How Metal Revolutionised Printing
When answering the question of who invented printing, most would undoubtedly point to Gutenberg, some to the Chinese. Meanwhile, the Polish textbook 'Uczeń-Drukarz' (Trainee-Printer) states that the forefather of this art was King Agesilaus, a Spartan who, after writing a mirror image of the word ‘victory’ on his hand, imprinted it on the entrails of his victims.
In the same publication, Józef Galewski also mentions a more humane method of printing letters to encourage children to read: the letters were made of dough. Another way of multiplying letters (because it is difficult to speak of printing before the invention of the printing press) was with wood cut-outs, which were used to produce playing cards or pictures of saints with prayers: ‘A wooden board was covered with ink, paper was put on it and, with the help of a leather spreader filled with horsehair fibre, it was de-inked’, explains the author. Until the inventor of the art of printing came along, and he was Johannes Gutenberg. A more extended footnote should be made here.
The story of the invention of printing (worldwide version)
The roots of one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in human history can be traced back to ancient Egypt. It was there that, as early as around 2400 BCE, clay stamps were used to emboss plaques before firing them. These instruments, along with papyrus, then made their way to China, where they were perfected. During the Tang dynasty (between 618 and 907 CE), the technique of making copies of reliefs and inscriptions in stone or bronze, i.e. estampage, became widespread. This method made the mass reproduction of important documents possible – from imperial edicts to religious writings – previously promulgated in a single copy on stone slabs called stelae, already widespread in ancient Egypt and Greece. (A thousand years later, Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, would state that for the Chinese, ‘print was an alternative to their prayer wheels and was a visual means of multiplying incantatory spells, much like advertising in our age’.)
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Pressman at work – etching shop, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl
Around the same time, the first woodblock prints on paper appeared (the Chinese chancellor Cai Lun, who conjured up the material from silk rags, hemp and fishing nets in 105 CE, is responsible for this invention). A scroll with Buddhist incantations from the eighth century is believed to be the oldest printed text. The entire book, The Diamond Sutra, was printed in 868 in China. In Korea, the process was considered so important that the first state-owned institution for reproducing texts was established there in the 10th century.
A Chinese blacksmith’s discovery proved to be a breakthrough: in 1041, Bi Sheng used a single, movable printing type. Why didn’t he become as famous as Gutenberg? His invention was made of brittle clay, and the complex Chinese script was not conducive to the expansion of this innovation. The material was soon changed to wood and, in the 15th century, to metal alloys – tin and bronze. The oldest known book printed in this way, dating from 1409, is from Korea.
The story of the invention of printing (European version)
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The invention of printing, photo: Wikimedia Commons
Medieval Europe was the era of manuscripts. Scribes, usually monks, spent almost half their lives transcribing precious books. They used pumice for erasing, knives and razors for cutting skins and dividing pages, and files for sharpening the goose feathers they wrote with. Decorative letters did not begin to be imprinted until around 1147 by the Benedictines in Engelberg. Woodcuts were soon popularised in Ravenna, and metal fonts appeared only a century and a half later. (McLuhan would recognise manuscript culture as conversational ‘if only because the writer and his audience are physically connected by the form of publication as performance’.)
The greatest rival of Johannes Gensfleisch (known as Gutenberg) was Laurens Janszoon Coster. He is said to have printed an eight-page book using wooden fonts as early as 1423 – cutting them out while playing with his grandchildren. As much as the invention of the Dutchman from Haarlem is questionable (many researchers consider his achievement to be one of the urban legends), the goldsmith from Mainz unquestionably deserves to be called the father of modern printing, because, even if he was not the forerunner, he created the possibility of casting a single movable metal font. Not only did he develop his own version of fonts adapted to the different shapes of the letters of the Latin alphabet (McLuhan would state that printing erased Latin by turning vernacular languages into mass media), but he also invented a way to space words and lines in print. In addition, he perfected the mechanism of the printing press, modelled on an oil or wine press.
The date of the invention of movable type is assumed to be 1450 (less commonly 1440). Five years later, Gutenberg published a 42-line Bible – one of the dozens preserved worldwide can be found in Pelplin. Although printing initially took several days – the first day the paper was soaked, the second printed, the third dried, then pressed – and there was a wait of up to 20 years for binding, the German craftsman revolutionised the approach to knowledge with the help of metal. On the one hand, it became commonplace; on the other, a private copy of a book symbolised individualism.
Beginnings of printing in Poland
The Kingdom of Poland was the ninth country to which German printers migrated. They settled in Wrocław (at the time outside our borders) and Kraków. It was in this town outside Wawel Castle that the Almanach Cracoviense ad annum 1474 – the oldest printed calendar in Poland – was published. Written in Latin, the document containing not only astronomical data but also medical advice was published in 1473 by Kasper Straube. That Bavarian by birth opened a long list of Krakow’s printers, including Johann Haller (who printed Bogurodzica [Mother of God]), Florian and Helena Ungler (he was the publisher of the first treatise on Polish orthography; she took over the business after her husband’s death), and Hieronim Wietor (Hieronymus Vietor), who oversaw the publication of more than 500 works. Kraków and Wrocław were followed by other Polish cities, and schools were established where type production, the art of printing and bookbinding were taught.
