Letterpress
In addition to the Wood Engraving, I have an interest in letterpress printing. Below you will find some links to more information on my personal projects and links to other, more informative, pages on the world of Letterpress. On this page, you will also find a bit of history of Letterpress.
Links to past and current projects, as well as resources and downloads:
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A Bit of History:
Whereas wood engraving and other printing media are used to convey images, Letterpress is the art of printing text. In China, individual wooden blocks or baked clay pieces with a specific character were printed together to form passages as early as 1040 A.D. It took Europe a little longer to get to, what we now call, Moveable Type.
Moveable type refers to the system of printing that uses individually cast letters to form the text body. Compared to printing woodblocks, type was quicker, longer lasting, and infinitely more adjustable. And, while the Chinese language required several thousand individual characters, the Latin alphabet only contains 26.
Before moveable type, text was carved, backwards, into single blocks of wood just like images. When printed, the backwards letters were transferred correctly onto the paper. Books, whose pages were printed with both text and image carved on woodblocks, were called Block-books. Theses types of books were common in the first half of the 15th century, before the proliferation of moveable type transformed the industry of book production.
Johannes Gutenberg is generally accepted as the inventor of movable type. However, some printing from moveable type was being practiced by the Dutch some years before. Gutenberg’s true legacy lies in his making famous the means by which type could be accurately cast in large quantities.
Early on, all type was cast by hand. First, the typefounder created his letters in steel, in the form of a punch. He then punched a metal matrix (usually of brass) for every letter of the alphabet. He was then able to cast the letters he needed, one at a time. Hot metal was poured into a specially designed hand-mould, plugged at one end with the brass matrix, and opened at the other, so lead could be poured in. The metal used was, and still is, a mixture of various metals including lead, tin and antimony.
Type Faces:
Early fifteenth century printers were not as interested in different typefaces as printers are today. Their goal was to create books that imitated illuminated manuscripts as closely as possible. Therefore, fifteenth century types were calligraphic in style, created through wide straight lines. This typeface is referred to as Gothic, or sometimes Blackletter. Later in the fifteenth century, a more rounded and legible typeface emerged. These “Humanist” typefaces were closer to the typefaces we see today.
Letterpress Today:
After the initial leap from Gothic to Humanist, type designers did not stop creating different typefaces. The 20th century saw the complete range of type designs, from serif faces to sans-serif socio-political statements. Stylistic changes in type design often coincided with broad historical changes. The old way of creating typefaces in metal has almost disappeared. Today, font design is almost purely in the digital domain. Letterpress printers use a broad mix of lead type and newer digital fonts embodied on photopolymer or metal relief plates.
Bibliography:
Carter, Harry. A View of Early Typography. London: Hyphen Press, 1969.
Hind, Arthur M. An Introduction to a History of Woodcut with a detailed survey of work done in the fifteenth century, 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1963.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition. Oxford University Press
Updike, Daniel Berkeley. Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937.