Often credited as being the most influential invention of all time, Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type printing press was as revolutionary to the world of communications as the Internet.

His first hit publication, the Gutenberg Bible, would have cost an average clerk three years wages - a snip compared to the cost of a handwritten version.

Feeding the renaissance, Gutenberg’s invention led to the education of the masses and is celebrated as a turning point history that brought Western Europe out of the culturally stagnant Middle Ages.

With its wooden and later metal movable type, his printing techniques brought down the price of printed materials and paved the way for the mass production of books.

MC visited Beamish Museum to speak to historian, print shop expert and former print compositor, Phil Paisley.

“The Chinese had been producing printed books and manuscripts for centuries, but the industry as we currently know it took off in the 1455, when Gutenberg invented the first sets of movable type.

“Making metal moulds into which he poured liquid metal, he cast letters in a lead and tin alloy. This meant the type was more durable than its wooden predecessors and could be copied with speed and economy.”

Hailing from the grape producing region of the German Rhineland he adapted an old wine press and set about producing his first copies of the bible.

In the 1470s an Italian bishop wrote that three printers working for three months could produce 300 copies of a book and estimated that it would have taken three scribes a lifetime each to complete the same task.

While Gutenberg’s methods largely remained unchanged until the nineteenth century, the greatest innovations in the industry during that time came in the development of new typefaces:

“When the print revolution began, the commonly used typeface was the old English Gothic style Textura Characters. Referred to as black letters because they were thick bold characters, Textura was hard to read on the printed page, and this lead to the development of the ‘white letter’.”

Designed by people like Jensen, Bodoni and Garamond, the creation of new styles of white letter became an industry in itself with the designer selling cases of type to print houses across Europe:

“These letters were simpler, more readable, more durable than wooden blocks and could be arranged and rearranged as many times as the printer wished. Having different typefaces and point sizes also brought the printed page to life and looked less boring to reader.”

“The compositor would sit with his setting stick in palm of his left hand with the written articles and cases of type face in front of him. The upper case would contain the capitals and the lower case would contain the normal sentence case.”

Once a skilled typesetter, you would be able to look at the writers copy in front of you and put the columns of type together without looking down at the typefaces.

When the setting stick was filled, the column of type was transferred to the galley, a frame containing the composition of one page of print.

“Ink was rolled over the type and a simple proof taken and checked. Once read and corrected, the galley was given to the ‘stonehand’ who would have the editor’s page layout and would put the stories in the right place. The sub editors ‘subs’ made sure the stories fitted and the headlines were dropped in last of all.”

Once the page was finished it was sent to the stereotype department to make the semi-circular plates that would be attached to drums of the print machine.

For hundreds of years innovation in printing centred on the development of new typefaces, such as Times Roman, Helvetica and Gill, which was developed by Eric Gill especially for the London Underground.

The development of cylinder presses in the late 1700s increased in the volume and speed of the print process and by the mid 1800s had been adapted to make use of steam power.

The biggest breakthrough in pre-print production and mechanical composition came in the 1880s – over 400 years after Gutenberg:

“In 1886 across the Atlantic, Otmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype machine. This produced lines of type at a time using a keyboard and a molten metal alloy.”

“About the same time, Tolbert Lanston introduced the Monotype machine which consisted of a keyboard and a casting machine. It had a ‘Qwerty’ layout keyboard, except there was no such thing as a shift key. There was a keyboard for capitals, one for lower case characters and others for bold, italic and the numerals.”

The use of ‘hot metal’ to create the type and plates continued until the 1960s when it was overtaken by lithographic offset printing.

Originally developed for printing on to metal, the process is the most a widely used printing technique today. An inked image is transferred or ‘offset’ from a plate first to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface.

With the digital age upon us another print revolution is imminent. Already used widely on lower volume shorter run jobs, digital printing allows artwork to be sent directly from the computer to the printer without the need for plates.

Considered a marketers dream and the ultimate expression of the ‘mail merge’, Digital Print allows every copy to be personalised to recipients and potential customers.

While yet to be cost effective on larger print runs, the technology is still in its infancy, but over time is sure to bring to an end a golden age of the print press which has thrived for over 500 years.

*Indebted to his backers, Johannes Gutenberg was financially unsuccessful during his lifetime and ended up giving us one of the greatest inventions ever for free. Ironically the greatest publishing medium of the modern age- the Internet - was given to the world rolyalty free by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee KBE.

Print phrases

• ‘Drop the dead donkey’ – the ‘donkey’ was the filler story which would get pushed back from one edition to the next until eventually it was dropped all together
• ‘Upper case / lower case’ –As the typesetter worked, he would stand in front of the typeface, the upper case of type containing the capitals and lower case in easier reach contained the more widely used sentence case.
• ‘Coin a phrase’ – ‘Quoins’ are used to wedge columns of type in the printers ‘chase’. Printers believed to put things in type was to make them permanent and believe this to be the origin of the phrase, ‘Quoin a phrase’.

Pivotal moments...

• 1447 – Gutenberg’s invents movable type and his printing press
• 1500s - Typefaces begin to be developed
• 1796 – lithography invented by Alois Senefelder
• 1800s - 1850’s – development of powered presses
• 1886 – Linotyope machine invented by Otmar Mergenthaler.
• 1887 – Monotype machine invented by Tolbert Lanston
• 1903 –Ira Washington Rubel first used the offset printing techniques to print on paper
• 1960s – Hot metal type composition gives way to the development of photomechanical printing plates. Documents to be printed are first recorded on film negatives. Images from such negatives are then transferred to photomechanical printing plates
• 1990s – Digital printing allows us to send artwork instantly to press

Offsett printing...

American Ira Washington Rubel was the first person to use an offset press to print on paper. In 1903 he noticed that whenever a sheet of paper was not fed into his lithographic press during operation, the stone printed its image to the rubber-covered impression cylinder, and the next impression had an image on both sides - direct litho on the front and an image from the rubber blanket on the back. He then noticed that the image on the back of the sheet was much sharper and clearer than the direct litho image because the soft rubber was able to press the image onto the paper better than the hard stone.