Printing 3829

money, but with whom by this time he had '
quarrelled. Gutenberg had been making ex- (
periments in printing from movable types, first
at Strassburg, afterward at Mainz, since about
1440, and in 1904 there were reproduced in i
facsimile fragments of a calendar, apparently 1
for the year 1448, and of a short poem on the |
Judgment of the World, which may belong to
this experimental period. The publication at
Mainz of the magnificent 42-line Latin Bible,
known as the Gutenberg (or Mazarin) Bible,
marked the completion of the experimental
stage of printing. In 1470 a Frenchman from
Tours, Nicolas Jenson, also began issuing
books at Venice, and his beautiful roman type
has served as a model to many other printers
both in his own day and in recent times. Dur-
ing the 15th century more than a hundred and
fifty firms of printers worked at Venice, whose
output equalled that of all the 70 other Italian
towns where the art of printing was practiced,
and half that of Germany.

The claim of Lourenz Janszoon Coster, an
innkeeper, about whom as the inventor of
printing a fanciful legend sprang up- in the
16th century, is unsupported by any evidence.
In what is now Belgium, printing began at
Alost in 1473; in 1474 or 1475 it was intro-
duced into Spain at Valencia;, and in 1476 in-
to England by William Caxton, who in the
two previous years had printed a few books
at Bruges, with the help of a Bruges calli-
grapher, Cokrd Mansion. The first book
printed by Caxton at Bruges was The Recuyell
of the Historyes of Troye; the first dated book
printed in England, The Dictes and Sayings of
the Philosophers (1477). About 1520 the pri-
macy of European printing passed from Italy
to France; and under the influence of the
Estiennes, Simon Colines, Geoffroy Tory, and
Jean de Tournes much excellent and scholarly
work was produced both in Paris and in Ly-
ons. When religious persecution lost France
many of her best printers, Antwerp, under the
influence of Christopher Plantin, became for
a time the most important center of printing
in Europe. But by the beginning of the i7th
century the desire for cheapness, which had
caused a steady deterioration in both paper
and ink, had reduced printing to a low'level
all over Europe. But toward the end of the
17th century British printers, who had hither-
to slavishly imitated the Dutch, now began
•to initiate good work, partly through the im-
proved types supplied by William Caslon (d.
1766), the first great English typefounder.
The experiments of John Baskerville (1706-

_____________________________ Printing

75; with type.- in which the differences be-
tween the thin and thick strokes were strong-
ly accentuated, were imitated abroad in Italy
by Bodoni of Parma (1740-1813;, in France
by Didot (1720-1804), and in Germany by
Goschen of Leipzig (1752-18:8). The re-
vived use of old-faced type by the Chiswick
Press (founded by Charles Whittingharn in
1789) was followed by an increased attention
to the decoration of books, which after some
vicissitudes reached its culmination in the ex-
periments of William Morris and his follow-
ers with the books of the Kelmscott Press, the
Vale Press, the Dove Press, and others.

It is probable that intaglio printing may
be considered one of the earliest forms of
printing used, as some time before the date
ascribed for the invention of letterpress
printing, mediaeval goldsmiths doing niello
work were accustomed to fill the incised lines
in the metal plates with coloring matter from
which proofs showing the progress of the
design could be drawn.

Composition is the name given to the op-
erations of setting type and preparing it for
the printing press. The kcopy' is 'set' by a
compositor standing in front of two trays.
The two cases are designated as upper and
lower cases, the upper case containing the
capital letters, signs, etc., the lower case hold-
ing the small or lower-case letters of the al-
phabet, the figures, punctuation marks, etc,
In letting/ the compositor picks out one by
one the letters needed to form each word, and
arranges them in a 'composing stick' or metal
box (set to the required width of page or
column), which he holds in his left hand.
Type, being the reverse of the printed im-
pression, is set from left to right and upside
down.

A galley is a shallow quadrangular box,
open at the top and at one end. A 'proof
(rough impression) is then taken from the
matter on a hand-press, or more frequently
a specially designed proof-press, and is given
to a 'reader' for comparison with the copy.
Corrections to be made are noted on the
proofs by special 'readers' marks/ the com-
monest of which are shown in the accom-
panying illustration. It should be noted that
today very little 'straight matter* is set by
hand. Although matter set by a skillful com-
positor presents a more smooth, even, and
beautiful appearance, typesetting machines
are able to do this work so much more cheap-
ly that hand-set matter is used only in de
luxe editions o! books and in advertising dis-