The Impact of the Printing Press

Gutenberg’s invention revolutionized the world of communication and was the most revolutionary advancement in technology since the wheel, because it was the first beneficial example of mass production in the world which initiated an information revolution. The printing press allowed for an assembly line style production process that was much more efficient than pressing ink to paper by hand, books were created at a fraction of the cost of conventional printing methods and movable type established a standard of technological excellence for later generations. His technologies spread across Europe at an extraordinary speed which gave new ideas a chance to surface, this saw the number of printed books rise from 0 to 20 million in just 50 years. The art of movable type defines us today in modern society, as it wouldn’t exist without the intervention of Gutenberg because up until now, knowledge was sparse and was available only to the elite, those of royalty or the religious order.

There was a shift from the laborious creation of handwritten manuscripts to a new print technology that allowed large quantities of written work to be created quickly and efficiently. The press gave texts a consistent look and feel as it produced type with suitable yet uniform spacing and hyphenation, the consistency of the text allowed readers to easily understand the author’s writings and intentions which enhanced the overall reading experience. Printed books had a positive impact on educational practices that transformed learning and were viewed as teaching machines whereas manuscripts were now crude and outdated teaching tools. Prints were now available to the general public, as the costs to create books had significantly decreased since books could now be published and mass-produced with less effort. 

The first few hundred years of freely available literature wasn't religious, almost all of it was travel literature as people couldn't leave and explore the world themselves so they wanted to explore through stories and non-fiction experiences, as information was now available to a much larger segment of the population who were eager for knowledge of any variety. Production costs to make books plummeted and knowledge flourished, access to knowledge was now granted to those who were unable to have it before. It completely transformed Europe as literacy was booming which brought about a thirst for more knowledge, particularly information on travel, other cultures, and what was going on around the world.

Writing became a broadcast medium due to the printing press, it lead to a more literate populace and a stronger economy as prior to the press, ideas were lost and now opinions and information could be spread freely. It was now possible to integrate and refine ideas and texts through time by commentary and comparison. It was the catalyst for many world movements and events, as well as cultural and societal transformations that began in the 16th century by providing an effective way to disperse texts. The impact of the printing press was astounding as it had dramatic effects on European civilisation, one of its immediate effects was that it spread information quickly and accurately as handwritten and translation errors were a thing of the past. It enabled the production of laws, maps, histories, scripture, and the classical writing that survived the Dark Ages where the body of printed writings stored in libraries around the world made up the collective, cumulative, comprehensive memory of humanity. The book trade flourished throughout Europe, as there was now always a consistent demand for new books.

The press used type that did at first imitate a manuscript but then eventually developed new typefaces as the contents of books covered an increasingly wider variety of non-religious topics such as: grammar, etiquette, geology, and travel literature. These new topic areas appealed especially to the professional members of the middle class. Printing prevented any further corruption of texts through hand copying, this allowed scholars to learn and work from the same text and they made progress in scholarship and science faster and more reliable. It stimulated literacy amongst those who previously had no knowledge of anything and eventually came to have a deep and lasting impact on their lives and promoted the circulation and preservation of knowledge in standardized form, which was important for the advancement of science, technology, and scholarship.

Texts became more reliable and the risk that material might be lost, corrupted, destroyed, or suppressed was reduced. Books were now affordable to ordinary people and as society grew more literate the number of potential readers increased as 20 years after Gutenberg revealed his new machine, the new technology was firmly established in Europe. The majority of books were originally published in Latin but during the Renaissance there was a demand for books in different languages so that natives were able to read the contents. Readers also wanted a greater variety of books and so new topics such as almanacs, travel literature, chivalrous romances, and poetry were published.

Despite the blooming knowledge and literacy which shaped European countries for the future, the press also created a disturbance within the Church as the increased number of books in circulation proved difficult for the church to control and censor their content. The power of the press was also used as a decentralizing force to undermine established elite institutions, and as an instrument of mass influence and control through advertising and propaganda, it allowed political and religious views to be widely distributed throughout Europe.

By 1482 there were over 100 printing presses in Western Europe and a Venetian printer called Aldus Manutius began to print the works of the Classical Authors such as Aristotle, Theocritus, and Aristophanes. He created the Aldine Press printing office in 1494, which comprises Europe’s humanistic intellectual elite and employed the most talented printers of the age. It was here that the typeface Antiqua was developed and soon spread throughout Europe. The font was modelled on Roman inscriptional capitals and Carolingian writing which feature more or less uniform thickness of all strokes and slanted serifs, it was a font style that was used to mimic handwriting and is classified as an Old Style typeface.

