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Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Friday, July 19, 2013
Brief History of Printing
The history of printing begins in the 1450s with the development, by Johannes Gutenberg, of the handpress. Gutenberg's press was in some respects less an "invention" than it was a clever synthesis of existing technologies, including letterpress printing (in which the impression of an inked block is pressed upon a piece of paper) and the use of a hand-powered press. Nonetheless, his introduction of reusable "moveable type," the development of a rapid hand-powered screw press, and employment of cast lead type revolutionized the public dissemination of information in the Eary Modern world. Within decades, use of the handpress had spread throughout Germany, and, soon after, to the rest of Western Europe. The new availability of relatively cheap mass-produced works had a social impact that was both liberating and destabilizing, as new texts and new ideas spread at a greatly accelerated pace through an expanding readership that would have found much more expensive manuscript books well beyond their means.
The handpress developed by Gutenberg remained, in its fundamentals, virtually unchanged for 350 years, but by the beginning of the 19th century new technologies, and the need to produce ever larger print runs for a rapidly expanding and voracious reading public, brought about important changes in the tools and processes of printing. The replacement of wooden presses with iron ones was paralleled by the first applications of steam-power to the process. Driven by the demands of the newspaper industry, printing technology next saw the introduction of cylindrical platens, which could much more quickly impress ink upon paper than flat platens, and the use of rolls of paper rather than single sheets. The invention of monotype and linotype at the end of 19th century made the setting of type for printing a much more efficient and rapid process.
The Hand-Press Era (ca. 1440-1800)
While printing using wood blocks had been around some time in China and the Islamic world, and was introduced into Europe in the late middle ages, the invention of the printing press with moveable type seems to have been a Western invention. Producing block prints, one for each page, was a laborious process, and the resulting block was, of course, only capable of printing the page for which it had been designed.
It was the innovation of Johannes Gutenberg, a 15th-century German goldsmith, to combine the principle of the letter press - raised letters that would take ink for impression onto a sheet - and combine it with a screw-driven press and re-usable and interchangeable pieces of metal type. A press was required because significant pressure had to be exerted upon the paper to impress the ink strongly and cleanly onto it. Gutenberg adapted existing presses for oil, wine, or linen which exerted pressure slowly; he provided his printing press with a more rapid mechanism, so that sheets might be printed quickly and in bulk.
Metallic moveable type was durable, flexible, and relatively easy to produce; its introduction vastly reduced the time and expense required to set a page for printing. Gutenberg's invention was only possible because he also developed a means of producing molds and matrices that could produce large quantities of metallic type; he also developed both an alloy suitable for type and a high-quality ink.
Gutenberg seems to have begun to experiment with the hand-press in the late 1430s and 1440s; by the mid-1450s, he was demonstrating the capabilities of his invention through the production of his famous and beautiful "42-line Bible."
Printing spread rapidly throughout Europe following the success of Gutenberg: the first press appeared in 1464 in Italy, and presses in Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Hungary followed within little more than a decade. William Caxton, the first English printer, brought a press that he had established at Bruges to England in 1476.
Germany dominated European printing through most of the last quarter of the 15th century, but Venetian presses began to establish their excellence from about 1470, introducing an elegant form of Roman or "Humanist" type that soon challenged the "gothic" or black letter type used in Germany. Meanwhile, printers began to experiment with the inclusion of illustrations in printed books, beginning with the use of woodcuts from the 1460s. Over the course of the next century, intaglio illustrations - etchings and engravings - were added as "plates," printed separately from the book and then added during the process of binding.
By the end of the 15th century, there were an estimated 1700 presses in 300 towns throughout Europe, and up to 15 million "incunabula" - the earliest printed books - had been produced and distributed. Printing most truly came of age, however, from 1517 with the advent of the Reformation. A precondition of Protestantism was access by a broad audience to relatively cheap Bibles translated into the vernacular: it was printing that made this possible.
