat in a two-pull operation. Along with a press, Gutenberg had to create two allied elements. He needed an ink that would be persistent, viscous, and quick44

drying, unlike writing inks. What he composed was closer to the varnish or oil paint used in other trades, probably deriving from linseed oil. Rarely discussed is that his ink glittered — it contained a fair proportion of copper, lead, and titanium. He also had to work with existing paper, as an industry that had grown for three centuries in Europe manufactured a surface intended for writing with the implements of the time — not for printing with types. Gutenberg wanted to press ink that was more like paint onto a paper that wasn’t prepared for that consistency. Papermaking originated in China near or before the start of the common era, and was kept secret for centuries. However, it eventually spread and reached Europe by the 12th century. By Gutenberg’s lifetime, mills had been producing paper for centuries, and paper had begun to supplant parchment — a medium made from animal skin — as production techniques improved. (Gutenberg printed deluxe editions of his Bibles on vellum, parchment made from calfskin.) Because paper in the 15th century was designed for writing, it was full of sizing, then likely a coating of animal-derived gelatin that made the surface harder and which could more readily accept ink. His workshop would have had to wash or dampen the paper to remove the sizing and make it soft enough to remain sturdy when making an impression, or print. Wetting paper remained the rule for centuries, even after papermaking adapted to printing with type. Neither type nor paper was perfectly even, and a common press couldn’t bite deeply into paper. A soft impression allowed the most even print in this period. Handling paper required carefully planned wetting before printing, and drying afterward. Now back to the printer, standing at the press. With the forme in place, an inker applies the pigment. A printer mounts a piece of paper on the tympan’s pins, and then folds the frisket and tympan onto the forme. With a turn of the rounce, the carriage moves under the platen. The printer gives a truly mighty, firm, and steady pull to bring the platen briefly down on the tympan to force paper onto the inked surface, and then the platen bounces on release due to the elasticity of all the padding. The sheet is removed and handed over to dry.

45

Reduce the Pressure From 1450 to 1800, presses improved only gradually with the addition of cast-iron pieces, and by tweaking the leverage and control of the platen. But as with type manufacture and typesetting, printing was largely at a standstill until a big breakthrough: the iron hand press. The first successful all-iron press was the brainchild of one person, Charles Stanhope. He was the right person — both an earl and a scientist — but it was also the right time. Metallurgy, metalworking, and an understanding of mechanics had matured to the right point. Around 1800, Stanhope revealed his novel press, which relied on interconnected levers powered by a screw to multiply their effort. The pressure required to transmit that power was beyond what wood and some metal parts could handle, and thus he relied on all iron parts. Its platen had double the area of standard presses and required substantially less effort to pull, coupled with a regulator that prevented too much pressure from being transmitted to the forme. That allowed a single pull to print the sheet with more ease than two separate pulls, while creating a better impression as well. This control also allowed the start of the shift to dry-paper printing. Stanhope didn’t file patents in order that the technology would spread. The Columbian (1816), by George Clymer, further amplified and balanced mechanical effort. The Albion (c.1820), by Richard Whittaker Cope, shifted to a central piston to push the platen down aided by a spring, later replaced with a counterweight. The Albion and copies ultimately became the most widely used hand presses. But as James Moran notes in Printing Presses, “The all-metal presses which emerged were no faster in operation than their wood predecessors, although they were capable of producing better-quality work.” That was in part because of the time still required to feed paper, ink a forme, raise the platen, and remove paper. This was well understood at the time, too. A contemporary, Edward Cowper, wrote in 1828 in The Spirit of English Magazines that “as a press, Lord Stanhope’s invention has not been surpassed…in point of expedition, has little superiority over its wooden rival.” Gutenberg’s operation could produce at least a few hundred pages a day, though some estimates place the number higher. From 100 to 350 years later, the expected output — recorded by Cowper and estimated by Moran 150 years later — remained 200 to 250 sheets an hour. To speed up further required a clean break with the past. 46

