Movable type

A letter is a unit in a written language system, a form which when combined with other forms / units adds up to an understandable sum, ie words. It is an absolutely ingenious invention, whose civilizational and cultural importance are impossible to assess. It is the foundation of the modern man.

To create and combine letters may differ in difficulty depending on the method chosen, some are fast and relatively simple; just take a pen and suitable material to draw the letters on and get started, or lift the lid on your computer, start a word processor or Web browser and start combining digital letters. It’s fast, and you can easily rewrite something if you make a mistake.

Other methods may be more laborious, but can at the same time renew and deepen the way one looks at and understand letters and their condition. One method, which also led to this blog post, is to use movable type – small rods in lead with mirror reliefs of the letters / numbers / punctuation on one end – in order to create words. Invented by Gutenberg around 1450, and still in use, the movable type has survived numerous technological advances and it’s still in use, although to a considerably lesser extent, which is pretty good for a piece of 600-year old technology. I myself have had the pleasure, at a Falsbenets workshop, to print, emboss and foil smaller sections of text onto different notebooks and materials using movable type.

The movable type as a component in print production created a new profession – type setters. Artisans whose work was to painstakingly combine hundreds of small letters into finished pressing blocks, which were later stained and used to print the letter shapes onto the paper. As a printing method, it might seem pretty laborious when compared to today’s laser, inkjet printers and digital press technologies, but before the movable type the only method to reproduce a book was to sit and copy it by hand, letter by letter *.

Four lines of mavable type placed in a composing stick. In the background: movable type, organized one letter per tray.

I’m no puritan when it comes to printing techniques, each has its place; posters to punk gigs looks punk when done in shitty copiers on crappy paper while a monograph of, say, a prominent graphic artist may advantageously be designed using elements like embossing and letterpressed parts on Mohawk Superfine paper. There is of course no mandatory law – you can do it the other way around if you like, in case you want to experiment and / or have a postmodernist inclination. Anyway, as a graphic designer (or someone who’s just interested in typography and traditional printing techniques) in a soon-to-be digital world, it can be nice to know the history of the printed letter. There is plenty of information on movable type and printing techniques on the Internet, but no information sounds so sweet as when it is filtered through Stephen Fry’s soft, very British English:

If you’re interested in trying to print with movable type I recommend looking for courses in small bookbinding workshops in your vicinity (commercial printers are likely to have no such equipment and are even less interested in holding courses). You can also check with Graphic Museums, or the County Museum in your county, where there is usually some print enthusiast more than happy to share what he or she knows.