type foundries in the beginning of print

[Member Yar…]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I'm currently working on an essays about the christian Hebrew typographer named Guillaume Le Be from the 16th century, and i want to elaborate about the profession of type design and type foundries. As i understood, the first type designers were craftsmen, often jewelers who were commissioned to create the letters by the printers/publishers. Then, in some point in history, type foundries were created and supplied type for the printers.

What i need is a good online source which i can cite and reference, dealing with this transition from sole craftsmanship to the commercial type foundry.

[Member old…]

Whenever a process which previously requires craftsmanship can be mechanized, it generally has been: it's called Industrial Capitalism. Scottish weavers fiercely resisted the Industrial Revolution as long as they could, but the cheaper prices brought about by mass production did them in. Doubtless, the process of founding type followed a similar arc…

[Member hra…]

If you don't find an online source, take an offline source, put it on your own site, and refer to it. :-)

hhp

[Member Wil…]

Printing was from the beginning mass production for sale. It was the first industrial production.

[Member Joh…]

Nick, the industrial capitalism phase of type making -- i.e. the period in which the means of type production are owned by people whose engagement in the enterprise is wholly financial and not enacted in labour -- didn't really come about until the 19th Century. In the 18th Century, one can see the end of the transition from the itinerant craft tradition of the renaissance and early baroque periods to that of foundries. One could say that the distinction is between the punchcutter travelling to the customer and the type travelling to the customer. But unlike, say, the introduction of mechanised weaving, the early foundries tended to be established by punchcutters, sometimes in partnership with publishers who had been their customers, or with other financial investment. So, for example, if you look at the Dutch punchcutters of the 18th Century, such as Fleischmann, you see him first working as a punchcutter for publishers and for other type founders, and then setting up his own type foundry.
_____

Bill, how are you defining 'industrial production'? Is 'mass production' in itself a sufficient criterion, or is the method of production to be considered also? Or some ratio of the quantity of production to the quantity of labour?

Setting type, even by hand, and printing books on a wooden handpress is surely more efficient than having scribes produce individual copies, but in terms of production it seems to me on a level with producing cloth on a handloom: more efficient than knitting, but not really industrial.

[Member Yar…]

yes hrant, of course, you are right.
but i was afraid that i would not find a good source about this in israel. not that there aren't books, libraries, etc here, it's just that you might recommend on something i can't reach. therefor i asked for an online source.

but if you kind folks have some book or an essay about this, and you are willing to scan some of it, i would be thankful :)

[Member Yar…]

how do you flag spammers here?

[Member Yar…]

hi John Hudson.
have you any good online/offline source about this?

btw i have read that garamond had his type foundry (am i right?),
also Guillaume le be (which was his successor).
i am still unsure about the notion of type foundry versus the craftsman in the renaissance, because i lack a good source. i understood that type was used and sold and resold. Famous printer Christof Plantin bought 21 fonts (i.e. metal sets of letters) in 1555 and brought them to Antwerp in order to open his print house -"the golden compass". that may show that type was still rare at that time, and often re-used for long periods.

that was quite common with hebrew types that were even rarer and used until the letters crumbled.

[Member hra…]

how do you flag spammers here?

With a white flag? :-/

hhp

[Member old…]

William,

I would argue that printing was the first mass medium; however, as John Hudson pointed out, the capitalists didn’t get involved in type founding as early as they did with other enterprises. Most likely, there wasn’t enough demand until more of the population became literate: people who can’t read aren’t likely to buy too many books…

[Member Nic…]

William, the Arsenale in Venice was an earlier example of industrial production, an assembly line for boats.

Kilns were an ancient form of industrial production, with bricks pressed in wooden forms being the uniform mass-produced object—although hand-turned amphorae were consistent in size and shape.

Pottery perhaps preceded salt making in industrial production, as ceramic bowls were required to reduce the salt. Solnitsata, the oldest town in Europe, was founded on the production of salt 6,000 years ago. I don’t know whether there was a standard form for salt cake distribution, as there was later with the sugar loaf.

And of course monetary coins were an early form of standardized industrial production.

[Member Joh…]

The Scythe and the Rabbit
This new book, a collection of essays on Simon de Colines by Kay Amert, edited by Robert Bringhurst, is vert good on the development of type casting and printing in renaissance Paris, and includes quite a lot about Le Be's famous 'Memorandum', a kind of memoir of the Parisian typographic scene in the early 16th Century.

The massive Enchedé/Carter Typefoundries in the Netherlands book provides a very good insight into the kinds of relationships that existed between punchcutters, printer publishers and foundries from the 16th to the 18th Centuries.

