Printing has long been considered a crucial agent of the circulation and transmission of information. The principle of letterpress, printing from a raised surface onto paper or cloth, was known by the seventh century in China and was used for metal movable type in China and Korea by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Wooden blocks were applied to the decoration of cloth in India by perhaps the fourth century BCE, and in western Europe by the fourteenth century CE.
The separate development of movable type in mid-fifteenth-century Europe depended partly on the adaptation of a series of existing metalworking processes. First, a punch was cut, with the appropriate letter or other mark on the end. From this a matrix, of softer metal, was made. This matrix was inserted into a mold and type metal was poured in so as to create the piece of type. Once a large number of pieces of type (or “sorts”) had been made they were planed down so as all to sit at exactly the same height, with their faces upward, when they were printed. Separate punches and so on were required for each size of letter as well as for each design. Punchcutting, like typefounding, was a quite separate skill from printing. In Italy, Francesco da Bologna worked with Aldus Manutius to create roman and the first italic type. His Greek types, based on the work of skilled contemporary scribes, successfully overcame the difficulties posed by highly ligatured handwriting. By the sixteenth century the names of some craftsmen such as the Frenchmen Robert Granjon or Jean Jannon were celebrated: several of Granjon’s types were used by Christophe Plantin in Antwerp. By the end of the eighteenth century names such as Caslon in England, or Didot in France, not only were internationally celebrated; they also became synonymous with particular families of designs.
In the fifteenth century printers could usually be distinguished by the types they used, whether of different designs or showing evidence of having been cast at different times. The first English printer, William Caxton, for example, used eight different fonts along with assorted decorative initials, but some of the largest printers used many more: in Nuremberg, Anton Koberger (active by 1471) owned an exceptionally large printing house with two dozen presses and perhaps a hundred workmen. He has been identified with almost thirty different sizes and designs of type by the end of the century. The development of an international trade in matrixes and typefounding meant that by the mid-sixteenth century the same designs were to be seen in many different towns.
Printers needed large supplies of type in order to make books. Type metal was heavy, and expensive. Until the nineteenth century it was customary to set a given number of pages, and after printing them off to distribute the type so that it could be used for another setting.
Type that had been cast was distributed into pairs of cases, the upper case (mostly containing the capitals) and the lower case: hence the modern terms uppercase and lowercase. Using a setting stick, the compositor set a few lines and then transferred them into a wooden or (later) metal tray known as a galley. From this, pages were made up, arranged in such a way that when printed onto large sheets the paper could be folded into sections with the pages in the correct order. The form of type was transferred to the bed of the press, locked in place, inked, and printed. While in the smaller printing houses no doubt skills were transferable, it was normal for the compositor to be quite separate from the two pressmen: he was also often better educated. Each sheet was laid on the press and printed first one side and then the other, the form of type being inked by hand between each impression. Because this could be paused at any time, text could be corrected easily: the result was that an edition might well contain many minor variants. This phenomenon has been most studied for Shakespeare and early English drama, but it is equally applicable to all kinds of text, and this remained so for as long as books were printed by hand. Further alterations could be made by means of replacement leaves or even whole gatherings (“cancels”), by printing corrections on slips of paper and pasting them in, or simply by pen. All are frequent in early printing and mean that no individual copy in the handpress period can be confidently regarded as part of an exactly repeated sequence.
Letterpress printing brought an immediate and immense increase in the numbers of books in circulation, and in the speed with which they could be produced. The wooden, or common, press was developed also in the 1450s and remained in use until the introduction of iron presses in the early nineteenth century. But the latter brought no essential technical change, and the speed of printing remained much the same, with about 1,250 sheets printed per day. Larger editions were possible, but agreements with workmen were designed to ensure a balance between compositors and pressmen. So after a day’s work the type was redistributed. Any reprints (strictly called new editions) had thus to be reset, though in fact sheets from two settings could be easily confused, as excess sheets from the earlier printing were redeployed in the reiteration.
Speeds altered dramatically with the invention of the cylinder press, first installed at the Times in London in 1814. Output increased dramatically, to over one thousand impressions an hour, and steam was replaced by electricity for newspaper printing in the 1890s. Old methods of stop-press correction were usually no longer feasible. The newspaper press was responsible for many of the innovations during the century. When curved stereotype plates were introduced after 1816, and were linked to machine-made paper fed on a continuous roll, presses were developed that could run very much faster.
It took longer for typesetting to be speeded up. Several ideas were tried, both in casting as one those letters frequently used together (logography) or in combining manual and machine setting, until in the 1880s Ottmar Mergenthaler of Baltimore invented the Linotype machine, which set lines in solid slugs of metal, and in the 1890s another American, Tolbert Lanston, invented the Monotype, which cast each piece of type separately, as it was needed. The latter drew several of its principles from the Jacquard loom, where the machine was instructed by punched card. In the Monotype this card was replaced by a punched paper spool, created by the compositor sitting at a keyboard. The spool was then fed into a separate machine to cast the letters and make up the lines of type. Linotype was much used in newspaper work, and in setting cheap paperbacks. Monotype, with a huge mixture of traditional, modern, and specialist typefaces, dominated book printing. Both were used worldwide, latterly even for the complexities of setting in oriental languages.
The printing of illustrations was transformed with the invention of the halftone process, whereby photographs could be reproduced as a series of raised dots, the size of the dots, and hence the density of ink, dictating shadows, darkness, and light. The principle was suggested by William Fox Talbot in 1852, but it became commercially as well as technically successful thanks to Georg Meisenbach, a German working in England in the 1880s. Color printing, which had hitherto depended on lithography, was transformed with the introduction in 1893 by William Kurtz of three-color separation for half-tones.
Letterpress, where type, line blocks (whether of wood or metal), and half-tone photographs could all be printed simultaneously, lay at the heart of printing worldwide until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Its dependence on a host of specialist skills made it increasingly expensive in equipment and manpower alike. It was overtaken by new technical developments in both setting and machining and could no longer compete in price. Within a very short time it was replaced for all but specialist work mostly by fine printers, as lithography and offset lithography, computer setting, and eventually *digital printing took its place.
David McKitterick
See also books; printed visuals; publicity/publication; stereotype printing; xylography