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.

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Cast in Korea · 1377

Seventy eight years before Mainz.

Korean foundries cast the Jikji in movable metal type. Two volumes were printed and one survives, which is seven hundred years of luck on top of the invention.

Mainz, about · 1440

The letter had to be invented, not the press.

Screw presses had been squeezing olives for centuries. Gutenberg's contribution was the hand mould: a way to cast any letter to exactly the same height, so a page could be locked solid and pulled flat.

Iron, from · 1800

It stopped being made of wood.

Stanhope's iron frame took a whole forme in one pull instead of two, and stopped the press flexing away from the paper under load. The impression got even, and stayed even.

The machine age · 1886

One man, seven lines a minute.

The Linotype cast a whole line as one slug of hot metal from brass matrices. Newspapers quadrupled inside a decade, and hand composition became a specialism overnight.

The jobbing years · 1905

A press in every high street.

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

Still running · Today

The fault became the reason.

Offset made all of it worthless, and then, once nothing was printed this way, the way it looked stopped being ordinary. The dent that was a defect for four centuries is now the whole point.