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CHAPTER ELEVEN The Mechanics Of Printing Johann Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the mid-15th century is credited by historians with helping to bring the Dark Ages to an end. It also launched a new industry which in succeeding centuries would have huge impact on the entire world. True, printing was slow to evolve, but this replacement for the laborious process of hand lettering all manuscripts, including the few books of that time, gradually spread throughout Europe and followed the path of migration to America. No matter what embellishments were added to the basic process along the way, the root of the printing revolution was Gutenberg's type. Purists may argue that the Chinese had created block type and had printed on paper six centuries before Gutenberg - but what took place in the Orient at that time was scarcely known in the Occident and the remarkable new idea introduced at Mainz, Germany was the beginning of printing in the Western World. Eventually type was reduced in size to resemble that used in today's books, magazines and newspapers. And even those totally unfamiliar with the process can envision how painstakingly slow it was to assemble all the individual characters needed to form even a single sentence. Compositors worked from a shallow box known as a "type case." The most popular version was called a "California case." It was divided into enough compartments to store each letter of the alphabet in both capital and lower case, along with numbers and the various characters required to grammatically perfect thoughts - colons, semi-colons, periods, exclamation marks, et al -- plus spacing materials of assorted sizes. The wooden or, later, metal container in which characters were assembled was called a "type stick." Letter-by-letter, word-by-word, sentence-by-sen- 209 |
