Value

is in the Eye of the Beholder

Kumkum Nadig
July 25, 2020

Looking at the Letterpress that sits in the Print Studio of my college I am
naturally drawn to its simplicity of form and function but also intensely aware
of the fact that this is an antique piece of machinery that was once a primary
means of livelihood as well as a significant part of a bustling and proliferating
printing industry for many in the print industry in the 16th to 19th centuries.
Like many other objects and equipment this piece of machinery too has been
replaced by new and technologically superior printing machines which are
faster, cheaper, providing superior image resolution, and far more versatile as
some can also print on variety of mediums other than paper. What intrigues
me most about this antique press is its relevance, use and demand even today!
Unlike any other antique objects why is it that the Letterpress still finds
numerous admirers and passionate users even after 600 years since it was first
created? Is there any other piece of machinery that is still in use and in
demand after so many centuries? What is it about Letterpress that we still love
to work with it and not just place it in a museum as an artifact even though it is
an artisanal form?

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For print enthusiasts, students of art, printmaking, and graphic design, working
on a Letterpress is a deeply engaging craft, which for hundreds of years was
just known as printing. Letterpress printing is one of the oldest form of printing
imagined and created by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around 1440. It is a
form of relief printing, where the text is on a raised surface, and each letter is
set upside-down and reversed in a composing stick by hand. Ink is applied to
the raised surface which could be text or an image, and then paper is pressed
directly against it to transfer the text. This invention by Gutenberg is also
known as Moving Type where an adjustable type mold allowed many pieces of
type to be cast at once and therefore enabled printing of large number of
pages at a never before known speed and rate. Letterpress printing remained
the primary mode of printing from the mid 15th century until the 19th century.
The Gutenberg Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and newspapers during
the Civil War – all shaped history with the power of the letterpress.

The Letterpress also played a pivotal role in the history of publishing, an
account of the selection, preparation, and marketing of printed matter from its
origins in ancient times to the present. The activity has grown from small
beginnings into a vast and complex industry responsible for the dissemination
of all manner of cultural material; its impact upon civilization is impossible to
calculate.1

The English philosopher Francis Bacon, who is credited with developing the
scientific method, wrote in 1620 that the three inventions that forever
changed the world were gunpowder, the nautical compass and the printing
press.

The invention of printing press had a very wide and significant impact and
influence on society, culture, values, governance and habits. People could now
share knowledge and experiences widely and with far greater speed than ever
before. My inquiry into learning about the effects of this profound invention of
printing took me to look at History.com website that lists seven ways the world
changed the world, pulled Europe out of the dark ages and accelerated human
progress:2

1
Philip Soundy Unwin, George Unwin and Others, History of publishing, Encyclopædia
Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., April 02, 2020.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing
2
Dave Roos, 7 Ways the Printing Press Changed the World, History Stories, History.Com,
Original Aug 28, 2019. Updated Sept 3, 2019.
https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-

2

Johannes Gutenberg’s first printing press.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Listing the 7 ways that according to Dave Roos, Letterpress changed the world:
1. Launch of a Global News Network
Trading ships carried printed copies of religious texts and literature,
and also news from across the known world. Printers sold four-page
news pamphlets to sailors, when their ships arrived in distant ports.
Since literacy rates were still very low in the 1490s, locals would
gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news,
which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports. “This
radically changed the consumption of news,” says Palmer. “It made
it normal to go check the news every day.” 3

2. The Renaissance kicked into High Gear

14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and
Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system
that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca. By the
1490s, Venice was the book-printing capital of Europe,

3. Martin Luther becomes the first best-selling author
This German religious reformer questioned the church by widely
publishing his messages. From 1518 to 1525, Luther’s writings accounted
for a third of all books sold in Germany and his German Bible went
through more than 430 editions.

renaissance#:~:text=In%20the%2015th%20century%2C%20an,knowledge%20more%20quic
kly%20and%20widely.&text=Knowledge%20is%20power%2C%20as%20the,and%20faster%2
0than%20ever%20before.
3
Historian Ada Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of
Chicago, USA.

3
Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg castle church.
Ipsumpix/Corbis/Getty Images

4. Printing Powers the Scientific Revolution.

For millennia, science was a largely solitary pursuit. Not only
were handwritten copies of scientific data expensive and hard to
come by, they were also prone to human error. With the
newfound ability to print, publish and share scientific findings
and experimental data, science took great leaps forward in the
16th and 17th centuries.

5. Fringe voices get a platform

People who had no voice before printing now could get a platform for
their voices and concerns. As critical and radical opinions entered public
discourse, those in power tried to censor it, which was easy before the
printing press. Not any more.

6. From Public Opinion to Popular Revolution
During the Enlightenment era, philosophers like John
Locke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were widely read
among an increasingly literate populace. Their elevation of
critical reasoning above custom and tradition encouraged people
to question religious authority and prize personal liberty.

7. Machine Steal Jobs from Workers. Before Gutenberg’s paradigm-
shifting invention, scribes were in high demand. Bookmakers would
employ dozens of trained artisans to painstakingly hand-copy and
illuminate manuscripts. But by the late 15th century, the printing press
had rendered their unique skillset all but obsolete.

To further understand the impact of printing on the society and to understand

this genesis of communication technology in a deeper sense, my research took
me to revisit Marshal McLuhan’s book The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which

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even today after 50 years since it was first published is relevant in exploring
and bringing to our attention our relationship to different mediums and modes
of communication technology.