Manutius discovered that the real market for books was not for huge volumes of the Bible but for smaller, cheaper pocket books. He wanted to create books that were affordable, small, and easier to handle, with a condensed yet readable type to cut paper costs and with the goal of saving space on the pages, he commissioned Francesco Griffo to develop a cursive type for this new series. Griffo designed the new italic type based on the cursive script developed in the 1420’s by Niccolo de Niccoli. De Niccoli was an Italian Renaissance humanist of the early 15th century who worked as a copyist and collator of ancient manuscripts where he corrected text, introduced divisions into chapters, and made tables of contents. He began to oblique and add flourishes to his letters when he wished to write in a faster and more relaxed fashion and by the mid 15th century, other scholars began to imitate his writing style.

Manutius had the idea to create books in an octavo format where pieces of paper around A2 size were folded to produce eight leaves and sixteen pages, this process created miniature books that were almost A5 paper size. These were called pocket books and were a great success that encouraged Aldus and his sons continue publishing classical texts in small format throughout the 16th century, however Manutius did not sell these new fonts to his competition so they became widely counterfeited. The term italic was established as the style was developed it Italy and was used by Manutius’ plagiaristic competitors. Modern typefaces such as Bembo, Garamond, Aldus, and Palatino were based on the works of Griffo commissioned by Manutius. By the 16th century his books had spread throughout Europe with over 40,000 editions and 6 million copies published.

A sample of Nicholas Jenson’s Roman typeface, Antiqua.

Niccolo de Niccoli’s cursive script.

A pocket book printed on vellum that features miniatures and illumination. 

Martin Luther was a German friar and theologian that became angry at the clergy for selling indulgences which promised remission from punishments for sin and in 1517, he published his 95 Theses attacking the papal abuses and the sale of indulgences. He was turned against many of the major teachings of the Catholic Church and wanted to reveal the true story of the Bible rather than the false interpretation put about by the Church. He wrote a series of leaflets developing his ideas on Christian Liberty, Freedom of a Christian Man, Christian Nobility, and The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and thanks to the printing press hundreds of thousands copies were printed of his theses and leaflets which spread quickly throughout Europe. Gutenberg’s Bible inspired him to print the German translation of the Protestant Bible by publishing the New Testament in 1522 and the complete Bible with New and Old Testaments in 1534, which initiated the Protestant Reformation. His translation also fostered the development of a standard version of the German language.

A selection of Luther’s leaflets, translation from left to right: To Christian Nobles of German Nation from 1520, To the Councilmen of all Cities from 1524 and A Sermon to Send Children to School from 1530.

He used simple language in his translations as he believed that everybody should be able to access the scriptures.

The 16th century saw the steady evolution of basic standards and techniques to organise bodies of knowledge and information as alphabetical order, tabulation, graded textbooks, and reference guides all emerged. The uniform texts allowed people to index and cross-reference material by page and line numbers which grants citations of previous works by author, date, title, and publisher. Some libraries were hesitant in accepting these new books as the addition of these printed books were thought to devalue the enormous cost of the previous collection of handwritten scripts, even though they were now able to store greater quantities of books.

The movable type printing press vastly changed the nature of book publishing as it simultaneously increased printing volumes and decreased prices. The press was spread throughout Europe where over 2,500 European cities had acquired presses where German masters held an early leadership but the Italians now challenged their pre-eminence, as the press was used extensively in Italy where humanist writers of the Renaissance had long sought a way to more easily express their ideas to the public. The increased number of texts reached an audience of unprecedented size as literature became a part of the lives of the greater public and the growing economic success led to the founding of more schools and universities before the 16th century.

Renaissance was a very complex period with no well-defined beginning or end and no simple root causes, although the invention of the printing press clearly aided the bloom of education involving literature, sciences, and arts. The Renaissance was the rebirth of European art and literature that was influenced by the Classical era of Ancient Greece and Rome which included their thought processes and art styles. Italy became refuge for the intellectuals of Constantinople due to the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the scholars brought with them the great works of the Ancient Greeks and Romans that had been lost to the West during the Dark Ages. The Holy Roman Empire had lost power in northern Italy so the Papal States were governed by various leading families within each region, this vacuum of leadership allowed merchants to gain considerate power as the revised laws governing banking, commerce, shipping, and trade created a freer atmosphere which led to a busy exchange of both goods and ideas.

