Six Centuries of Type & Printing

If you ever wondered exactly what Gutenberg invented, Six Centuries of Type & Printing will give you a firm grounding in his adaptations and innovations in manufacturing and setting type, formulating ink, preparing paper, and creating a printing press. You’ll also discover the marvel of pantographs, devices that trace a template to cut or carve an identical copy, often much smaller. Learn about the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Linotype hot-metal typesetter! Uncover the roots of modern type and how Steve Jobs’s love of letters led to the Macintosh’s sophistication in handling fonts and printing by laser.

I’ve paired the love of type and printing in my approach to the design, production, and typesetting of this book. It’s set in Monotype Bembo, a classic typeface used extensively in the hot-metal era and still popular today. The hardcover volume is bound in green cloth with a debossed, foil-stamped title and spine. The interior paper is a creamy textured stock with black text and illustrations in a second color. The endpapers are printed in black on a sharp, bright red.

“Histories of printing are often boring and inscrutable—or fast and shallow. This is neither. Six Centuries is at the perfect cruising altitude for an informative and non-exhausting history of printing for anyone even tangentially curious, written by someone who knows how to weave the big picture and the fascinating details.”—Marcin Wichary, author, Shift Happens

This bundle includes the print, ebook, and audiobook editions. The 84-page extended ebook has three additional sections: endnotes, a bibliography, and a full index of the print edition. The audiobook is a 130-minute recording with chapters marked in the audio file of the entire text of the print edition.

The print edition can be ordered with an inscription and signature.

Table of Contents

• The Master Printer: A brief biography of Johann Gutenberg and his ascribed accomplishments; a look back at Chinese and Korean precursors

• The Mold That Shapes the World: The importance of a width-adjustable hand mold for casting type

• Each Letter, a Work of Art: How type was made through tiny carvings and molds

• Mind Your p’s and q’s: Setting metal type by hand

• Printing Stands Still; Type Diversifies: The evolution of typefaces even while typecasting and press development stood still

• A Bicycle for the Hand: Automating metal type casting

• A 19th Century 3D Printer: How electrotyping transformed type design and led to an explosion of faces

• A Motor for the Mind: Using a pantograph to produce fine designs and power the future

• Type Heats Up Information’s Speed: The mechanization of typesetting in hot lead, with Linotype the winner

• Enter the Matrix: Monotype’s hot-metal typesetting system that presaged a future of separating data and output

• The Coming of the Light: Phototypesetting breaks the limitations of metal type

• PostScript, Ergo Propter Script: Setting type with lasers one line of code at a time

• A Press That Lasts Centuries: The persistence of the Gutenberg-style press

• Reduce the Pressure: An all-iron-frame press reduces labor on the path to increased throughput

• The Need for Speed: Faster presses rely on cylindrical plates spinning past endless feeds of paper

• Copy and Paste in Metal: The critical role of printing molds in meeting the demands of newspapers and readers

• Painting Images with Ink: A look at the many ways in which images were transformed onto paper

• Printing with Light: The fall of metal relief printing and the rise of “flat” lithographic offset

• Paste-Up Is Pasting Down: The transition of page layout from metal to photographic to digital

• Coda: Letterpress Abides: Despite the advantages of speed and precision, letterpress as an artistic craft made a resurgence