[Member Wil…]

John, Nick, I confess I don't know the history. But printing does seem to be significantly different from most crafts in terms of standardized ingredients, specialization of individual jobs, and mass distribution of products. Also I'm wondering if Venice quickly becoming the center for printing had anything to do with the rise of capitalism, as if I remember correctly Venice was a pioneer in that as well.

[Member hra…]

One thing I learned (or maybe re-learned) from Lane's "The diaspora of Armenian Printing, 1512-2012"* is that Venice was the destination of refugees from the sack of Mainz (the cradle of Western printing). Why they ended up going there though I have no idea.

* http://www.oakknoll.com/detail.php?d_booknr=109505

Also, I just found this:
http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/firstimpressions/Spread-of-Print-thr...

hhp

[Member Yar…]

John,
thank you very much.
i know Bringhurst from the massive "the elements of typographic style v3.0".
so this book is surely comprehensive.

[Member Yar…]

if i recall correctly,
from my history studies of the time of the pre - french revolution (which is about two centuries after the 16th century), especially what i read in hobsbaum's book, most of the "industries" were more like workshops, not the heavy industries we know from the 19th century onwards. it doesn't mean that there were not massive undertakings, but usually these escapades were directed from the rulers, not by manufacturers of the market.

however i also know that Christoff Plantin hired 200 workers in order to print the polyglot bible. so he must have been quite busy.

about 4000 hebrew books were printed alone in the 16th century. this is certainly not the "industry" of the modern times onwards, so our question is dealing with the definition of industrialism.

[Member Yar…]

from wiki,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_capitalism#Industrialism

-Mercantilism-

The period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is commonly described as mercantilism. This period, the Age of Discovery, was associated with geographic exploration being exploited by merchant overseas traders, especially from England and the Low Countries; the European colonization of the Americas; and the rapid growth in overseas trade. Mercantilism was a system of trade for profit, although commodities were still largely produced by non-capitalist production methods.

While some scholars see mercantilism as the earliest stage of capitalism, others argue that capitalism did not emerge until later.

[Member Yar…]

Nick, was the assembly line for boats a commercial business, or created by the government/military.
correct me if i'm wrong, but it's one thing for a singular or governmental phenomenon - such as these are old as the pyramids and earlier.
it's another thing for a recurring phenomenon powered by private market.

[Member Joh…]

While some scholars see mercantilism as the earliest stage of capitalism, others argue that capitalism did not emerge until later.

In either case, a useful distinction can still be made between mercantile capitalism (or proto-capitalism) and industrial capitalism. One is centred on a market of manufactured goods; the other is centred on a market of capital goods. The latter is formalised in the modern stock market system, in which it becomes the norm for the people who own shares in the means of manufacture to be completely uninvolved in the process of manufacture, even in a managerial role. When this model is applied to banking, it leads to the third phase: finance capitalism, which is centred on a market of debt.

[Member Wil…]

Very interesting numbers in the Wikipedia article on the printing press:

"By 1500, the printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million copies. In the following century, their output rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies.

"European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing 3,600 impressions per workday. By comparison, movable type printing in the Far East, which did not know presses and was solely done by manually rubbing the back of the paper to the page, did not exceed an output of forty pages per day."

This confirms my feeling that printing was mass production on a scale never seen in history. It was hand powered until the 19th century, but the specialization and mass production were similar to what energy-powered manufactures were, and must have been a model for it.

[Member old…]

The only real difference between Mercantilism and Capitalism is the means by which small groups of individuals accumulate massive amounts of wealth; likewise, shipbuilding served both commercial and political ends, although—as the history of the East India Company reveals—there really is precious little difference between the two…

[Member Yar…]

quite impressive, William.

[Member hra…]

"did not exceed an output of forty pages per day."

"... at the hands of a conjoined twin, during a famine."

Don't believe everything you read.

hhp

[Member Ber…]

i understood that type was used and sold and resold. Famous printer Christof Plantin bought 21 fonts (i.e. metal sets of letters) in 1555 and brought them to Antwerp in order to open his print house -"the golden compass". that may show that type was still rare at that time, and often re-used for long periods.

There seems to be some confusion about this 'trading'… What Plantin bought were sets of matrices, eg the base needed for casting type (it is more complicated than stated here; the process could result in multiple matrices — Smeijers's Counterpunch is an enlightening book on this matter).

The Enschedé story is similar: they acquired matrices from various sources during an extended period.

[Member Wil…]

Just thinking about it, I'm pretty sure that the mass production of coins much earlier, in Europe and Asia, and also of ceramics in China was on the scale of printing, in the millions. One of the features of industrial production that is pointed to is the production of identical parts, to be assembled later. That is a feature of type, so maybe that is an innovation (of the Chinese). The history of mass production looks pretty interesting, but I haven't read anything on it.