"How were the Earliest European Printing Types Made?"
Joint Lecture by Paul Needham and Blaise Agüera y Arcas,
Princeton University
Co-sponsored with the Bibliographical Society of America.
The Grolier Club, New York.
Paul Needham, Scheide Librarian, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Princeton
University, argued for a new theory about how the earliest printing types
were made. By common consent of historians and bibliographers, the essence
of Gutenberg's invention was the creation of individual character or
letter punches, from which matrices could be struck, and multiple
identical castings made. Various alternative opinions from the eighteenth
century onward, hypothesizing woodcut letter forms, casting in sand, and
other possibilities, have never occupied the center ground. By means of
automated comparison of digital images of individual letter forms in early
incunables, all these opinions can be tested: none of them meet the
evidence. The speakers hypothesized an alternative, hitherto
unrecognized system of typemaking which began with Gutenberg and held the
ground in European printing shops until, around the mid-1470s, it began to
be gradually replaced by fonts cast from punches and matrices. Free and open to the public.
Postscript: The lecture was reviewed by
Stephen O. Saxe in the APHA Newsletter
Spring issue (available online). The lecture was also featured in
the Saturday, January 26, 2001, New York Times in "Has History
been too Generous to Gutenberg?" By Dinitia Smith. Some excerpts:
[Needham and Agüera y Arcas] used computer enhancement to magnify
the typeface of the Calixtus Bull, a letter from the Vatican printed by
Gutenberg that sought to raise money to fight the Turks, and of two
Bibles printed in Gutenberg types that are at the Scheide Library.
[....] The scholars said they discovered that individual letters
differed in shape from one another in such a way that they could not
have come from the same metal mold. [....] Mr. Needham and Mr. Agüera y
Arcas say they believe that Gutenberg employed a cruder printing method,
sand casting, used at the time for making metal objects. The two
scholars suspect Gutenberg made his molds in sand, then poured lead
alloy into them to create letters. (full
text available from the New York Times -- registration
required)
The
American Printing History Association