The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a
culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of
the visual. Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and
swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in
evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single
"point of view". He writes: the world of visual perspective is one of unified and
homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken
words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg
technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.4

About 30 years ago, letterpress printing began its decline in India. Mainly due
to the fact that it is tedious, slow and fussy. Printing of books and magazines or
any other material with large chunks of text had already been taken over by
Offset Printing presses. The appetite for skillsets required for setting type was
also diminishing as the aging typesetters did not find apprentices who were
ready and willing to learn this craft. Print technicians jobs in offset presses
were far more in demand than those in Letterpress printing. When I had
visited Prestige Printers, a small printing press in Bangalore that used to do
only letterpress printing since 1950s, I learnt from the owner Mr Desai that his
printshop, had stopped printing books and booklets a few decades ago. Their
main clients since late 20th century were only small independent cinema
houses who used to order printing of their show tickets by letterpress because
it worked out much cheaper for them than printing on offset.

But for every bit of fuss, there’s an equal measure of aesthetic appeal. Martha
Stewart was among the first to highlight this as letterpress faded, and
clamoured for its revival. In the 1990s, her lifestyle empire extolled the
handcrafted look and feel of letterpress work, especially for wedding
invitations. Stewart’s outlets tended to feature prints with a deep relief, known
as debossing, which photographs well at an angle in a shallow depth of field.

4
McLuhan, Marshall, W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, and Dominique Scheffel-Dunand. The
Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. University of Toronto Press, 2011.

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You can feel the impression with your eyes. (Embossing raises paper towards
the reader, pressing up from underneath.)5

This humble piece of printing equipment is attracting my students (as well as

students in other art colleges across the globe) to spend hours and sometimes
days in typesetting with minute attention of detail to leading, word spacing
and composing as they take one impression after the other to print more than
one colour. The reason that I see from an educator’s point of view is the
importance of teaching and making students aware that Type was not always
digital. It had a form, could be held in hand and examined and could be used in
a device to create an impression or a mark on the paper. The journey and
transformation of the Type from being a material object to becoming a virtual
entity is something that I wish to make my students to experience. Most of the
terminologies that were used during Letterpress printing days are still shaping
the language and practice of Typography today even though the tools and
techniques of setting type on a page have changed radically and beyond
compare.

I also see this revived interest and passion for Letterpress amongst the young
learners of art and design as a reaction to the incorrigible digital life that they
are surrounded with. It is almost as if these youngsters are retorting the pixel-
based electronic highway to take a break from the mainstream digital life to
explore the by-lanes of crafting and artisanal ways of making by hand. Just as
the digital media keeps engulfing us, so too does the value and desire for this
steampunk printing technique, as we love its tactile feel, to hold that lead Type
in hand feeling all the 3 dimensions and actually look at it as an object.

Letterpress printing in the very recent years is set to be reborn in a new avatar
as designers now begin using photopolymer plates, which when exposed to UV
and washed out produces relief printing surface. The advantage of this process
is that the visual––whether text or image––is computer generated and not set
by hand. Explaining this new technique of printing on letterpress with a
photopolymer plate Glen Fleishmann reports that ‘Though letterpress might
seem like yet another expression of a society hankering for artisanal, one-of-a-
kind goods in an era of endless, identical reproduction, this return to the past
is different. Beneath the old-timey patina of letterpress goods is a full-scale

5
Glen Fleishmann, “How Letterpress Printing Came Back from the Dead”, Wired Magazine, June 21,
2017 https://www.wired.com/story/how-letterpress-printing-came-back-from-the-dead/

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digital reinvention that drags Gutenberg’s great creation into the full embrace
of modern technology’.

This embrace of digital technique will certainly save a lot of lead and wood
from getting junked and revitalise this craft. However, it leaves me wondering
how it will affect the honesty and integrity of the craft of hand typesetting,
fussing over alignment and spacing, reading type upside-down and backwards
and tying it all up in the corner of a galley to keep it ready for printing. Will it
continue to thrive and generate the same sense of passion and
accomplishment in its digital avatar?

Comparing traditional hand-set type as shown below with the new

Photopolymer plate used in letterpress shown at the bottom.

Source: https://letterpresscommons.com/setting-type-by-hand/

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/how-letterpress-printing-came-back-from-the-dead/

Not just me but many art and design colleges across the world still encourage
students to use the lead and wood type, embarking on the painstaking task of

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hand-setting each letter, using the lead spacers to achieve desired line space,
securing the setting in a composing stick and arranging the chase for printing;
all the while getting their hands inky and eyes squinty.

This perhaps is the only 600 year old technology that we still use and feel
passionate about even today as my students learn the basis of the art, craft
and evolution of typography and layout design. Engaging with this ancient
machine acts as a springboard for them to make the leap into understanding
how to set Type, how to design with Type and what is the basis of some of the
glossary of Typography that continues to be used in this digital age.

I would like to end my paper with some examples of Letterpress Lab and
Postcards designed by my students:

Letterpress machine on Srishti campus where my students have gathered for a demo by our
technician.

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 rd
A 3 year undergraduate student’s work at Srishti where on the left you see the chase which holds
the type set by hand and on the extreme right is the printed outcome on Letterpress of this setting.

In this postcard designed by Srishti student we can see attempts to use blank impression to create
embossed effect with the Type. Note that the period sign is also used to create an embossed texture
all over the postcard.