Six hundred years of the impression

How letterpress outlived everything built to replace it.

Cast metal, a screw, and enough pressure to drive a letter into wet paper. The idea has not changed since 1377. What changed is who needed it.

Scroll ↓ · the years run sideways

Before anyone in Europe had thought of it

Cast in

1377

Korean foundries cast the Jikji in movable metal type, seventy eight years before Mainz. Two volumes were printed. One survives.

The idea was never the press.

Presses existed. Screw presses had been squeezing olives and paper for centuries. What had to be invented was type: a way to cast thousands of identical letters, hard enough to take the hit, and to hold them dead flat while they took it.

Mainz, about

1440

Gutenberg's contribution was the hand mould: an adjustable brass former that could cast any letter to exactly the same height and set solid alongside its neighbours.

A reconstruction of Gutenberg's wooden screw press. — Fig 2 / The wooden common press

A page of the 42-line Bible. — Fig 3 / The 42-line Bible, about 1455

It was built to pass as handwriting.

The 42-line Bible was cut in dozens of variant widths so every line could finish flush. Nobody was supposed to be able to tell. Around 180 copies were made; fewer than fifty survive.

Six centuries later, printers are still measured against the evenness of its setting.

Then it stopped being wood

Iron, from

1800

Lord Stanhope's iron frame took the whole forme in one pull instead of two, and stopped the press flexing away from the paper under load.

The Stanhope iron press. — Fig 4 / The Stanhope press, cast iron

One man, one machine, seven lines a minute.

The Linotype cast a whole line as a single slug of hot metal from brass matrices. Newspapers quadrupled in size inside a decade. Hand composition, which had set every book for four hundred years, became a specialism overnight.

A Linotype machine and its keyboard. — Fig 5 / Linotype, from 1886

The jobbing years

1905

The platen jobbing press put letterpress in every high street: bill heads, tickets, invitations, cards. It is the machine this studio still runs.

An Original Heidelberg platen press. — Fig 6 / The Original Heidelberg

Metal type sorts in a case. — Fig 7 / Sorts, in the case

And then it was over

Offset made all of it worthless.

Photographic plates, no relief, almost no pressure. Offset was faster, cheaper and cleaner, and it did not care how heavy the forme was. The foundries closed. Type went for scrap by the ton. Presses were cut up where they stood.

A printer at the case, from a book of trades. — Fig 8 / The printer, Jost Amman, 1568

The turn, about

1990

Once nothing was printed this way, the way it looked stopped being ordinary. The dent that had been a fault for four centuries became the entire point.

A forme locked up in a chase with furniture and quoins. — Fig 9 / Locked up, ready for the bed

Nobody presses this hard by accident.

A commercial printer of 1930 would have called our impression a fault and reset the packing. We set it deliberately, on soft cotton, because the whole reason anyone orders the work is what it feels like under a finger.

The platen closing on the forme. — Fig 10 / The impression, close

Still running

Six hundred years, and it still has to be felt.

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