From the printer’s handbook
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The typesetter’s typecase, photo Wikimedia Commons / Willi Heidelbach
Valuable knowledge of the art of printing and many interesting facts are presented in textbooks published between the wars. In the above-mentioned publication, Uczeń-Drukarz from 1929, Galewski explains the origin and use of materials and tools necessary for the work and discusses various stages of printing. He expertly explains that fonts ‘are small sticks or blocks, cast from metal, consisting mainly of lead, to which 20-30% antimony, 5-10% tin and sometimes a little copper are added, according to the type of script’. More detailed information is provided by Roman Mathia, who, in his 1923 Podręcznik dla Składaczy Ręcznych (Handbook for Manual Typesetters), gives formulas for English, French and German type – the latter was a model for Polish foundries – differing in the proportions of the component metals.
The shapes of the first fonts resembled the character of the monks’ handwriting. The clergy had two types of ink at their disposal, black and red, made from cabbage juice, oak galls boiled with gum arabic and beer or wine and the addition of copper sulphate. Printers were already using a full palette of colours, and black ink was usually obtained from soot or varnish, red from the dried bodies of cochineal (carmine). Until the mid-19th century, typecasting was done by hand. The stamp engraver created the image of a letter out of steel; letters without an image (spacing material) filled the space between words and lines. The goose quills and razors necessary for manuscript writing were replaced by a typesetter’s dagger, an engraving chisel, metal tweezers or a wooden stave assuring the equal height of the type in a composition. (According to McLuhan, printing is not merely a technology but is itself a commodity, a natural resource or article of necessity that ‘shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence’.)
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Press company, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl
As Galewski warned, the printing profession, which distinguished between a typesetter (arranging type into a ‘precise rectangle’ of text) and a press operator (a printer working at the machines), required months of preparation. By the time an apprentice had learnt that insulated fibre paper was to be used for printing banknotes, iron was ‘supposed to cause the yellowing of wood-free paper’, and letter paper ‘dare not be too thick, but pure in transparency, firm in grip and well glued’ and could distinguish between ‘French-blue’ and ‘Paris-blue’ ink (the latter being a purer ‘iron chlorate solution acidified with hydrochloric acid salt’ with an admixture of ‘yellow potash solution’, but just as fast drying), he was able to move on to operate treadle-driven and Boston-type presses with a clear conscience.
The first printing presses were wooden (a device modelled on Gutenberg’s design is in the Museum of Printing in Warsaw’s Praga district). The iron machine was developed by an English lord, Charles Stanhope, in the early 19th century. The modern design allowed larger formats to be printed, e.g. whole pages of newspapers, while additional improvements by the Americans minimised the physical effort of the person operating the equipment (one of George E. Clymer’s designs, called a Columbian press, can be seen in the Museum of Printing and Writing in Grębocin). At the time of the printers’ handbook, hand presses had already been replaced by treadle-driven presses and steam-driven machines. The former handled small-format prints (ephemera), while the latter handled materials whose format exceeded the size of the treadle-driven press. The Boston-type press, on the other hand, was a type of hand-operated press. (The author of The Gutenberg Galaxy would note that the printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality.)
Galewski devoted little space to explaining the operation of the rotary machine, as the level of complexity was beyond the competence of an ordinary student. He praised only its multi-colour and high-volume printing capacity, reaching up to 12,000 copies per hour. However, he did not fail to mention one of the printer’s most important tools – the accounting pencil, which, if used skilfully, would protect him from the dangers of ‘bad economy, either of a private or professional nature’.
It is easy to re-create the interior of a 19th- or 20th-century printing house on the basis of Galewski’s and Mathia’s handbooks: to see the shelves with typecases filled with alphabetically arranged fonts, to smell the ink or hear the sound of machines working and type being set. With a bit of effort, one can even see the typesetter placing the manuscript on the divider and the printer sliding the type layout into the iron wedge, measuring the margins with a steel or brass compass and trimming the typesetting material on the frog, i.e. the manual table guillotine. No imagination is needed for this – one need only visit one of several printing museums in Poland to feel this unique atmosphere.
In the age of advancing digitalisation, such places seem like a dreamy hallucination of the past. However, 555 years after Gutenberg’s death and 550 years after the first printed text was produced in Poland, we would not be able to speak of UV or 3D printing or even of an age of reading were it not for clay stamps and metal fonts.
sources
Written by Agnieszka Warnke, 18 July 2023; translated by Agnieszka Mistur
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