newspaper, the _Acta Diurna_, which seems to have been a record of
the proceedings of the senate. We do not know how it was written, nor
how it was published, but it was frequently mentioned by contemporary
writers as the regular official medium for transmitting intelligence.
It was sent to subscribers in distant cities, and was, sometimes, read
to an assembled army. Cicero mentions the _Acta_ as a sheet in which he
expected to find the city news and gossip about marriages and divorces.
In the sixth century the business of book-making had fallen into
hopeless decay. Ignorance pervaded all ranks of society.[7] The books
that had been written were neglected, and the number of readers and
scholars diminished with every succeeding generation.[8] The treasures
of literature at Rome, Constantinople and Alexandria which were
destroyed by fire or by barbaric invasion were not replaced. Books
were so scarce at the close of the seventh century, that Pope Martin
requested one of his bishops to supply them, if possible, from Germany.
The ignorance of ecclesiastics in high station was [p045] alarming.
During this century, and for centuries afterward, there were many
bishops and archbishops of the church who could not sign their names.
It was asserted at a council of the church held in the year 992, that
scarcely a single person was to be found in Rome itself who knew the
first element of letters. Hallam says, “To sum up the account of
ignorance in a word, it was rare for a layman of any rank to know how
to sign his name.” Charlemagne could not write, and Frederic Barbarossa
could not read; John, king of Bohemia, and Philip the Hardy, king
of France, were ignorant of both accomplishments.[9] The graces of
literature were tolerated only in the ranks of the clergy; the layman
who preferred letters to arms was regarded as a man of mean spirit.
When the crusaders took Constantinople, in 1204, they exposed to public
ridicule the pens and inkstands that they found in the conquered city
as the ignoble arms of a contemptible race of students.
During this period of intellectual darkness, which lasted from the
fifth until the fifteenth century, a period sometimes described, and
not improperly, as the dark ages, there was no need for any improvement
in the old method of making books. The world was not then ready for
typography. The invention waited for readers more than it did for
types; the multitude of book-buyers upon which its success depended had
to be created. Books were needed as well as readers. The treatises of
the old Roman sophists and rhetoricians, the dialectics of Aristotle
and the schoolmen, and the commentaries on ecclesiastical law of the
fathers of the church, were the works which engrossed the attention of
men of letters for many centuries before the invention of typography.
Useful as these books may have been to the small class of readers for
whose benefit they were written, they were of no benefit to a people
who required the elements of knowledge.
We may imagine the probable fate of a premature and unappreciated
invention of typography by thinking of results that might have been
and have not been accomplished by printing among a people who were not
prepared to use it as [p046] it should be used. Printing has been
practised in China for many centuries, but there can be no comparison
between the fruits of printing in China and in Europe. The remarkable
inefficiency of the Chinese method is the result not so much of
clumsiness of the process, as of the perverseness of a people who are
unable to improve it, and unwilling to accept the improvements of
Europeans. The first printing press brought to the New World was set up
in the City of Mexico about one hundred years before a printing office
was established in Massachusetts. Books were printed in Constantinople,
perhaps as early as 1490, certainly before types were thought of in
Scotland. And now Scotland sends types and books to Turkey, and Boston
sends printing paper and presses to Mexico. If the people of Turkey and
Mexico are receiving benefits from printing, the benefits have been
derived from the practice of the art abroad and not at home.
In making an estimate of the service that printing has done for the
world, we frequently overlook the supports by which it has been upheld.
It is a common belief that the diffusion of knowledge which was so
clearly manifested in the fifteenth century was due to the invention of
printing. This belief reverses the proper order, and substitutes the
effect for the cause. It was the broader diffusion of knowledge that
made smooth the way for the development of typography. In its infancy,
the invention was indebted for its existence to improvements in liberal
and mechanical arts; in its maturity, it is largely indebted for its
success to discoveries in science, and to reforms in government.
The magnetic telegraph is the most recent discovery, and of the
most importance, in its services to the daily newspaper press. The
circulation of leading American daily newspapers has more than trebled
since the invention of the telegraph.
The free public schools of America have done much to promote the
growth of printing. If the State did not offer free books and free
education, a large portion of the people would grow up in ignorance.
Every scholar in a public school [p047] becomes for life a reader, and
to some extent, a purchaser of books. The value of the school-books
manufactured in the United States annually, has been estimated at
fifteen million dollars. Of Webster’s Spelling-Book alone, thirty-five
million copies have been sold, and a million copies are printed every
year. If printing were deprived of the support it receives from
public schools, there would at once follow a noticeable decrease in
the production of printed matter, and a corresponding decrease in the
number of readers and book-buyers.
To foster the tastes which have been cultivated by public schools and
newspapers, some States have established public libraries in every
school district. There are, also, a great many valuable libraries
which have been established by voluntary association or by individual
bequest. These libraries create books as well as readers.
