The Triumph of the
Printing Press
Or, Everything You Ever
Wanted to Know about
Kerning and Serifs, But
Were Afraid to Ask….
Kip Wheeler
English 328
Fall 2008
Printing is not a
new idea
We give all the
credit to Johannes
Gutenberg, but he
wasn’t the first
Printer--just the
first in Europe to
make the innovation
practical.
The Phaistos Disk
Discovered in Crete, 1908. If it isn’t a fake, it dates to 1850 BCE.
Woodblock
Printing
Used as early as 200 A.D. in
China,(but economically
not feasible without paper
and without a phonetically
based alphabet)
Movable type first appears
using wooden blocks (and
then later ceramic fired
letters) in 1020 CE under
the direction of Bi Shang
in China. It becomes a
standard competitor of
calligraphy a good 400
years before the
technology permeates
Europe. It quickly spread
to Korea and Tibet.
Here are the directions for a Zaju play from the Yuan Dynasty of
China, printed via wood block printing. The play is entitled Zhuye
Zhou.
Tibetan Monks using rubbing
technique to create a Woodblock
Print in Sera Monastery, Tibet
Metal movable type first appears 20 years later (1040 CE) in
Arabic Egypt, sixty-some years before the Crusades. The
technology doesn’t become known in Europe until about 1450.
European crusaders are far too busy slaughtering Muslims (and
vice-versa) to trade printing technologies.
Here, we see a metal type-letter (a
“sort”) and the image it stamps on a
page.
A typesetter would align hundreds
of these “sorts” in rows, lock them
in place, and reverse-stamp them to
print an entire page at once.
Advantages?
 Metal sorts wouldn’t crack under pressure the way ceramic
sorts would.
 Metal sorts would not absorb and hold excess ink the way
pores in wood, much less messy.
 While each wood block had to be carved by hand, it was easy
to reproduce metal type.
Gutenberg (originally a goldsmith) was familiar with using a
matrix to stamp a negative impression into a hand mould made
of lead, tin, and antimony. This left a hollow impression of the
desired stamped image. This hollow mould could be filled with
liquid metal, cooled, and the the sort snapped out after excess
casting stuck on the end and edges (“tang”) were trimmed
away.
Gutenberg’s Debt to
Olive Oil and Wine?
He figured out the same mechanism used in
winepresses to crush grapes and in oil presses to crush
olives could be used to press ink against sheets of
paper in rapid succession.
Renaissance
Winepress
c. 1450
Its daughter,
Technologically
Speaking-The Printing
Press (example
From 1598)
Its great-grand daughter: The
Koenig Platen Printing Press of
1823….
Its Basic Anatomy:
The Rise of Typeset!
Reproduction of medieval manuscripts
 Hybrid forms!
Vignettes!
Ligatures!
Majuscule becomes “Upper case”!
Miniscule becomes “lower case” (originally applied to the
drawers in standard workshop design that held each letter!
Kerning!
Catchphrase!
Serifs!
Sans Serif Font
Serif Font
Serif Font with
serifs painted red.
Traditionally, American printers use serif fonts for long passages
or “body text,” and they use sans serif fonts for titles or short
phrases. This rule is the opposite of most European publications.
The Rise of Fonts!
Arial
Baskerville
Bauhaus
Braggadoccio
Chicago
Cooper Black
Geneva
Helvetica
New York
Times
Finis!
Citations: Under Construction!
Serif and Sans Serif. Wikimedia Commons.
“Wine Press.” The Clutterbug Photography. 7 October 2008.
<http://www.theclutterbug.com/Photos/index_photos.html>.