The Need for Speed No matter the mechanical advantage provided in an all-iron frame and other improvements to the hand press, the “hand” part was a limit. New presses needed to tap into new forms of motive force, which included steam engines, gas-powered engines, and eventually electrical power. They needed to ink a forme automatically and shift it into place under the plate — or shift the platen over the forme. And they needed to manage more of the paper flow, feeding it along its journey. The automation roadblock was first cleared by Friedrich Koenig. Koenig and his partner Andreas Bauer spent a decade experimenting before the shocking debut of his cylinder press in 1814. Koenig and others had developed powered versions of hand presses before this, but to limited success, as they didn’t dramatically reduce costs relative to efficiency. Other attempts at cylinder presses had preceded Koenig as well. The cylinder press feeds paper held around a drum, and pushes it against the forme as an advancing line of force during rotation. This was a sharp break from all previous platen-pressed printing, which relied on an area of pressure. Koenig’s breakthrough device was steam powered. By 1814, he’d evolved it into a double-cylinder unit, which allowed the press to feed 47

paper on the outward journey and back again from separate cylinders. The press used pressurized tubes to add ink onto rollers that coated the type. His press premiered in secret next to the printing plant of the London Times. Its owner wanted to switch over without sabotage by printers. Pressmen were told the November 29, 1814, edition was being held for news of the Napoleonic wars, even as it was printed next door. When the printing was done, the owner told his workers they would be paid full wages until they could get a job elsewhere if they didn’t commit acts of violence; they forbore. The double-cylinder press printed one side at a rate of 1,100 sheets an hour, which quickly increased to 1,800 an hour. Not long after, Koenig created a perfecting press, or one that could print on both sides without manual handling. These innovations were the greatest changes to hit printing since Gutenberg, both singly and taken together, but didn’t immediately revolutionize printing. The cost was high, and pressmen pushed back, calling them “type smashers.” It also took decades for steam power to become reliable. After Koenig, an improved hand press called the bed-and-platen press rose to the fore, where it remained through the mid-1850s. While still employing a platen, it eliminated the lever in favor of other power, while adding automatic inking. An early version doubled hand press output to 500 to 600 sheets an hour. A later revision kept the platen steady and used power to press a forme into it, allowing paper to be fed at one end and collected at the other. Cylinder presses became increasingly complicated in how they fed paper. In an illustration that looks like a cyberpunk invention, an electric-powered 10-cylinder press depicts 10 men standing at various levels to insert paper for printing. These efforts sped up production to thousands of sheets an hour. For newspapers, that was critical: The more efficiently a paper could produce more copies, the more copies they could sell at lower prices. However, even these speeds weren’t enough to feed the rising demand in growing cities, who had more newspaper and book readers and more commercial enterprises who needed business printing. Something would have to change again. In England in 1803, the French-designed process for making paper in a continuous roll, or web, went into production. Called the Fourdrinier machine (after its investors), the device allowed paper to be produced much faster than ever before. However, it was still cut into sheets for printing, because no press took a roll of paper. You can see where cylinders and rolls of paper should intersect: Continuously fed paper could be fed through rollers and pressed 48

onto a drum-shaped forme. But there was a significant problem. For decades after the invention of cylinder presses, formes remained stubbornly flat no matter how ink and paper were applied to them. Some inventors tried to adapt flat type to curved surfaces. They created trays in segments that would be pressed against paper as it moved by. Others used locking mechanisms to hold type in place. Charles Henry Cochrane related in 1904 in The Wonders of Modern Mechanism, “On a big central cylinder were wedged the pages of type, secured by ingenious devices in ‘turtles’ to prevent the letters from being flung out by the centrifugal force of rotation.” But, he added, “With the best of them some types were always sure to work out, marring the print.” The Encyclopædia Britannica noted rather frankly in an article in its 1896 American edition, referring to a press designed in 1837 that held type around a curve, “Napier’s press had a tendency to throw the type out, as did indeed all the presses up to his time.” Yet rates of production with rotary presses shot up to tens of thousands of impressions across the first generations. By 1887, Harper’s Magazine reported that the New York World newspaper could produce a 28-page Sunday edition of 250,000 copies. These rotary presses quickly dominated newspaper printing in the later part of the 19th century. What allowed that huge jump in speed didn’t arise from prayers that type would remain fixed in place instead of becoming highvelocity, pointy projectiles. Rather, it was the invention of a thing that could be attached to a cylinder as a single piece: a curved metal plate — a stereotype.