Railroads, steamboats and package expresses are aids of as great
importance. The New-York daily newspaper, printed early in the morning,
is sold within a radius of three hundred miles before sunset of the
same day. Newspapers now find hundreds of eager purchasers in places
where they would not have found one in the days of stage-coaches. The
benefits of cheap and quick transportation are also favorable to the
sale of books. A bookseller’s package, weighing one hundred pounds,
will be carried from New York to St. Louis, on the Mississippi, within
sixty-five hours, at an average expense of three dollars. When there
was no railroad from St. Louis to San Francisco, the overland charges
on one hundred pounds of books were one hundred dollars. The long
delays and great expenses of stage-coach transportation would operate
almost as a prohibition to the sale of periodicals and new books.
The greatest legislative aid that printing has received is through the
facilities which are furnished by post-offices and mails. They create
readers. Weekly newspapers are now sent, for one year, for twenty
cents, to subscribers in the most remote corner of the Union. Books
are sent three thousand miles at the rate of one cent per ounce. The
improvement [p048] of postal facilities has increased the number of
readers and purchasers of newspapers to an amount unforeseen by the
most sanguine projector.
All these aids are, comparatively, of recent introduction. The
beginnings of the telegraph, the railroad and the express are within
the memory of the men of the present generation. The systematic
establishment of free schools and libraries is the work of the present
century. Public mails and post-offices were introduced in 1530, but
it is only within the past forty years that their management has been
more liberal for the benefit of the people. It is by aids like these,
and not by its intrinsic merits alone, that printing has received its
recent development. It was for the want of these aids that printing
languished for many years after its invention. One has but to consider
the many supports printing has received to see that its premature
invention would have been fruitless.
If, even now, when books and readers and literary tastes are as common
as they were infrequent, it is necessary to the success of printing
that there shall be schools and libraries, cheap and rapid methods of
travel, generous postal facilities, a liberal government and a broad
toleration of the greatest differences in opinion, what but failure
could have been expected when the world was destitute of nearly all?
Printing not only had to wait many centuries for improvements in
mechanical appliances, without which it would have been worthless; it
had to wait for a greater number of readers, for liberal governments,
for instructive writers, for suitable books. It came at the proper
time, not too soon, not too late. “Not the man, the age invents.”
[p049]
III
The Key to the Invention of Typography.
Conflicting Theories about the Invention of Typography . . . Was it
an Invention or a Combination? . . . Errors of Superficial Observers
. . . Merit of the Invention is not in Impression . . . Not altogether
in Types or Composition . . . Types of no value unless they are
Accurate . . . Hand-made Types Impracticable . . . Merit of Invention
is in the Method of Making Types . . . Is but One Method . . .
Description . . . Counter-Punch . . . Punch . . . Matrix . . . Mould
. . . Illustrations . . . Type-Making as Illustrated by Moxon in 1683
. . . As Illustrated by Amman in 1564 . . . Notices of Type-Making
by Earlier Authors . . . Type-Mould the Symbol of Typography . . .
Inventor of the Type-Mould the Inventor of Typography . . . A Great
Invention, but Original only in the Type-Mould.
* * * * *
The character of typography is not pressing and printing but
mobilization. The winged A is its symbol. The elements unchained,
the letters freed from every bond in which the pen or chisel of
calligrapher or xylographer held them entangled; the cut character
risen from the tomb of the solitary tablet into the substantive life
of the cast types—that is the invention of printing.
_Van der Linde._
* * * * *
There is a wide-spread belief that typography was, in all its details,
a purely original invention. A popular version of its origin, hereafter
to be related, says that it was the result of an accidental discovery;
a conflicting version says that it was the result of more than thirteen
years of secret experiment. Each version teaches us that there was
no perceptible unfolding of the invention; that the alleged inventor
created all that he needed, that he made his types, ink and presses,
that he derived nothing of value from the labors of earlier printers.
If typography was invented by Gutenberg, it was fitly introduced by
the sudden appearance of the printed Bible in two folio volumes; if
invented by Coster, by the unheralded publication of a thin folio of
large [p050] wood-cuts with descriptive text of type. If either of
these versions is accepted in the form in which it is usually told, we
must also believe that printing, in the form of perfected typography,
leaped, Minerva-like, fully equipped, from the brain of the inventor.
There is another belief, which is strongly maintained by a few
scholars, that typography was not an original invention, that it was
nothing more than a new application of the old theories and methods
of impression which have already been described. According to this
view, the practice of engraving is at least as old as the oldest
Egyptian seal; the publication of written language can be traced to the
Babylonish bricks; printing with ink, as indicated by old Roman hand
stamps, was practised as early as the fifth century; the combinations
of movable letters were suggested by Cicero and St. Jerome. All that
was needed for the full development of typography was the invention of
paper. Supplied with paper, the so-called inventor of typography did no
more than combine the old theories and processes, and give them a new
application. He really invented nothing.