At the same time, the utility of print for the broad distribution of polemical pamphlets and controversial literature became apparent to both sides of the great religious debates that now raged across Europe: print provided a cheap and effective medium for popular propaganda. By the mid-1520s, the writings of Martin Luther were available in hundreds of inexpensive editions throughout Europe.
By the mid-16th century, the pattern for the continued development of the printing trade had been set. Printed books reinforced trends towards the expansion of literacy by providing inexpensive reading materials, while this expanding market for books, pamphlets, and broadsides fed the slow but steady growth of the printing trade. Governments and churches, recognizing the power of the printed word, sought to control it with limited success through censorship and regulation; unsurprisingly, during times of social and political turmoil which tended to be accompanied by a relaxation of such efforts the production of printed works really exploded; the sudden outburst of popular and often highly subversive print publications during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s is a salient example.
Gutenberg's wooden hand-press was a remarkably resilient and enduring invention. It remained in use throughout the West virtually unchanged in its essentials for over 350 years, the centerpiece and mainspring of a steadily growing culture of literacy and information. Its social impact was incalculable: it connected disparate cultures and populations, educated, informed, entertained, and even liberated an ever-growing reading public. In a sense, the hand-press was finally rendered obsolete by its own success, for by the end of the 18th century, the demand for print materials had exceeded the capacity of the old technology to produce them cheaply and efficiently.
In response to this demand, printers looked to harness the methods of the Industrial Revolution. The new technologies required outlays of capital and organizational methods that increased the size and complexity of printing houses: the old printing house, which might feature no more than two presses, was displaced by larger, more streamlined and efficiently organized workshops. Printing, from being a "trade," was to become an "industry."
The Machine-Press Era (ca. 1800-1950)
As dramatic as the technological changes introduced into printing in the last two centuries seem, the fundamentals of printing changed only slowly. For most of the 19th century, type was still cast and set by hand, and it was not until the mid-20th century that printing began to shift from letterpress - the impressing of inked type upon paper - to the large scale implementation of other methods of setting type or illustration onto paper surfaces.
The earliest practical developments improved existing technology. The introduction of the iron press in 1798 responded to the need for sharper impressions that would do justice to newer and finer type fonts now available. Lord Stanhope's iron press added the power of the lever to the conventional screw mechanisms, producing a much sharper impression. It, along with other new iron presses such as the Columbian (1817) and Albion (1822), had largely displaced wooden presses by the 1820s. These significantly improved the quality of printing; they did not, however, address the need for a higher or speedier output.
The basic problem was that the new iron presses still involved using both horizontal motion (as the letterpress moves beneath the platen) and vertical motion (as the platen exerts pressure down). It was more efficient to combine these through the use of cylinder presses that rolled over a flatbed holding the paper. Friederich Koenig produced a steam-driven press in 1811 that combined a flatbed with letterpress plates loaded onto a cylinder. In 1814, a Koenig press was printing The Times of London at a rate of about 1,100 one-sided sheets per hour. By 1827, improvements to the flat-bed cylinder press had raised the rate of printing to 5,000 impressions per hour.
The next logical improvement was to replace the flatbed with an additional cylinder so that paper could be continuously fed to the cylindrical plate. This was accomplished by Richard Hoe in 1845. Even more efficiency was introduced in 1865 by William Bullock, who replaced individual sheets with rolls of paper, so that there was a continual feed of paper into the press. Using this principle, the Walter press employed by The Times in 1866 could produce 25,000 sheets, printed on both sides, every hour, a one hundred-fold increase over the rate of production of a typical wooden handpress.
Another innovation that introduced efficiency into the printing process was the shift towards printing from plates rather than directly from set type. Pages were still set in the old manner, with individual pieces of type chosen and arranged by a compositor, but a mold was then made of the resulting letterpress, which in turn was used to create a plate that would perform the actual work of printing. This saved wear and tear on the expensive type, which could be broken up and immediately reused, while the plates (or the molds) could be stored cheaply and easily for future printing. The process of producing plates in this way was called "stereotyping."
