This post is the second installment in a series on how old books were made in the 15th-18th centuries. The first installment describes the papermaking process.
Last summer, when I arrived at the Library for my first week working for the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, I learned with a flutter of both excitement and nerves that part of my job would be to help design a teaching space around a colonial-era replica printing press. What an incredible teaching tool, I thought. If only I knew something about it.
Over the past few months, I’ve enjoyed learning not only the basics of how to operate the press, but also some of the history of this innovative technology. Most of us learned in school that Gutenberg invented the printing press, but that does not mean that he was the first to design a machine that would apply pressure when pulled or cranked. Winepresses had been used to squeeze grapes and olives since the Roman Empire, and East Asian cultures printed textual characters by pressing them into paper as early as the 800s. While Gutenberg did tweak the design of the winepress so that it wouldn’t twist on release and smear the ink on the page, his most important innovation had to do with the process of making the individual metal letters. His invention of “moveable type” allowed letters to be recombined and reused in infinite possibilities of words. In this way, Gutenberg revolutionized the ease and efficiency of sharing knowledge through mass-produced texts.
Below, I’ll explain how moveable type is made and prepared for printing. The process can be divided into two parts: “letter cutting,” in which the shape of the letter is made, and “type founding,” in which individual pieces of metal type, also known as “sorts,” are cast.
Be forewarned that the process is a bit confusing, because it goes from designing negative space in the “counterpunch” to positive space in the “punch,” from designing letters and numbers backwards in the “punch,” then correctly facing forward in the “matrix,” then back to being backwards in a piece of type so that it would print the letters correctly when stamping the ink on paper. It’s a complicated, multi-step process. Let’s look at each stage one by one.
First, a skilled metalworker (Gutenberg himself previously worked as a goldsmith) would design and produce a piece of metal cut in the shape of a letter. This craftsperson, called a “letter cutter,” would first take a long, thin piece of hot steel and, on its tip, use a hammer and sharp instruments to carve out the negative space of a letter’s internal design (like the oval inside of an “O,” or the little triangle and trapezoid inside of an “A”). This was called a “counterpunch.” It would be hammered into the end of another piece of hot steel to create the negative space of the letter.
Sharp tools and files would be used to engrave the outline of the letter’s design (backwards, or in mirror image) on the tip of this second piece of metal, which was called a “punch.” The sides of the letter would be filed down so that only the letter protruded from the tip of the steel bar.
Another worker, called a “type founder,” would then hammer the punch into the flat side of a piece of softer metal, such as copper, to make an impression, or “matrix,” of the letter. Because the punch was designed backwards in mirror image, the imprint of the punch looks correct and faces the right way. The punch and matrix together could be used to reproduce many pieces type, making these two workshop items highly valued (more so than the type itself).
The matrix of a letter would be locked into the base of a “hand mold” of two interlocking pieces of wood-encased metal with a hollow center. At the bottom of that hollow center, the copper matrix bearing the impression of the letter made by the punch would be exposed and ready to form melted metal into a piece of type. The type founder would hold the hand mold and pour a hot liquid alloy of softer metal (principally lead) into the hollow channel, filling in the rectangular chamber as well as the impression of the letter’s shape in the matrix at the bottom of the mold.
When the lead alloy cooled in the hand mold, the interlocking pieces would be released, leaving the long rectangular piece of lead type with a little groove or “nick” in the side (more on this “nick” in the next post). This piece of type would have a “sprue” of excess metal attached to the end; the type founder would snap off the sprue and melt it again to be shaped into other pieces of type. Each piece of type would need to be smoothed and filed into consistent sizes so that the letters would align when printed on the page.
Dozens if not hundreds of each letter would be produced and organized in wooden cases. The upper case would hold capital letters, and the lower case would hold…lower case letters. Yup. That’s where we get the names for upper and lower case letters.
So, just to recap: a designer would draw what the letter should look like, the letter cutter would create a counterpunch of the negative space inside a letter, the counterpunch would be hammered into the punch, the letter cutter would use files to shape the rest of the letter in the punch, the punch would be hammered into the copper matrix, the hand mold would lock around the matrix, hot metal would be poured into the hand mold to make a piece of type in the shape of the letter in the matrix, and that cast-metal letter would be used to print words. That’s a revolution in human communication in eight easy steps.
In the next installment in this series about the process of making old books, we’ll learn about how the skilled laborers in a printing workshop composed these individual metal letters into pages of text…if that sounds like your type of thing.
Sources & Further Reading:
Finkelstein D., McCleery A. (2013). An Introduction to Book History. Routledge.
Spencer, P. (2001). “Scholars Press for Printing Clues.” Princeton Weekly Bulletin. Princeton University.
Werner, S. (2019). Studying Early Printed Books: 1450-1800. Wiley Blackwell.
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