Books also spread awareness of a new philosophy that emerged when the Renaissance scholars known as humanists returned to the works of ancient writers as previously, scholars were guided by the church’s teachings. These humanists learned to read Greek and Latin as they were influenced by the writings of Ancient Greece and Rome because they were known as The Classics and had been greatly ignored. They sought to uncover ancient manuscripts that had been forgotten for almost 2,000 years and in these manuscripts the humanists rediscovered writings on scientific matters, government, rhetoric, philosophy, and art; the knowledge of these ancient civilisations changed their thinking process during the Renaissance.

Books on secular nature were printed as scientists specifically benefited from the reproduction of accurate, non-miscopied information that allowed the advancement of knowledge and further understanding. It enabled the creation of widely dispersed scholarly communities whose members systematically refine and build upon ideas and results through generations, where the impact on the development of scholarship, science, and technology were profound. This led to the Scientific Revolution of the Enlightenment in the 16th century which reshaped how Europeans viewed the world and universe.

The press ultimately created the notion that machines were able to carry out tasks quicker and more efficiently than man and so brought about the end of the artisan era that then saw the beginning of the manufacturing era. The impact of the printing press ultimately brought about the Industrial Revolution, Gutenberg’s invention was so revolutionary that his name lives on as one of the greatest inventors in human history.

Movable Typography

Woodblock printing was a technique used for printing text, images or patterns as a method of producing multiple copies on paper or fabric, some of the earliest examples of printing on cloth date back to before 220 CE; it originated in China and was used widely throughout East Asia where it was chiefly used to print religious imagery. 14th An artist would carve a mirror image of a design into a wooden block using a knife, chisel, or sandpaper to create a relief pattern where the non-printing areas were cut away. The surface of the block would be inked and recesses remain ink free, a roller is then used to transfer the ink to the material it is pressed against, but these methods of reproduction were expensive and time consuming. The woodblocks were not sufficiently durable and would split and splinter after repeated use, this caused prints to become distorted and would call for a fresh carving to be made out of another block, these blocks would also be rendered useless and discarded as a marginally different impression was needed. The stamping technique had blocks sit on top of the material with the print facing downwards where a hammer would be used to tap the back of the block to transfer the print, this was commonly used for European woodcuts in the 14th century. Weighted presses were another way to transfer designs and one of the earliest surviving books printed using this technique was an ancient Buddhist text called The Diamond Sutra created in 868, China. The rubbing technique had the block facing upwards on a flat surface with the material on top where the back of the material would be rubbed with a flat piece of wood or hard pad, this took over the stamping process in the 15th century.

Woodblocks are carefully prepared as a relief pattern, where negative space was cut away with a knife, chisel or sandpaper.

Moveable type is the system of printing typography that uses moveable components to reproduce the elements of a document, usually individual letters and punctuation. The first known movable type system for printing was created in China sometime in the 11th century by Bi Sheng, his system involved the production of hundreds of individual characters that were made out of baked clay. His invention allowed him to print copies of documents fairly quickly although the types made from clay were too fragile for large-scale printing. In the late 14th century a Korean monk named Baegun developed a metal movable type system, the Jikji, which was used to print Buddhist sayings and is the oldest extant movable metal type. Neither system was widely used due to the mammoth and impractical task of casting and composing individual pieces of type as the Chinese and Korean written languages are made up of thousands of different characters.

The Jikji’s full name is a Korean treatise on Seon Buddhism, which can be translated to Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests’ Zen Teachings.

Mainz, Germany was previously an important, influential and rich city during medieval times but two bouts of the plague brought about its downfall in the 14th century and it became a city of the past. When Johannes Gutenberg was born in this bankrupt city between 1397-1404 (his is exact birth date is unknown), almost everybody was illiterate as there were no freely available sources of knowledge as handwritten books were expensive and would take years to complete. There is little evidence about his early years but his father was a known merchant whose work brought him into contact with the city’s goldsmiths and Gutenberg helped him at a mint working as a blacksmith and goldsmith, producing coins.

It is likely, but not known that he studied at university and came into contact with the books that were handcrafted by scribes because he was an intellectual and later became an engineer. He knew that there was a growing demand for books and there was a great fortune to be had for the inventor of a mechanism that could produce exact copies of a text quickly and efficiently. It is thought that growing up in the heartland of the German wine industry inspired him with its wine presses as his invention would become an evolved form of these simple presses, but turning a basic piece of engineering into a precision machine was only part of the challenge he faced.

The screw wine press exerts controlled pressure in order to free the juice from fruits to avoid crushing the seeds.

