Page 17 - All About History 55 - 2017 UK

The printing press
Paper is placed upside down into a frame
called a frisket to keep it in position,
then is lowered onto the set type, which
has been slicked with ink. This is then
placed under a large threaded screw
press, which has a lever that has to be
pulled tight to apply the ink to the paper. Sticky ink
Gutenberg’s printing
process needed a slightly
sticky and deeper black
ink to produce a good
print. Unlike the water-
based ink for woodblock
printing, Gutenberg
combined linseed oil,
resin and soot for his
ink. When printing, the
type was coated with ink
using spongy, leather-
covered ink balls.

Printing paper
Papermaking was a skill that had
to be refined for printing. Chinese
paper, which spread westwards in the
Middle Ages, was fine for printing from
woodblocks, but too soft for print. The
paper used by scribes was too hard. It
took a lot of experimentation to discover
the right consistency. For higher quality,
vellum was used instead of paper.

Gutenberg’s Bible
Gutenberg chose to set his Bible in two columns, because this
was the tradition followed by scribes for centuries. The short
lines are easy to read, the columns form pleasing proportions
between horizontals and verticals and the wide margins leave
plenty of room for illustrations. But Gutenberg aimed to do
better than any scribe. For instance, it was hard for a scribe to
create a ‘justified’ right-hand margin, but easy for a typesetter.

The hand mould
The hand mould is something familiar to many
generations of printers. The type-maker poured hot
metal — a combination of lead, tin and antimony —
into a slot on to an imprint of a letter. This produced
a ‘type’ on which the letter was reversed. In © Adrian Mann
printing, it comes out the right way round.

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