49

Copy and Paste in Metal A rotary press needed type’s surface to somehow bend around a curve. After attempts to bend flat type to a rounded process, the ultimate solution arose from an intermediate step. Type founders and printers already understood quite well how punches and matrices worked for type. What if you could take an entire forme and convert it into a mold, and then curve the mold so it could be cast as a single plate suitable for mounting on a cylinder? Printers had been tinkering for centuries to develop molds and reprintable plates, albeit flat plates as those befitted presses of their time. This would allow them to distribute type while retaining the plate for reprints without setting type anew. Most efforts before around 1830 involved plaster of paris, sand casting, or other materials that could set hard to create the mold. These often involved adapting existing processes used in professions like statue making and goldsmithing. Some inventors’ techniques showed promise, like Scotland’s William Ged in the 1700s. But he was sabotaged by printers, compositors, and type foundries for decades to keep him from creating a method that would save labor! The Didot family, members of which were famous for printing across generations, developed an approach in which special matrices were typeset instead of pieces of type, and then all cast as a plate. While 50

it was used commercially in the early 1800s, it was too expensive and had too many limitations as a general solution. Most of these processes didn’t produce results of high enough fidelity or consistency, and many allowed just a single casting from each mold. They had to be made carefully to avoid damaging the valuable type. The cost of stereotyping had to be low, the speed fast, and the resistance by workers overcome to make it worthwhile. The increased speed of presses as the 1800s progressed provided a spur to make the equation work, leading to the patenting in 1838 of a papier-mâché mold known as a flong. The name “flong” derives from the French flan, because its substance was like a cake of blotting and tissue paper interleaved with paste. The type forme was prepared as usual and coated with a layer of oil or another substance that allowed the flong to be lifted off when dry without breaking. Flongs could be made from any combination of type and relief image, though they didn’t preserve carved detail well. The flong had to be beaten with a special wire brush into all the crevices in type and images. Once knocked into shape, it was baked before removal. The result was a resilient paper mold. The mold was fit into a casting device that could be flat, as they were initially, or curved. The plate is called a stereotype, from an 18th-century coinage derived from the Greek word for “solid” or “durable” paired with “type.” (In France, they were clichés, supposedly onomatopoeia of the “click” sound of casting.) This plate would then be — according to the 1892 book Stereotyping, the Papier Mache Process — sawed, shaven, trimmed, routed, beveled, and finished. Some stereos were full type height, while others were thinner and made to mount on a base for ease of use. Flongs could be used to cast multiple plates, allowing simultaneous printing, or to have one used immediately for printing and one held in reserve for later reprinting, as with a book. It took until the 1860s for stereotyping to become a consistent process. James Moran in Printing Presses says the first regular use stereotypes on a rotary press was likely in 1860 at The Times of London, while he cites the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1865 as probably the first rotary press to print from a continuous roll of paper and on both sides at once. (Electrotyping could also be used to make plates of entire forms, but it was slow enough that it was reserved for book publishing.) Making flongs could damage the type through beating or heat. This was less problematic after hot-metal composition arrived, as type was melted down after making flongs. But the paper-and-paste process was still fussy. In the 1890s, experiments in compressed wood pulp, called dry 51

flong, matured enough for newspapers in Germany, where it was invented. By 1910, it was in common use. Dry flong needed to be lightly conditioned in a humidor before use, but it was a further factor in speeding production. Dry flong coincides with the rise of national advertising and the syndication of written columns and comics. An ad agency, advertiser, or syndicate made up an original plate using standard column widths for newspapers. They made any number of flongs, which were sent to newspapers. Newspapers in turn would cast a flat stereo, lock it up with the rest of a page, and then run it though production just like any image or type created in house. The speed and scale of stereotyping was tremendous. Ben Dalgin, the New York Times production chief, wrote in his 1948 book Advertising Production that the Times cast 90,000 pounds of metal nightly for daily editions and 300,000 pounds every Saturday night for the Sunday paper. The last pages — page 1 and story continuations inside — would go from the composing room to printed papers landing at a train terminal in 30 minutes, he wrote. As a bridge technology, stereotypes were invaluable — and seemingly inevitable. Without them, huge constraints would have restrained burgeoning commerce by the limited speed of printing.