In his 30’s he travelled down the River Rhine to Strasbourg where his experiments in printing would first begin. Strasbourg was a bustling city with trading links all across Europe and beyond which made it a far more promising business base than the bankrupt city of his birth. The central cathedral was more than the ecclesiastical heart of the city as it also ran the city with its paperwork, legal documentation and printing services, making it a focal point for the city’s money-makers. He knew how important the church was and the slow rate of duplicating books called for a new technology, this was a tremendous money making opportunity because a new, efficient way to print would make knowledge less expensive and accessible to all. By the late 1430’s Gutenberg had struck up a partnership with three of these venture capitalists to fund his work and was ready to start experimenting.

He employed a carpenter to work on his machine and other craftsmen from the city’s guilds; he worked not in the city but in a secluded hamlet downstream, away from prying eyes of potential competitors who were also trying to come up with a means for printing text. While they worked on the press they also needed a second revenue stream in order to support themselves, Gutenberg came up with the idea to create and sell holy mirrors to pilgrims. There was a great pilgrimage planned to the Cathedral of Aachen where thousands of pilgrims would be coming to see relics that go on display every four years in Europe, there would be so many of them that getting close enough to see the relics for themselves would be impossible. The metal mirrors were concave and were held up to act like a satellite dish today, where they were hoped to capture healing rays from the relics. Local makers couldn’t keep up with the demand for them so Gutenberg stepped in using the press he was developing to print out mirrors but as luck would have it, another outbreak of the Plague caused the pilgrimage to be postponed, which halted the income that was to be made from selling holy mirrors. Also during this misfortunate time, one of Gutenberg’s business partners died and his partnership began to collapse, which left him heavily indebted and struggling.

There aren’t any surviving machines from this early period and an illustration has never been discovered of what they look like, the earliest illustration of a printing press was in the Danse Macabre from 1499, some 50 years after Gutenberg completed his press.

His idea was to create individual letters that were durable and since letters could be arranged into any format, reusing and resetting the type could print an infinite variety of texts quickly and efficiently. Although he needed a system for mass-producing these individual letters and so looked for help at the guild of goldsmiths where a crucial technical breakthrough made Gutenberg’s idea a practical proposition. He discovered which metals worked best for each stage of his process, steel was used to craft the punch, copper or bronze was soft enough to create the matrix mould and a mixture of lead, tin and antimony was strong enough to hold up the pressure of the press. This process is called the punch matrix system where experienced craftsmen first created a punch, an individual letterform that was carved backwards into the end of a steel bar using a sharp file. The punch would go on to be hardened and tempered before a matrix would be made by striking the letterform into a softer metal bar made of copper or bronze, to create an indent of the letterform that was right reading. The matrix would then be attached to the bottom of a type mould, also invented by Gutenberg, a handheld device of two halves that fit together to create a cavity in which a wrong reading letter would be produced by pouring the molten compound of lead, tin and antimony into it. The mould was then shook to avoid air pockets and the letterform would be ready to remove, the cast would be released and cleaned of any unnecessary appendages and is then levelled for use. Wrong reading letters were critical for the press to be a success as the text will be right reading when printed on paper.

Two halves of a hand-mould for casting type, the rat-tail spring held the halves firmly together as molten metal was poured into the top.

The components of the punch matrix system.

Both the machine and type needed to withstand the rigours of printing and repeated use so he needed a precision machine that could apply even pressure to a page. The process of creating a punch would create up to two letters per day, which meant that almost a year was devoted to the creation of punches for over 300 characters used in the Gutenberg Bible. Around 300 different sorts of type were needed for the production of the Bible; these include upper and lowercase letterforms, punctuation marks, ligatures, special characters, and common abbreviations. But all of that time devoted to creating the punches was worth it as the revolutionary type mould device allowed him to make many identical letters quickly and cheaply where roughly 4,000 letters could be produced per day. The Gutenberg Bible shows that approximately 2,600 individual pieces of type was required to create a single page. Compared to woodblock printing, movable type page settings were more efficient and durable because the metal type pieces were uniform and set the perfect example for the creation of typefaces and fonts. He also developed his own ink using linseed oil, soot with high quantities of copper, lead, and sulphur as he needed a different solution to the water-based inks that were common during this time, an oil-based ink would thicker and adhere to the metal type and not run off. It is believed that the guild of painters helped with this concoction as it consists of similar compounds used by oil painters of this period.