In this conflict of opinion, the critical reader will note an inability
to perceive the difference between impression and typography. Those
who believe in the entire originality of typography ascribe its merit
to the mind that first thought of the combinations of types; those
who deny its originality find its vital element in pressure. With one
class, the merit of the invention is in the idea of types; with the
other, it is in the impression of types. Neither view is entirely
correct.
A printer may see how these errors could be developed. The unreflecting
observer, who, for the first time, surveys the operations of a printing
office, finds in the fast presses the true vital principle of printing.
With him, presswork is printing; type-setting and type-making are
only adjuncts. He was the inventor of the modern art of printing who
built the first press, and printed the first book. The conclusion
is illogical, as will be shown on another page. If a radical [p051]
improvement had not been made in the earliest method of printing
books, the art would have been as unproductive in Europe as it has
been in China. The fast press may do its work admirably, but its only
functions are those of inking and impressing, and impression is not
typography.
The thoughtful observer will perceive that the merit of modern printing
is not in impression; that there would be neither fast presses, nor
great books, nor daily newspapers, if there were no types. With him,
whatever of greatness there is in printing is due to the mind that
first imagined the utility of types. The grandness of the results that
have been achieved by typography seem all the grander when he thinks
that these results have been accomplished with such simple tools as
little cubes of metal. The making of these tools he regards as a matter
of minor importance. For in these types are visible no intricacy of
mechanism as in the power loom, no indications of a mysterious agency
as in the magnetic telegraph, no evidences of scientific skill as
in photographic apparatus. There are in types, apparently, no more
evidences of genius or science than there are in pins or needles. The
grotesque types of the fifteenth century are rated by him, and even by
many mechanics, as rude workmanship which could have been done by a
carver in wood or a founder in metal. He who could imagine them could
make them. To think was to do. The merit of the invention of typography
is accordingly adjudged, not to the inventive spirit which constructed
the mould by which the types were made, but to the genius which first
thought of the utility of types. This is a grave error.
Speculations like these, which assign all the merit of the invention of
typography to him who first conceived the idea of types, are opposed to
many facts and probabilities. Cicero and Jerome could not have been the
only men who thought of the combinations of engraved letters; nor were
the old Roman lamp-makers and branders of cattle the only men who used
types. The idea of stamping with detached letters [p052] could have
been entertained, and practised, by hundreds of experimenters of whom
there is no tradition. It is probable that there was such a practice,
but the stamping of single types by hand pressure was not typography,
nor did it lead to its subsequent invention. Experimental types like
these, which had been cut by hand, were of no practical value, for they
could not have been used on any extensive scale.
[Illustration: Illustration of Types of Irregular Body.]
There is something more in types than is apparent at the first glance.
Simple as they may seem, they are evidences of notable mechanical skill
in the matter of accuracy. The page before the reader was composed
with more than 2,000 pieces of metal; the large page of a daily paper
may contain more than 150,000 of these little pieces. Whether the page
is large or small, the types are always closely fitted to each other;
they stand accurately in line, and the page is truly square. If the
types of one character, as of the letter a, should be made the merest
trifle larger or smaller than its fellows in the same font, all the
types, when composed, will show the consequences of the defect. The
irregularity of line that is scarcely perceptible in the first row
will be offensively distinct in the second. It will increase with each
succeeding row, until the types become a heap of confusion which cannot
be handled by the printer. Advantages which might be secured from
movable types are made of no effect by an irregularity so slight that
it would be passed unnoticed in the workmanship of ordinary trades. The
illustration proves that it is not enough for types to be movable; they
must be accurate as to body; they must fit each other with geometrical
precision.
The accuracy of modern printing types is due more to the nice
mechanisms employed by the type-founder than to his personal skill.
He could cut types by hand, but the cost of hand-cut types would be
enormous, and they would be vastly [p053] inferior to types made
by the type-casting machine. He could make types by a variety of
mechanical methods, but they would be imperfect and unsatisfactory.
A careful survey of the impracticable inventions in type-founding,
recorded in the patent offices of this country and Great Britain,
proves that there is, virtually, but one method of making types. The
requirements of accuracy and cheapness can be met only by making them
of metal, and casting them in a mould of metal.[10]
Although it is clearly understood, by all persons who have a practical
knowledge of the subject, that practical types can be made only by
casting, many popular books repeat the old story that the first
typographic books were printed with types which had been cut by hand
out of wood or metal. Whether the mechanics of the middle ages could
have done what modern mechanics cannot do,—cut types with bodies of
satisfactory accuracy—need not now be considered. The stories about
hand-made types—about types that were sawed out of wood blocks—about
types that were cut out of wooden rods, and skewered together with iron
wires—about types that were engraved on the ends of cubes of metal—will
be examined at greater length on an advanced page. Even if these
doubtful stories were verified, it would still remain to be proved that
the cut types had advantages over letters engraved on wood. It would be
difficult to give reasons for their introduction. Books composed with
cut types could not be neatly printed; they would be inferior to good
manuscripts in appearance, but not inferior in price. Cut types [p054]
were as impracticable in the infancy of the art as they are now. There
is no trustworthy evidence that they were ever used for any other
purpose than that of experiment.