52

Painting Images with Ink The desire to use ornamentation and art dates to the earliest printed works. One of Gutenberg’s many firsts was printing not just in one color, but two: black and red. Each color required registration, or lining up material across separate passes in the press. However, historians believe preparing the two colors was too time-consuming and prone to error, and the rubrication — the addition of ornamented capitals and other text in red — was completed by hand. His Bible had wide margins, which allowed for flourishes and illustrations made by an illuminator. From that ambitious beginning and false start, adding images to text or printing entire pages of images proceeded rapidly. Albrecht Dürer was already carving extraordinary woodcuts before 1500. He and others carved on a plank, the lengthwise section of a tree where its grain runs parallel. In the 1600s, intaglio illustration rose to the fore, in which lines are carved in or etched away from metal plates. Instead of a raised surface on which ink is applied, ink is forced into the depressed portions. An intaglio press requires great pressure to force paper into the metal and essentially lift the ink out onto the paper. The process allowed very fine details to be reproduced exactly. 53

Engravers used hand tools to carve away plates, while etchers drew in an acid-resistant medium on metal and then used successions of acid washes to etch away layers. Intaglio illustrations were printed on their own and either tipped in (bound as separate leaves) or pasted onto blank pages reserved for them. (Intaglio remained in use as rotogravure, a rotary printing technique, until the early 20th century as an attractive way to print color for magazines and newspapers.) The late 1700s saw the re-introduction of relief wood engraving, this time using the hard crossgrain end of a tightly grained wood instead of the plank direction. The endgrain allowed detail close to that of intaglio, and images of this kind could mix freely with type in letterpress printing. By the 1830s, it dominated illustration printing. But as with nearly everything else to do with printing, the 1800s bowl over previous centuries. First came lithography, an entirely new reproductive method invented almost by accident by a poor actor trying to find an inexpensive way to print. As the 19th century dawned, Aloys Senefelder discovered that he could etch on a stone (lithos in Greek) and print badly from it. With further experimentation, he discovered he didn’t need to etch directly: The right drawing media could produce a distinct print. The stone must be specially prepared, or grained, so it’s receptive to the printing treatment. A lithographer draws with a greasy crayon, wash, or ink on the surface of the stone. A gum arabic solution is then washed over the entire surface, which is absorbed in undrawn areas and which etches a very small depth of the surface. When the stone’s art and etching is finished, greasy areas are oleophilic and accept ink, while etched parts are hydrophilic and accept water. The surface is then prepared with water and ink, and prints can be made with a high-pressure lithographic press. When a print run is finished, the stone is grained again and ready for new work. It took a few decades to fully catch on, and then became a riproaring success both for routine material, like business forms and letterhead, and for art prints — especially later in the 1800s, when color lithography became possible. Lithography sits between letterpress (relief) and intaglio (incised) printing as the place in between: planographic or flat printing. Also invented in the 1800s? Photography. In the 1830s and 1840s, a series of inventors created and perfected ways of capturing light on film and paper. But these photographic prints were continuous tone, representing shades of gray. The tones couldn’t be represented in the relief printing process, which relies on solid colors. In 1852, an early inventor, William Fox Talbot, patented a glimmer of an idea. By interposing screens of  fine lines at right 54

angles that formed a tiny grid, grays projected through were turned into concentrations of solid black dots that fool the eye into seeing tones — a halftone. It took decades to turn into reality, and the first newspaper-printed halftone appeared in 1873, though the next wasn’t until 1880. Within a decade, they became common and almost entirely replaced hand engraving for news illustration. (That, in turn, is seen as a reason cartoons were invented: A lot of unemployed engravers sought something to do.) Making a relief halftone relied on photosensitive chemical painted on a metal plate. A photograph was captured through a halftone screen onto a negative. That negative was then exposed onto the sensitive plate, hardening the areas that should be printed. The plate was then etched, eroding unexposed areas and leaving a relief area with halftone dots. Further advances allowed the creation of photolithographic plates, a perfect pairing that allowed any design or picture to be transferred photographically onto a plate that could be used with lithography. That gave rise to the developments covered in the next chapter: offset lithographic printing.

55

Printing with Light Lithographers used rubber as packing when they printed from stones to mediate the pressure required to make a print. Around 1904, printer Ira Rubel noticed that a print made from an accidentally inked piece of rubber produced a crisper result than did direct contact with the original. Thus was offset lithography born. Direct lithography had many advantages for the kinds of tasks that ill suited letterpress in the 19th century, like printing photographs and producing rich color prints. But as relief technology improved with the addition of photographic reproduction, letterpress started to fill more niches. Lithography tried to keep up. Stone-based printing was slow but allowed many high-quality prints. Inventors created a rotary form that used flexible metal plates with similar properties to a grained stone. It was faster and more versatile, but the plates wore down rapidly. With offset lithography, speed and the persistence of image could be married. Rubel tried to capitalize on his discovery, but died in 1908. Charles Harris stepped in to create practical offset presses; the company bearing his name still thrives. (Later, it was an early entrant into phototypesetting.) The principle of offset printing is that a plate isn’t printed directly 56