Almost nothing is known about how Gutenberg set his type or printed the bible but what is known today comes from the traditional printing techniques from later years. A compositor worked from a manuscript setting type by arranging the pieces on a composing stick, a shallow adjustable tray in which type is arranged. Metal strips called quads were used to create space between words and leads were used to create space between lines of text; furniture were blocks of metal or wood that filled in the space around the type in the chase. Once a line was complete it was moved off the composing stick and onto a board known as a galley, when enough lines were stacked on top of one another to make a page or column they were locked into a metal frame called a chase using sliding wedges called quoins that lock type and spacers into place. The chase would be placed into a form where it was then placed into the bed of the press where a hardwood block called a planer would be used to ensure that the type was at an even height, ready for printing. The ink-ball tool was then used to apply ink to the type, they were balls of wool covered in leather and attached to wooden handles that were coated with an oil-based ink. After dampened paper was placed over the inked chase the bed would be moved beneath the platen, which was brought down to apply even and downward pressure, thus leaving behind impressions of type in ink on the paper. The puller would take the printed sheet off and check the quality of the print job, seeing that the impressions are of a good standard while the inker would reapply the ink to the type. After printing, the sheets were hung up to dry and once the ink had thoroughly dried the sheets could be put through the press again on the other side.

An example of a composing stick with modern moveable type and the various parts needed to set up a page of movable type.

A quoin key tightens up the form before the chase is transferred to the printing press.

Gutenberg intended to demonstrate that his invention could produce a book as beautiful as any manuscript, he was aware of the greatest users of books which included monasteries, universities, nobility, and royalty. He selected a particularly fine and accurate manuscript which was beautifully handwritten to serve as the model for his work. His Bible showcased a typeface that was heavily influenced by the Blackletter script writing style of the monk scribes in their manuscripts where the monk’s abbreviations helped him to create clean margins. His typeface featured tall, narrow letters formed by sharp, straight angular lines with dramatic thick and thin strokes and serifs that created a highly stylised yet legible font. The general sort of Blackletter used by Gutenberg in his bible is called Textura, the most calligraphic form of Blackletter. He wanted the finest alphabet and so created variants of characters that were slightly narrower and slightly wider so that the lines of text would always appear set in a justified paragraph alignment so that there was no unnecessary or unsightly white space between the text. He was a driven perfectionist so his type was so much more beautiful that it need to have been.

An example page from Gutenberg’s Bible with rubrication yet no illumination.

Sometime between 1444 and 1448 he returned to Mainz as Strasbourg was being terrorised by a marauding band of French mercenaries called the Armeniacs. There is little information on his activities for the next ten years although it is believed that he spent his time turning his ideas from conception into invention. In need of more funding, he created a partnership with a new investor called Johann Fust, which gave him the cash he needed to set his press running. The exact date of the completion of the printing press is debated although the invention of movable type mechanical printing technology in Europe is credited in 1450. The first print job he tested using the press was a Latin grammar book, as the Bible was far too ambitious at this stage. To show the church that his invention provided an opportunity and not a threat he printed documents like papal indulgences, dispensation for sins, to show off his new technology. The church saw the advantages this machine brought them and supported him, although there was still one issue to resolve as handwritten books were made using vellum and the production and harvesting of this material was time-consuming and costly.

Indulgences were printed on vellum around 1452 and given to Catholics who prayed for forgiveness for their sins.

He wanted his bibles to be of the finest quality and believed that they would all be printed on vellum, however some calculations revealed that only a few could be produced using this material as it would take 140 calves to make enough vellum for a single copy of the bible. This meant that he could not complete a print run of 180 Bibles, as it would take 25,000 calves in order to do so and although the Chinese had invented paper between the years 105 - 220 AD, it was a new commodity in the west. Gutenberg now needed a system for mass-producing paper and coincidently in Basel, Switzerland, a paper mill was set up around the same time that he had completed the printing press. The paper here was made from cloth rags that were mashed to a fine pulp via large hammers powered by a waterwheel, once it had reached the right consistency the pulp was transferred to a large vat where it is heated and stirred. A framed rectangular sieve was then submerged into the mixture and lifted out lying horizontally, the excess water is shook off and the frame is removed to reveal a sheet of damp paper which is placed on a sheet of felt and layered with other sheets until dry. The papermaking process was a fine art as the paper had to have the right texture and absorbency, so it was time consuming, but not nearly as time consuming as producing vellum and as a result, most copies of the Bible were printed on paper.

Woodcut by Jost Amman, from Piazza Universale by Tomaso Garzoni 1641.

Gutenberg attempted to print the red rubrics at the start of each chapter of the Bible, where each page was to be printed first in black and when dry was realigned to receive a second printing of the red initials. However this practice proved to be too time-consuming and difficult and was consequently stopped in favour of creating spaces for rubric capitals to be added by hand. The first printed books printed on the press were made to look as much as possible like traditional manuscripts, the Gutenberg Bible was conventionally illuminated and rubricated before use; although the process of rubrication, illumination and binding of the printed pages would take several months to complete. The differences between Gutenberg’s Bible and handwritten manuscripts were the number of lines on a page and the economical use of paper, he also started to print an edition of the bible with up to 180 copies whereas scribes would take an order for a book before the work would begin. He planned to decrease the amount of money needed to invest in the project as large amounts of money were already invested into his equipment and materials before any money was made from sales, he did this by increasing the number of lines on a page from 40 to 42. His first edition of the Bible ran to 180 copies which each contained more than 1,200 pages. His books were solid and robust as they were made to be turned too all the time, so the Bible was bound into two volumes with leather-covered wooden boards.