Experiments in stereotyping date from the early 18th century, but it was the enlarged print runs of the 19th century that made the process financially worthwhile. Stereotyping from plaster moulds became common in the 1820s, but within two decades, these were being replaced by flexible moulds made from compressed laminated paper called "flong." Because the mold or "matrix" could be used to cast curved plates, this system could be combined with a printing cylinder; by 1886, The Times of London was doing just this.
It is no coincidence that so many of the new innovations in printing technology were pioneered by the newspaper industry, and by the premier newspaper in the world, the London Times in particular: the nineteenth century saw a massive increase in the readership of newspapers, magazines, and serials. Newspapers and periodicals, of course, particularly required methods of printing that were fast, cheap, and efficient, and so it was these, particularly in Britain and America, that tended to drive technological change.
One bottleneck that continued to slow the process was composition, the process of actually setting a text into type. For much of the 19th century, this continued to be done slowly and laboriously by hand, letter by letter. Type itself remained expensive until the production of an effective type-casting machine in 1883. This was quickly followed by the invention of the Linotype machine in 1886, which combined composing, justifying, and casting of type into a single operation, producing a complete line of type in one piece cast in lead. Composing was also facilitated by the development of Monotype, which cast individual pieces of type as needed using a keyboard that recorded the specifications for justification and type on a perforated roll of paper.
New methods of producing high-quality paper by machine began to supersede hand-made paper by the 1820s. This, with the introduction of wood pulp paper in 1844, had an enormous impact upon availability and price: by the end of 19th century, the price of paper (previously the main expense of any book) had dropped about 10 fold. Book binding also became mechanized, and publishers began to produce trade editions for a mass market. The introduction of the paperback in 1935 by Penguin made books more affordable than ever before.
In the late 20th century, the advent of "desktop publishing" made print cheaper and more accessible than at any previous time in history. Yet it has been paralleled by a slow but steady erosion of the place of the printed book by the "e-book." Rumours of the death of print are, however, greatly exaggerated: a well-known joke is that the second book printed by Gutenberg predicted the death of the publishing industry. Print will survive, not just in the great publishing houses, but also in the innumerable small presses the world over, where printers continue to use traditional methods and take pride in the Art of Printing.
The handpress developed by Gutenberg remained, in its fundamentals, virtually unchanged for 350 years, but by the beginning of the 19th century new technologies, and the need to produce ever larger print runs for a rapidly expanding and voracious reading public, brought about important changes in the tools and processes of printing. The replacement of wooden presses with iron ones was paralleled by the first applications of steam-power to the process. Driven by the demands of the newspaper industry, printing technology next saw the introduction of cylindrical platens, which could much more quickly impress ink upon paper than flat platens, and the use of rolls of paper rather than single sheets. The invention of monotype and linotype at the end of 19th century made the setting of type for printing a much more efficient and rapid process.
The Hand-Press Era (ca. 1440-1800)
While printing using wood blocks had been around some time in China and the Islamic world, and was introduced into Europe in the late middle ages, the invention of the printing press with moveable type seems to have been a Western invention. Producing block prints, one for each page, was a laborious process, and the resulting block was, of course, only capable of printing the page for which it had been designed.
It was the innovation of Johannes Gutenberg, a 15th-century German goldsmith, to combine the principle of the letter press - raised letters that would take ink for impression onto a sheet - and combine it with a screw-driven press and re-usable and interchangeable pieces of metal type. A press was required because significant pressure had to be exerted upon the paper to impress the ink strongly and cleanly onto it. Gutenberg adapted existing presses for oil, wine, or linen which exerted pressure slowly; he provided his printing press with a more rapid mechanism, so that sheets might be printed quickly and in bulk.