to paper, but is inked and rolls its images off onto a receptive rubber blanket. That blanket in turns rolls against paper; the print is offset by one remove. Generally, offset presses work the same today as a century ago. They rely on a photosensitive metal plate that hardens in areas exposed to light. When the plate is developed and prepared, its unexposed portions wash away and are receptive to water, while the remainder of the plate holds ink. The plate is mounted on a press cylinder, which rolls it through wetting rollers and then inking ones before offsetting onto paper. Newspapers in Germany began adopting offset presses by the 1920s using models that could print both sides and feed from a web of paper. Improvements followed in the 1930s, such as synthetic rubber for better offset blankets and multi-color printing via units — effectively separate offset presses lined up for paper to pass through continuously. Use grew among jobbing printers, but newspapers held back because the technology wasn’t efficient enough for the speed they needed. The chemicals used to make photosensitive plates had to be managed by each printer, who mixed and coated plates in house because the combined ingredients remained sensitive only for short periods. In 1951, however, 3M introduced a stable prepared plate. This appears to have been the tipping point, but it also paired neatly with the development of practical phototypesetting, discussed in “The Coming of the Light.” Newspapers then rapidly adopted offset. In the US, 200 shifted over in the 1950s; by 1970, nearly half had converted. By 1997, only 64 newspapers still used letterpress. Routine commercial printing moved quickly, too. Just nine percent of all print work was offset in 1950, but by the end of the 1970s, letterpress was well on its way out.

57

Paste-Up Is Pasting Down Page composition with offset was significantly different than that for letterpress, though it has parallels to stereotyping. Instead of composing type in lead and preparing images as separate plates to create a page forme, offset production people took phototypeset copy produced as galleys on special paper. In later years, that was resincoated (RC) paper, a slick semi-glossy material that was easy to cut. Images were converted to the black-only needs of printing using a stat or process camera. The high-contrast photostat paper could also be cut up. Photographs needed a screen interposed, as with letterpress, and were often marked as rectangles in the paste-up as for position only (FPO), then shot as halftone negatives and added in the next step. Halftones could also be created as positives and included in the layout. Production artists created a paste-up from the materials. After waxing the back of the material or coating it with rubber cement, they cut it up and glued it down on bristol board, a two-ply flexible cardboard with a slick surface. Wax or rubber cement was used so that material could be lifted and moved around but otherwise stay in place. Everything cut had to be straightened by eye and ruler. For publications, the layout board had preprinted margins, columns, and other details in non-reproduction blue, a color invisible to lithographic film. Production notes were also made with blue pens. If halftones were shot to negative film, a layout artist indicated the insertion spot with a rectangle of Rubylith, a red adhesive film that appears black when shot for plates. They might also put down tape with lines (“rules”) to make a box, or cut shapes from Zip-a-Tone or Letratone to add flat tones of black or color to areas. That layout board was photographed precisely flat and square onto high-contrast negative film. A stripper — a job with an unintentionally risqué title — took that film, cut in halftones and other material stored in film form for reuse, and assembled pages together to appear on a single plate. This film composite was finally placed in a vacuum frame against an unexposed plate. The vacuum ensured alignment and removed bubbles that might allow light leakage and shadows. After exposure to high-intensity ultraviolet light, the plate — which is also right-reading — went through a chemical bath that removed all the unexposed areas. It was then ready for printing. The phototypesetting shift into lasers allowed page composition to catch up with the simplicity of offset plates. As noted in “The Coming 58

