Life Before Kinkos

Welcome to the Letterati Lounge and nice of you to visit. This is a place to find and share comments, questions and ideas about typography, words, images and books and anything related. I am beginning this blog after signing on to teach a 12 week course on Book Design for a 2nd year Typography course at a local community college. I foresee this as an open invitation for my students and any others interested in books, type and design to read and contribute to the discussions you find here in the months ahead. Learning is about sharing and stretching our imaginations with new ideas. In the words of Oliver W. Holmes, “Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension.” This will be a voyage of discovery for us all! Especially as I have much to learn about administering this site yet…

I will open my inaugural post today with an email my friend Bonnie shared with me. It is a short commemoration to Herr Gutenberg, the printer who first published a book with movable type. It is a mere 554 years ago today that he published his first section of the Gutenberg Bible in Mainz, Germany in 1452.

“At the time, all existing books were copied out by hand, and in order to be as efficient as possible, scribes had developed a way of writing that was full of abbreviations. Words were written in a dense cursive script, and there was very little space between letters or even words on the page.

It was Gutenberg’s genius to imagine an entirely different way of writing, in which all the individual letters would be distinct from each other, rather than connected. That way, he could produce individual blocks with letters on them. He fitted these letter blocks into a frame, coated them with an ink made of linseed oil and soot, and then used an adapted wine press to print text on paper. The revolutionary effect of movable type was the ability to print an infinite number of pages from a small number of letter blocks simply
by rearranging them. Within three decades there were print shops all over the European continent. It is estimated that more books were produced in the 50 years after Gutenberg’s invention than scribes had been able to produce in the 1,000 years before that. Today, about four dozen copies of the Gutenberg Bible survive. One of the most recent copies to come on the market was auctioned in New York in 1987. It consisted of only the first volume, but it was in good condition, and it sold at auction for more than five million dollars.”

So how about it all? Compared to digital publishing of today, do you think Mr. G’s invention of movable type is great or greatest?

Happy October 1st!
J. Kennard