Metallic moveable type was durable, flexible, and relatively easy to produce; its introduction vastly reduced the time and expense required to set a page for printing. Gutenberg's invention was only possible because he also developed a means of producing molds and matrices that could produce large quantities of metallic type; he also developed both an alloy suitable for type and a high-quality ink.
Gutenberg seems to have begun to experiment with the hand-press in the late 1430s and 1440s; by the mid-1450s, he was demonstrating the capabilities of his invention through the production of his famous and beautiful "42-line Bible."
Printing spread rapidly throughout Europe following the success of Gutenberg: the first press appeared in 1464 in Italy, and presses in Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Hungary followed within little more than a decade. William Caxton, the first English printer, brought a press that he had established at Bruges to England in 1476.
Germany dominated European printing through most of the last quarter of the 15th century, but Venetian presses began to establish their excellence from about 1470, introducing an elegant form of Roman or "Humanist" type that soon challenged the "gothic" or black letter type used in Germany. Meanwhile, printers began to experiment with the inclusion of illustrations in printed books, beginning with the use of woodcuts from the 1460s. Over the course of the next century, intaglio illustrations - etchings and engravings - were added as "plates," printed separately from the book and then added during the process of binding.
By the end of the 15th century, there were an estimated 1700 presses in 300 towns throughout Europe, and up to 15 million "incunabula" - the earliest printed books - had been produced and distributed. Printing most truly came of age, however, from 1517 with the advent of the Reformation. A precondition of Protestantism was access by a broad audience to relatively cheap Bibles translated into the vernacular: it was printing that made this possible.
At the same time, the utility of print for the broad distribution of polemical pamphlets and controversial literature became apparent to both sides of the great religious debates that now raged across Europe: print provided a cheap and effective medium for popular propaganda. By the mid-1520s, the writings of Martin Luther were available in hundreds of inexpensive editions throughout Europe.
By the mid-16th century, the pattern for the continued development of the printing trade had been set. Printed books reinforced trends towards the expansion of literacy by providing inexpensive reading materials, while this expanding market for books, pamphlets, and broadsides fed the slow but steady growth of the printing trade. Governments and churches, recognizing the power of the printed word, sought to control it with limited success through censorship and regulation; unsurprisingly, during times of social and political turmoil which tended to be accompanied by a relaxation of such efforts the production of printed works really exploded; the sudden outburst of popular and often highly subversive print publications during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s is a salient example.
Gutenberg's wooden hand-press was a remarkably resilient and enduring invention. It remained in use throughout the West virtually unchanged in its essentials for over 350 years, the centerpiece and mainspring of a steadily growing culture of literacy and information. Its social impact was incalculable: it connected disparate cultures and populations, educated, informed, entertained, and even liberated an ever-growing reading public. In a sense, the hand-press was finally rendered obsolete by its own success, for by the end of the 18th century, the demand for print materials had exceeded the capacity of the old technology to produce them cheaply and efficiently.
In response to this demand, printers looked to harness the methods of the Industrial Revolution. The new technologies required outlays of capital and organizational methods that increased the size and complexity of printing houses: the old printing house, which might feature no more than two presses, was displaced by larger, more streamlined and efficiently organized workshops. Printing, from being a "trade," was to become an "industry."
The Machine-Press Era (ca. 1800-1950)
As dramatic as the technological changes introduced into printing in the last two centuries seem, the fundamentals of printing changed only slowly. For most of the 19th century, type was still cast and set by hand, and it was not until the mid-20th century that printing began to shift from letterpress - the impressing of inked type upon paper - to the large scale implementation of other methods of setting type or illustration onto paper surfaces.
The earliest practical developments improved existing technology. The introduction of the iron press in 1798 responded to the need for sharper impressions that would do justice to newer and finer type fonts now available. Lord Stanhope's iron press added the power of the lever to the conventional screw mechanisms, producing a much sharper impression. It, along with other new iron presses such as the Columbian (1817) and Albion (1822), had largely displaced wooden presses by the 1820s. These significantly improved the quality of printing; they did not, however, address the need for a higher or speedier output.