of the Light,” the first imagesetter appeared in 1976, but it wasn’t until 1985 that the pieces came together for effective full-page composition and output outside of some proprietary, expensive newspaper systems. However, imagesetters — like the one I ran at a university printing service as late as 1991 — were initially often used to produce galleys that were pasted up. But we gradually shifted to full-page composition and relied more heavily on film, which our in-house stripper and print contractors could work with directly. By 1993, when I worked at an imaging center, we almost exclusively produced film output, including four-color separations using advanced halftone algorithms. By the early 1990s, platesetters began to appear, as they could offer computer-to-plate (CTP) production and bypass film altogether. Instead of exposing film, the laser exposes plate material. Platesetters largely replaced imagesetters by the early 2000s. For smaller sizes of paper and shorter runs, direct imaging evolved alongside CTP, where a plate is imaged directly on press. Digital printing has also emerged as an alternative to offset. While it may seem like a fancy term for photocopying (or xerography), companies have built systems that take digital files and produce a finished book as a single integrated operation. The quality of xerography continues to improve, especially for small quantities, while digitally printed print-on-demand books make it affordable to print single copies of a book. This weirdly takes us full circle, almost back to the days of the stereotype, where a printer in their own shop takes a design and produces a metal reproduction that goes on press. It’s enormously faster, cheaper, crisper, and all the rest. But the evolution of typesetting and printing has taken us much closer to 1850 than to 1950. Yet, as Robert Bringhurst wrote in the 1999 revision of A Short History of the Printed Word, while letterpress printing imitated writing, offset printing paired with phototypesetting imitated printing. The same is true for its digital successors. Thus in a wonderful bit of irony, lasers are helping revive letterpress in the 21st century, making it more feasible as a means of production than it has been in decades, as I explain in the coda.

59

Coda: Letterpress Abides Every November since 2008, hundreds of letterpress aficionados and designers  gather for a wayzgoose — an annual printer confab — at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Attendees hear lectures about history, design, and current practices, and take workshops on printing, paper marbling, and wood engraving. Wayzgoose-goers swap tales and letterpress prints over meals and pints. There is also bowling. Since its founding in 1999, the museum has survived funding crises, a flood, and the loss of its location within the old confines of the historic wood-type manufacturer for which it’s named, which was torn down in 2015. Its story is the story of letterpress: Despite many losses and near misses, it survives. This resembles in spirit the runaway train that type and printing became across the 19th and 20th centuries as methods were discarded almost as quickly as they were invented. Printing shifted from artisanal by nature to commercial by demand. Some rebelled. The Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s was in part a response to the quality, nuance, and aesthetics lost when printing grew into an industrial operation. A century later, typographers and printers pursued fine-art letterpress printing of ephemera and books, even as the commercial side crashed and was replaced by offset lithography. Universities, design schools, and art nonprofits helped keep the fire alive as well. Some institutions — like my alma mater, Yale — kept letterpresses turning, while others stowed their gear, and retrieved it from storage when interest picked up. Many nonprofits that taught silkscreening, lithography, and similar forms added letterpress, too. As a result, thousands of people a year take an afternoon workshop or an entire course in letterpress. Some of them start their own presses. Thousands of little presses and some medium-sized ones dot America and other countries, some saved from decades past and many newly founded for side hustles, art, or teaching. But Martha Stewart gets some credit, too. She loved letterpress when others had forgotten it, and featured relief printing in her flagship magazine. She favored a style in which the type bites down deeply, or is heavily debossed — shades of hand-press days and dampened paper. Traditional letterpress printers mostly prefer a kiss impression that lightly touches the paper with a taste of the type. 60

Nevertheless, Stewart elevated letterpress, making the method a popular choice for high-budget events, like weddings and arts fundraisers. But these printed works aren’t typically set in metal or wood type. Instead, they’re printed from plastic! That’s plastic in the form of photopolymer plates, a resin-coated raw material in sheets that — just like offset — hardens on exposure to light. But where offset is flat, photopolymer produces a relief. It’s used extensively in the packaging industry for flexography to print plastic films, wallpaper, and stuff that won’t work with offset’s flat method. To make one of these plates, a digital file is output as film from an imagesetter. The film is exposed to the plate material, which then gets an ultraviolet light treatment, and is finally scrubbed down. The remaining raised material is suitable for letterpress. Some flexographic platemaking devices skip a stage by using a laser to engrave plates. This is likely the future, as imagesetters are now endangered species. Photopolymer has distinct echoes back to the start of stereotyping. Then, type was expensive and composition slow. Pairing letterpress with fast digital composition and an infinite supply of characters and typefaces seems a natural progression, but carries a historic echo. Digital typefaces aren’t designed for the characters of impression and ink spread in relief printing, so there can be a mismatch between the two. And some printers challenge themselves  to find ways to use only traditional printable materials. But there are growing options even for traditionalists in using digital technology to revive old methods as well as produce entirely new forms of printing surfaces. It’s increasingly common in the late 2010s to find a mix of type and images: old and new pantograph-cut wood type as well as that made by 2D laser engravers and cutters or output from 3D printers. CNC routers — which drive cutting tools from a digital plan — are often used to make patterns for pantograph-cut wooden type and to make some larger wood type. And there are always inventors who experiment like Bruce, Barth, Benton, Mergenthaler, and Lanston. A few designers around the world have tested digital tools to produce fresh matrices for electrotyping and for casting on Monotype composition and Super Casters. Watching a volunteer at Hamilton cut wood type with a pantograph using training she received from her father, once a Hamilton woodtype carver, I realized that the difference between tracing a wood template to make type and designing on a computer to have a laser accomplish the same is more one of time than necessarily of craft. To preserve letterpress, some aspects of the past have to adjust to keep it going. But that’s always been the case with printing, a malleable art and craft that never stops changing. 61