Every method for making merchantable types, save that of casting, is
a failure. Typography would be a great failure, if its types were not
cast by scientific methods. This understood, we can see that the most
meritorious feature in the invention does not belong to him who first
thought of the advantages of types, nor even to him who first made them
by impracticable methods. Its honors are really due to the man to whose
sagacity and patience in experiment we are indebted for the type-mould,
for he was the first to make types which could be used with advantage.
[Illustration]
It will now be necessary to explain the scientific method of making
types which is practised by every type-founder. The first process
is the making of model letters. The work begins with the cutting on
steel of a tool which is known as the Counter-punch. The illustration
represents the face of a counter-punch for the letter H, of the size
usually known among type-founders as Double-English. This counter-punch
is an engraving, in high relief, of the hollow or the counter of that
interior part of the letter H which does not show black in the printed
impression. It has apparently, no resemblance to the letter for which
it is made. When the proportions of the counter-punch have been duly
approved, it is stamped or impressed to a proper depth on the end of a
short bar of soft steel. Properly stamped, the counter-punch finishes
by one quick stroke the interior part of the model letter, and does it
more quickly and neatly than it could be done by cutting tools.
[Illustration: Punch.]
[Illustration: Matrix.[11]]
The short bar of soft steel is known as a Punch. When it has received
the impress of the counter-punch, the punch cutter, for so the engraver
of letters is called in type-foundries, cuts away the outer edges
until the model letter is pronounced perfect. This is work of great
exactness, for the millions of types that may be made by means of the
punch [p055] will reproduce all its peculiarities, whether of merit or
defect. The steel of the punch is then hardened until it has sufficient
strength to penetrate prepared copper. It is then punched, by quick
and strong pressure, on the flat side of a narrow bar of cold rolled
copper. This operation makes a reversed or sunken imprint of the letter
on the punch. In this condition, the punched copper bar is known among
type-founders as a Drive, or a Strike, or an Unjustified Matrix. It
becomes the Matrix proper, only after it has been carefully fitted-up
to suit the mould. The exterior surface of the drive must be made truly
flat, and this flatness must be parallel with the face of the stamped
or sunken letter in the interior. The sides of the drive must be
squared, so that the interior letter shall be at a fixed distance from
the sides. The depth of the stamped letter, and its distance from the
sides, must be made absolutely uniform in all the matrices required for
a font or a complete assortment of letters. The object of this nicety
is to secure a uniform height to all the types, and to facilitate the
frequent changes of matrix on the mould. The justifying and fitting of
matrices to moulds is one of the most exact operations in the art of
type-founding.
For every character or letter really required in a full working
assortment of types, the type-founder cuts a separate punch and fits up
a separate matrix; but for all the characters or letters which are made
to be used together, there is but one mould. Types are of no use, as
has been shown, if they cannot be arranged and handled with facility,
and printed in lines that are truly parallel. However unlike they
may be in face, they must be exactly alike in body. This uniformity
of body, which is as [p056] essential as variety of face, can be
most certainly secured by casting all the types in one mould. All the
matrices are, consequently, made with a view to being fitted to one
mould. The mould forms the body, and the matrix forms the face of the
type. With nearly every change of matrix there must be a new adjustment
of the mould.
The word Body, as used by printers and type-founders, means the
measurement of a type in one direction only—in a direction at a right
angle with the regular lines or rows of printed matter. The types of
the accompanying illustration are of the same height, but they are of
different bodies.
[Illustration:
Pica Small-pica Long-primer Bourgeois Brevier Minion Nonpareil
body. body. body. body. body. body. body.
(See also page 18.)]
Exactness of body could be secured with little difficulty if all the
types belonging to the same font were of the same width, and could be
cast in one fixed and unalterable mould. But types of the same font
and same body are of all widths. They vary, in the letters from the
l to the W; in the spaces or blanks used to separate the words, from
the hair space to the three-em quadrat. The spaces in the following
illustrations are of the same body, but they are of different widths,
to suit the peculiarities of different kinds of printed matter.
[Illustration:
Six-in-em Five-in-em Four-in-em Three-in-em
space. space. space. space.
En Em Two-em Three-em
quadrat. quadrat. quadrat. quadrat.]