The basic problem was that the new iron presses still involved using both horizontal motion (as the letterpress moves beneath the platen) and vertical motion (as the platen exerts pressure down). It was more efficient to combine these through the use of cylinder presses that rolled over a flatbed holding the paper. Friederich Koenig produced a steam-driven press in 1811 that combined a flatbed with letterpress plates loaded onto a cylinder. In 1814, a Koenig press was printing The Times of London at a rate of about 1,100 one-sided sheets per hour. By 1827, improvements to the flat-bed cylinder press had raised the rate of printing to 5,000 impressions per hour.
The next logical improvement was to replace the flatbed with an additional cylinder so that paper could be continuously fed to the cylindrical plate. This was accomplished by Richard Hoe in 1845. Even more efficiency was introduced in 1865 by William Bullock, who replaced individual sheets with rolls of paper, so that there was a continual feed of paper into the press. Using this principle, the Walter press employed by The Times in 1866 could produce 25,000 sheets, printed on both sides, every hour, a one hundred-fold increase over the rate of production of a typical wooden handpress.
Another innovation that introduced efficiency into the printing process was the shift towards printing from plates rather than directly from set type. Pages were still set in the old manner, with individual pieces of type chosen and arranged by a compositor, but a mold was then made of the resulting letterpress, which in turn was used to create a plate that would perform the actual work of printing. This saved wear and tear on the expensive type, which could be broken up and immediately reused, while the plates (or the molds) could be stored cheaply and easily for future printing. The process of producing plates in this way was called "stereotyping."
Experiments in stereotyping date from the early 18th century, but it was the enlarged print runs of the 19th century that made the process financially worthwhile. Stereotyping from plaster moulds became common in the 1820s, but within two decades, these were being replaced by flexible moulds made from compressed laminated paper called "flong." Because the mold or "matrix" could be used to cast curved plates, this system could be combined with a printing cylinder; by 1886, The Times of London was doing just this.
It is no coincidence that so many of the new innovations in printing technology were pioneered by the newspaper industry, and by the premier newspaper in the world, the London Times in particular: the nineteenth century saw a massive increase in the readership of newspapers, magazines, and serials. Newspapers and periodicals, of course, particularly required methods of printing that were fast, cheap, and efficient, and so it was these, particularly in Britain and America, that tended to drive technological change.
One bottleneck that continued to slow the process was composition, the process of actually setting a text into type. For much of the 19th century, this continued to be done slowly and laboriously by hand, letter by letter. Type itself remained expensive until the production of an effective type-casting machine in 1883. This was quickly followed by the invention of the Linotype machine in 1886, which combined composing, justifying, and casting of type into a single operation, producing a complete line of type in one piece cast in lead. Composing was also facilitated by the development of Monotype, which cast individual pieces of type as needed using a keyboard that recorded the specifications for justification and type on a perforated roll of paper.
New methods of producing high-quality paper by machine began to supersede hand-made paper by the 1820s. This, with the introduction of wood pulp paper in 1844, had an enormous impact upon availability and price: by the end of 19th century, the price of paper (previously the main expense of any book) had dropped about 10 fold. Book binding also became mechanized, and publishers began to produce trade editions for a mass market. The introduction of the paperback in 1935 by Penguin made books more affordable than ever before.
In the late 20th century, the advent of "desktop publishing" made print cheaper and more accessible than at any previous time in history. Yet it has been paralleled by a slow but steady erosion of the place of the printed book by the "e-book." Rumours of the death of print are, however, greatly exaggerated: a well-known joke is that the second book printed by Gutenberg predicted the death of the publishing industry. Print will survive, not just in the great publishing houses, but also in the innumerable small presses the world over, where printers continue to use traditional methods and take pride in the Art of Printing.
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