colophon The print edition of this book was set by Nick Gill at Effra Press in North Yorkshire, England, on a Monotype Composition caster in Monotype Bembo. That edition was printed by Phil Abel at Social Enterprise Printing in London using a letterpress Heidelberg on Mohawk Superfine White Eggshell. Binding by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier, Germany. This ebook edition was designed and composed by the author in Adobe InDesign, and set in Cardo, a typeface designed by David Perry especially for the use of classicists, and which has a similar feeling as Bembo. Cardo is available under an Open Font License. a b o u t t h e au t h o r Glenn Fleishman trained as a typesetter in the late 1980s and earned a degree in graphic design from Yale University. He has spent his working life as a journalist, often writing about graphic communication and, in more recent years, printing and type history. In 2017, he was the first designer in residence at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, and printed a book there by letterpress of his writing, Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It. In 2018, he wrote London Kerning. This book is part of Glenn’s 2019 project, the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule, a mini-museum of type and printing artifacts, modern and historic. ac k n o w l e d g e m e n t s Thanks to all those who backed the Kickstarter campaign for the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule, and those who ordered museums and books afterward. You turned a dream of making something worthwhile across time and space for you all into a reality. Thanks to Phil Abel, Briar Levit, Keith Houston, Doug Thomas, and Marcin Wichary for reading drafts of this book and providing their insight and feedback; all errata are mine. Thank you to Stephen Coles for a scan from The Inland Printer held in the Letterform Archive’s magnificent collection. i l l u s t r at i o n c r e d i t s Figures from Advertising Production, Ben Dalgin; Chicago Specimen; Die Graphischen Künste der Gegenwart, chapter by Ludwig Volkmann; Hand Composition, Hugo Jahn; The Inland Printer; Lithographic Offset Press Operating, Charles Latham; Making Printers’ Typefaces, R. Hunter Middleton; The Mechanism of the Linotype, John Thompson; Printing Types, Daniel Berkeley Updike; A Short History of the Printing Press…, Robert Hoe; Stereotyping, the Papier Mache Process, C.S. Partridge; Stereotyping and Electrotyping, Frederick Wilson; Type: A Primer of Information…, A.A. Stewart; Typecasting and Composing Machinery, L.A. Legros; Typographical Printing-Surfaces Legros and John Cameron Grant; Typographia: an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress…, T.C. Hansard; as well as historic sources and photos by the author. 62

Sources Articles, Entries, and Essays

Benton, Lynn Boyd. “The Making of Type,” The Building of a Book. New York: R.R. Bowker company, 1909, pp. 31–40. Boag, Andrew. “Monotype and Phototypesetting.” Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 2000. Bolas, Thomas. “Cantor Lectures: Stereotyping,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. 22 August 1890, Volume 38, pp 829–845. Buringh, Eljto, Jan Luiten Van Zanden. “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of Economic History, June 2009, Volume 69, Issue 2, pp. 409–445. Hellinga, Lotte. “Press and Text in the First Decades of Printing.” Texts in Transit, 2014, pp. 8–36. “Electrotyping vs. Wood Flong Stereotyping” (advertising), The Inland Printer. 1922, Volume 69, page 335. Ringwalt, John Luther (editor). “Type-Setting Machines,” American Encyclopedia of Printing. Philadelphia: Menamin & Ringwalt, 1871. Sohn, Pow-key. “Early Korean Printing.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Apr.-Jun., 1959, pp. 96–103. “The Linotype,” Scientific American. 13 January 1894, Volume 70, pp. 17, 24–25. “Modern Printing Machinery and Appliances,” Scientific American. 31 May 1873, p. 337. “Modern Methods of Composing Type,” Scientific American Supplement. 20 November 1915, Volume 80, pp. 321, 324–326 Storme, Patrick. “Historical Type in the Collection of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp from a Metal Conservators’ Point of View.” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenenis, 2016, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 1–13