The first copies of his Bible were displayed at the Frankfurt trade fair in 1454 and caused a sensation, everyone was talking of the perfection of the volumes and people said that Gutenberg’s typeface, even in the early stages, was an example of perfection. The quality of the printed bible compared to handwritten manuscripts sparked a debate as some considered printing superior for the consistency of layout, accuracy of text and large, legible letters whereas some believed that handwritten forms were more beautiful. His bible was viewed as a signpost to the future showing that a new age of information was dawning in Europe fuelled by the power of the printed word. The demand for books became even more urgent as universities were starting up all across Europe and Gutenberg’s Bible was so influential that all of the Bibles printed in Europe were based on his model. Books were sold in sheets straight from the printing press or gathered and stitched with a plain protective cover usually made of paper or limp vellum. More important books such as the Bible were bound in leather-covered boards with elaborately decorated bindings embellished with stamp designs, gold leaf and even precious stones.

The Bible was printed in Latin and features blue and red rubrics on introductory pages to different chapters.

Some decorated capital letters feature gold leaf gilding and are embellished with leafy tendrils, floral spirals, and geometric lilies.

In 1455, Gutenberg’s business partner Johann Fust asked him to repay the money he had borrowed despite Gutenberg not having made any profit from his press yet as it had only just started running, the 1550 guilders Fust demanded to be repaid could not be recovered and so a lawsuit followed. The court voted in favour of Fust and Gutenberg was made to pay back 2026 guilders, plus interest and also lost all rights to his printing presses, type, premises and sheets already printed for the 42 line Bible. Fust took up the printing business with Peter Schoeffer who was Gutenberg’s foreman throughout the development of the press and movable type, Schoeffer’s close association with Fust led to speculation that Gutenberg was the victim of a conspiracy to gain inside knowledge of the presses and ultimately take control of the press industry.

Soon after the troublesome affair, Gutenberg travelled to a village two miles outside Mainz where he had family roots that helped him get back on his feet and even set up a new printing workshop, but he never enjoyed the riches which his invention earned for his former business partner. However his work was recognised and he was knighted and awarded a pension in 1465, so that when he did succumb the world knew that he founded the modern art of printing. 

The Introduction of Books

As cultures became more dependent on the written word, it became necessary to create documents that were more portable. Following the papyrus scrolls that ranged from 15 – 40 feet long when unwound, leather-bound books gradually replaced the scrolls and their parchment with skins of sheep and goats. Vellum was made from calfskin and was used for special copies of books as it was made with extra care as it would be fully washed, covered with lime to remove hair and stretched, scraped, dusted with chalk and polished with pumice. This of course sparked the handwritten alphabet to evolve once again.

After the Romans had developed and refined their take on the alphabet, Uncials, which is Latin for inch high, were introduced in the Middle Ages and commonly used between 400 – 800 AD; they were a form of capital letter that had a squared shape with rounded strokes that were used in Western Europe. Later on smaller half-uncials appeared which closely resemble our modern lowercase letters with extended ascenders and descenders; these were named Carolingian and with the introduction of increased spacing the scripts readability improved.

Faded Uncial Script from France 700 AD.

Charles the Great, the King of Franks, controlled most of Europe in the late 700’s AD and appointed an English monk to oversee standardized lettering practices for copying texts. Uncials were used at the beginning of sentences and Carolingian script, which share features of half-uncials, were now a uniform part of the alphabet.

Early Carolingian and a later development of its final form.

The style developed into Romanesque hand and later became the Gothic style in Germany in 900 AD, the appearance of this lettering was very thick, angular and tightly set within words to save space. Gothic is often referred to as Blackletter as it is an all-encompassing term used to describe the scripts of the Middle Ages in which the darkness of the characters overpower the whiteness of the page. The tittle above the lowercase i was added to distinguish it from similar strokes such as those in m, n and u. The thick and fine strokes were created using pens made from a reed or quill from the wing of a large bird, they were cut with a broad end, or nib, shaped like a chisel. Common script was not as strict as it was used for practical purposes but a more precise and artistic hand was needed to write important texts and books. The letter u was created separately from v in the 10th century, w was later created in the 12th century to accommodate more European languages where v could not serve and j evolved from a modified i in the 15th century which brought the Roman alphabet to 26 letters in total.

