Roman Type Wasn’t Built in a Day

I orig­i­nal­ly wrote the fol­low­ing post as a research paper for an under­grad­u­ate art his­to­ry class. Later, I took the text and used it as the basis for design­ing a book in a graph­ic design class. I’ve always loved all that I learned on the project and can hon­est­ly say that I enjoyed every hour I spent either in the library read­ing or in front of the print­er try­ing to get spreads to line up.

an intro­duc­tion to typography’s begin­nings based on a his­tor­i­cal research paper

Typography, and graph­ic design in gen­er­al, is an ever evolv­ing, process dri­ven field. This is the same today as it was 500 years ago when mass print­ing was just begin­ning in Europe. By exam­in­ing the evo­lu­tion and typog­ra­phy of this incunab­u­la peri­od, the novice design­er can learn both the intri­ca­cies and his­to­ry of type.

The Italian Renaissance that occurred from the four­teenth through six­teenth cen­turies caused rev­o­lu­tion­ary changes in human his­to­ry that still impact soci­ety and cul­ture today. One aspect that wit­nessed phe­nom­e­nal change was that of book pro­duc­tion. Technological achieve­ments com­bined with cul­tur­al revival of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty cre­at­ed stan­dards of pro­duc­tion and typog­ra­phy that have served as the foun­da­tions of both fields since their incep­tion more than five hun­dred years ago. The change was an evo­lu­tion­ary process that involved both cre­ative inspi­ra­tions from the clas­sics of Greece and Rome as well as trial and error refine­ment of print­ing techniques.

Western civ­i­liza­tion devel­oped reusable, move­able type around 1440. The major break­through came from the per­fec­tion of the mold in which to cast each block of type. With this new method, hun­dreds of pieces of type could be cast in a day allow­ing for mass pro­duc­tion of print­ed mate­ri­als. (Dowding 3) From its ini­tial birth around Mainz, Germany the inno­va­tions quick­ly spread through­out Europe as entre­pre­neurs saw the poten­tial for mass print­ed mate­r­i­al in other mar­kets and began estab­lish­ing press­es across the con­ti­nent. Having found its way to Italy, print­ing and typog­ra­phy under­went fun­da­men­tal changes at the hands of human­ist schol­ars and the print­ers asso­ci­at­ed with pro­vid­ing these edu­cat­ed men with read­ing material.

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