Books

A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Volume 3. London: W. Owen, 1764. The American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking. New York: Howard Lockwood & Co., 1894. 63

Barnes, William C., Joseph W. McCann, Alexander Duguid (edited by, compiled by). A Collation of Facts Related to Fast Typesetting. New York: Concord Cooperative Printing Company, 1887. Bolles, Albert Sidney. Industrial History of the United States. Norwich, Conn.: the Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1878. Chappell, Robert and Robert Bringhurst. A Short History of the Printed Word. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley &​Marks Publishers, 1999. Clapham, Michael. “Printing.” A History of Technology, Volume 3: From The Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution (1957) Cochrane, Charles Henry. The Wonders of Modern Mechanism. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1896. Comparative Basic Costs of Typesetting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916. Cost, Patricia A. The Bentons. Rochester, NY: RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2011. Dalgin, Ben. Advertising Production. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1948. De Vinne, Theodore. The Practice of Printing: Plain Printing Types. New York: Oswald Publishing Company, 1914. ---. The Invention of Printing. New York: George Bruce’s Son & Co., 1878. Denman, Frank. The Shaping of Our Alphabet. New York: Knopf, 1955. The Encyclopædia Britannica with American Revisions and Additions . Volume 15. Chicago: The Werner Company, 1896. (“Printing” entry) Hackleman, Charles W. Commercial Engraving and Printing. Indianapolis: Commercial Engraving Publishing Co., 1921 and 1924. Harris, Elizabeth M. Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in NineteenthCentury America. Boston: David R. Godine, 2004. Houston, Keith. The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.: 2016. Iles, George. Leading American Inventors. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1912. Jahn, Hugo. Hand Composition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1931. Kelly, Rob Roy. American Wood Type. Saratoga, CA: Liber Apertus Press, 2010 (reissue). Kubler, George. A New History of Stereotyping. New York: The Certified Dry Mat Corporation, 1941. Man, John. The Gutenberg Revolution. London: Bantam Books, 2002. McMurtrie, Douglas C. The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943. 64

Moran, James. Printing Presses: History & Development from the 15th Century to Modern Times. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973. The Monotype System. Philadelphia: Lanston Monotype Machine Co., 1912. Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick exercises: Or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works. Applied to the Art of Printing. London: 1683. Mullen, Robert A. Recasting a Craft: St. Louis Typefounders Respond to Industrialization. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Partridge, Charles Summer. Stereotyping, the Papier Mache Process. Chicago: A.N. Kellogg Newspaper Co., 1892. Polk, Ralph Weiss. Vocational Printing. Indianapolis: Guy M. Jones Company, 1918. Productivity of Labor in Newspaper Printing. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office (Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor), 1929. Reed, Talbot Baines. A History of the Old English Letter Foundries. London: Elliot Stock, 1887. Romano, Frank, et al. History of the Phototypesetting Era. San Luis Obispo: Graphic Communication Institute, 2014. Rumble, Walker. The Swifts: Printers in the Age of Typesetting Races. Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003. Seybold, John. The World of Digital Typesetting. Media, PA: Seybold Publications, 1984. Slinn, Judy, Sebastian Carter, Richard Southall. History of the Monotype Corporation. London: Printing Historical Society, 2014. Werner, Sarah. Studying Early Printed Books: 1450–1800. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019. Wilson, Frederick. Stereotyping & Electrotyping. London: E. Menken, 1898. Winter, Arthur F. Stereotyping and Electroplating. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1948.

Online Resources

Kyle, Harold, Jenny Wilkson, et al. Letterpress Commons web site. MacMillan, David M. Circuitous Root web site. “Literacy,” Our World in Data web site. Stillo, Stephanie. “Incunabula: The Art & History of Printing in Western Europe, c. 1450-1500.” Library of Congress web site. Waite, Jerry. “The History of Lithography.” Class materials from Digital Media Materials and Processes. Schlesinger, Carl, David Loeb Weiss. Farewell — ETAOIN SHRDLU. 1978. 65