Lower and uppercase forms of German Gothic script.

The continuous warfare, poor crops, and abnormally cold temperatures helped to plunge Europe into The Dark Ages, but the church played a very important role in protecting ancient works as monks were heavily involved in the reproduction and preservation of the literature that had been inherited from earlier writers, writers whose works had been accepted as classics– the Rule of St. Benedict. These scribes would have excellent literacy skills and knowledge of the Latin language alongside brilliant eyesight and good penmanship. They worked in rooms known as scriptoriums in European monasteries, these were devoted to the painstaking craft of writing, copying and illuminating of manuscripts. Before the scribes could begin copying they had to cut large and irregular sheets of vellum into smaller, uniform lengths, rubbing them smooth with a pumice stone; they also had to finely rule each page for adequate spacing between lines before they could begin transcribing.

These scribes’ works suffered from human error in the form of translations and writing mistakes as they were not allowed to talk, nor were they allowed to correct mistakes in the script they were copying from, which is why errors grew in each generation of a manuscript. Creating a book was extremely tedious and time consuming which meant that they were rare and expensive, the scribes would need to have warm fingers and light to keep a steady hand so they sat by windows in the summer and candles in the winter and night. They would fulfill their scribe duties inside the cold and dark scriptorium walls for hours on end when they weren't fetching new writing materials and so were always in the same position where their backs, eyes and hands would become tired or cramp easily.

The hard work caused scribes to leave records of their experiences in the margins or back of the books they were writing,                               jotting remarks of frustration about the conditions of which they worked or the tools they were using.

The church was the only place to educate people as universities were only starting to form, so the major themes of the handwritten manuscripts were religion (predominantly Christianity which helped protect and preserve Christian unity), art and literary characters. The knowledge from books was known only to royalty or the religious order. The subject of the book, how and who it was to be used by influenced the size, lettering, and decoration of the pages. A Bible would be used for the conducting of church services and would be rather large with beautiful decorations, while one destined for personal use might be smaller and less decorated depending on the income of the owner. After the text had been checked for scribal errors the rubricator would add titles, initial capitals and paragraph marks; rubric comes from the Latin word for red, because these important headings were often inked in red. When the manuscript was ready it would be sent to an illuminator, but it was possible that one scribe could have completed the whole process by himself. Books came to be illuminated in the medieval period, pages were literally enlightened by the addition of gold, vivid colours, and ornamental letters. The term illumination comes from the Latin illuminare, which means to light up, an illuminated manuscript is one decorated with gold or silver because they reflect light, however, many are richly decorated with colours and no gold or silver. The term illumination is often used in general and not a completely accurate way to refer to all of the artistic embellishments.

It took years for a scribe to complete a particularly detailed manuscript with coloured initials and miniature artworks that were given the name miniatures.

The Evolution of Typography

As speech required individuals to be within earshot of each other, other mechanisms were needed to carry messages over distances over time. Simple drawings became pictographs, and pictographs became standardised within each culture beginning the history of handwriting.

Archaeological excavations uncovered primitive paintings and inscriptions on walls and pottery that discuss the daily lives and culture of the Neanderthal. From the Cave of Altamira, Spain, the paintings date back to the Paleolithic period, created by the Magdalenians that were hunters in the old stone age, between 22,000-14,000 years ago depicting deer, buffalo, horses and human hands with intricate shadings.

 The artists used charcoal and ochre to create the images and exploited the natural contours of the cave walls to give their drawings a three dimensional effect. These drawings were abstract.

Pictographic writing was common throughout history before the invention of letterforms and was often highly detailed works of art that illustrated specific events. Syllabic forms were similar but became simplified as it became important to communicate more generically and so they were standardised examples of this are early forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese ideograms.

Examples of Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese ideograms.

Cuneiform was a style of writing developed by the Sumerians, one of the earliest urban societies in the world. It was another pictographic writing system that came from the Latin word meaning wedge-shaped, where figures were pressed into soft clay tablets with the slanted edge of a stylus, which gave them that unique wedge shape. The word for fish existed at first as a simple pictorial representation of a fish, the pictogram later developed into an abstract ideogram that came to represent not only things but also sounds. This set of symbols gained almost universal acceptance in the Middle East, with the oldest dating tablet made in 3100 BCE, from the Sumerian city of Unik. This writing system was used to write stories, religious documents, history and poetry as well as representing trade stock and goods, the pictographs were written from top to bottom and right to left, and was continually used for 35 centuries.

A clay tablet from 4,000 BCE with wedge-shaped markings.

The Ancient Egyptians used two kinds of writing styles that were logograms and syllabic signs, the syllabic signs are similar to the word signs we use today such as: &, $ and =. The term Hieroglyphic originated from the Greek words Hiero and glyphe which means holy and glyphic, which in turn means writing. Modern English has a sound for each letter where the Ancient Egyptians had a sound for each syllable and occasionally for multiple syllables, this resulted in hundreds of syllabic signs. Only royalty, priests, scribes and government officials could use and understand hieroglyphs, as they were difficult to learn and recreate. The logograms were used to write down prayers and stories, royal documents, guides of the after world on tomb walls and to decorate jewellery, stones and metals. Hieroglyphs were written on papyrus, painted on walls or carved into stone and became simplified for freer forms to be written quicker around 1500 BC, where it became known as Hieratic script (priestly writing). This script was used almost exclusively for religious writing, however it was later used for commerce. 1,000 years later the script was simplified again and become more widely used, this was called demotic script, the script of the people. Around 2400 BC the Egyptians started using papyrus and reed brushes for writing as the ink flowed more smoothly on papyrus which allowed scribes to write quicker and symbols became less angular and more rounded.

Cursive hieroglyphs on papyrus- logography 3,200 BC – AD 400.

Top image- Hieratic script from 1200 BC, bottom image- Demotic script from 300 BC.

The Semites of Syria and other parts of the Middle East created their own system of writing that was based on the Egyptian syllabic signs between 1500 and 1000 BCE. They abandoned all of the multi-consonant signs and created a new syllabary of around 30 signs, these consisted of one consonant plus any vowel. These early systems have died out but they are thought to have influenced the syllabic writing form that spread through the world.

Ugaritic script, developed in 1400 BC, employs 30 simplified Cuneiform signs.

The city of Byblos was famous for exporting papyrus which was used as a writing material but the Phoenicians of the city also created a new syllabic writing style that comprised of 22 phonetically-based symbols, all of which were consonants. The reader would fill in the vowels based on structure and context, so fnd could be understood as find, found or fond. The Phoenicians were seafaring traders that carried their writing throughout the Mediterranean where they set up colonies and cities all around Northern Africa and the South of Asia, from Yemen to Ethiopia where the ancient language is still used today. Phoenician was the first writing system that represented sounds instead of objects and was written right to left, various writing systems of today can be traced back to Phoenician such as: Arabic, Greek, Latin, Etruscan and Hebrew.

An example of ancient Phoenicia which dates back to 1500 BC.

Around 100 years later, the Greeks liberally borrowed Phoenician writing as they kept the forms, names and order of signs in the alphabet and the left to right direction of writing. However, the Greek form would later change in both shape of the letters and in other key structures of the writing form and gradually, they developed a writing style with a consistent left-to-right format, as beforehand they followed no fixed direction.  The Greeks systematically plugged in six signs with weak consonants – sounds that were used only in the Phoenician language and were no use to the Greeks. They were turned into the vowels a, e, i, o, and u. After this change the remainder of the symbols were no longer needed to represent syllables and were then used as consonants, and for the first time an entire alphabet composed of consonants and vowels existed.

The Greek alphabet, which had both consonants and vowels, is the basis of the alphabet we use today.

This alphabet later found its way to the Etruscans of Italy, the Copts of Egypt and the Slavonic people of Eastern Europe; the Etruscans adopted much of the art and religious beliefs of the Greeks, which also included the Greek alphabet. The Etruscan civilisation slowly waned following the expulsion of the Etruscan King, Tarquinius Superbus, in 524 BC and within a few centuries the Roman Republic became the master of Italy. The Latin alphabet that is used in modern times was created by the Etruscans and the Romans but had only 23 letters as j, u and w were missing; there was no need for a w, the j was represented by the i and the u was written as v. In 300 BC the letter g was added and in 100 BC z was added, borrowed from Greek words.

The development of letterforms changed from the abstract, linear forms of the Greeks to squared signs that became rounded and joined when less carefully drawn by the Romans. The capitalised versions of the alphabet were called Capitalis Quadrata, which were later transformed into Rustica Capitals, which displayed a freer form and were very condensed in width so that more text could fit onto parchment and papyrus. By 400 AD letterforms became less formal in shape and began to flow together to save time and space, these were the earliest sign of lowercase letterforms with ascenders, descenders and ligatures between letters.

Top image- Capitalis Quadrata, bottom image- Rustica Capitals.

The Latin or Roman alphabet is now the world’s most prolific and widespread of them all.