TYPOGRAPHY. - The discovery of printing, whose consequences were to be incalculable, was favored by the circumstance that copyists could no longer satisfy the orders of the lords, who were increasingly taken with admiration for the classical world, and also by the spread among the people of the love of letters and the need for books. Ingenious and resourceful minds therefore turned their interests and their studies to remedying the crisis arising from the imbalance between demand and supply and to solving the problem concerning the multiplication, by industrial processes, of copies of the works most sought after by the reading public.
The discovery of printing was therefore not the sudden divination of a genius, but the technical development of elements that already pre-existed. The historical process of this discovery has been traced by some back to xylography, or wood engraving, and later to the broadsheets with images of saints (such as the St. Christopher of the Spencer collection, 1423) and to the so-called xylographic (v.) and chiroxylographic books (the Biblia pauperum and other works of a religious character, the Speculum humanae salvationis, the Opera nova contemplativa, and secular ones, such as the various Calendriers and Almanacis and the Mirabilia Urbis): these, however, are independent of the first documents of printing with movable characters, or types as they are called in the composition of the book.
The idea of a new system of mechanical reproduction of the manuscript, which would not be the xylographic one, seems by now certain to be due to Johann Gutenberg (v.) of Mainz, although from chronicles and documents of the 15th and 16th centuries it is known that experiments in this direction must have been carried out in parallel also in Holland (v. COSTER) and France. The French tradition rests on certain notarial documents of the years 1444-46 discovered at Avignon, contracts of the Prague goldsmith Procope Waldfoghel, at Avignon from 1444, stipulated with scholars and craftsmen to teach them « artem scribendi artificialiter ». From these documents it seems to result that Waldfoghel built a kind of primitive typewriter capable of reproducing one by one the letters of the Latin and Hebrew alphabets, but not of multiplying a text in numerous copies. In any case it was a procedure altogether different from the one Gutenberg imagined, and only years later was printing introduced into France. Nor has Italy lacked its own legend, on the basis of a notice handed down by a seventeenth-century chronicle of Fr. Cambriuzzi, author of the Storia di Feltre, according to which the invention should be attributed to the physician Panfilo Castaldi (v.). But documents and testimonies by far more authoritative lend credit to the Gutenberg tradition, among them the Cronaca di Magonza in German for the years 1459-84, where under the year 1462 it is written that Johann Gutenberg was « der erste Buchdrucker zu Meinze », the first printer of Mainz; the Cronaca di Colonia, and the Cronaca di Eusebio, printed at Venice by E. Ratdolt, where under the year 1457 one reads: « A Joanne Gutenberg zum Jungen, equite Maguntiae Rheni, solerti ingenio, librorum imprimendorum ratio 1440 inventa ». One may also cite a letter of Guillaume Fichet, master of the Sorbonne, addressed in 1477 to Robert Gaguin, in which are extolled the great services rendered to humanity by the German printers and especially by a certain Johann Bonomontanus, that is Gutenberg, to whom was owed the art of printing books rapidly with metal characters.
The new discovery spread rapidly; already flourishing in 1470 in 19 centers of Germany, it passed into Italy and established itself in the principal cities between 1465 and 1473, in Switzerland in 1468, in France and the Netherlands in 1470, in Hungary, Bohemia, Poland around 1473, and around the same time in the Iberian peninsula, in 1477 in England, in 1482 in Denmark and Sweden, in 1493 in Montenegro; alongside works of a humanistic or popular or scientific character, there were also widely published legends of saints, miracle tales, moral opuscules, works of a theological and liturgical character and above all Bibles. In Italy, especially, through the work of the Germans Conrad Schweynheim of Mainz and Arnold Pannartz of Prague (v. SUBIACO), the invention was favored and perfected; typographic characters lost the roughness of the Gothic types and acquired new movements and elegant designs in imitation of the Carolingian script of the 10th and 11th centuries. The new character, round, progressed particularly with Wendelin of Speyer and then with Jenson and Ratdolt, on up to Giovanni di Reno, Dionigi Paravicino, Lorenzo di Francesco Alopa,
Enrico Scinzenzeler, Aldus Manutius, to whom is owed the elaboration of the italic character which from him was called Aldine, italic, chancery. With the innovation of characters, no neglect was shown in giving the book a distinction of its own, marginal friezes of superb elegance, decorations of an architectural type, flourished initials. On the other hand, typographic production gave a notable contribution to science and literature, gradually drawing scholars back to the pure sources of the language, and thus giving ample place to that fervor of studies and research that characterizes humanism: juridical doctrine found in printing the most useful instrument of its progress and its diffusion, and with it geography, astronomy, medicine, mathematics. Later one would arrive at the great masters of printing in Italy: the Aldi, the Giunta, the Giolito up to the Zatta, the Albrizzi, Lelio della Volpe, G. B. Bodoni, the Camino; in France Sébastien Griffo, Jean Barbou, the Anisson, Antoine Vitré, Panckoucke, the Didot; in Switzerland the Froben; in the Netherlands Christopher Plantin, the Elzevier, Willem Blaeuw; in England Roycroft; in Spain Joaquín Ibarra; up to the modern printers, such as today Alberto Tallone, to whom is owed the fact that printing has reached its greatest development and the book its highest technical and aesthetic perfection.
Bibliography10 works
TYPOGRAPHIC MACHINES
The multiple reproduction of written works takes place today by means of typography (a term denoting both the industry and the printing workshop) through machines that can be divided into two categories: composing machines and printing machines.
The invention of mechanical printing was due to the German Friedrich Koenig, who in 1810 built the first mechanical press which, after various attempts to replace the first hand presses set up by Gutenberg (v.), was able, through a series of improvements, to achieve large print runs in a very short time. The typographic machines that industrialized an activity until then carried out by specialized craftsmen have been classified, according to their various production systems, into flat-bed, flat-bed cylinder, and rotary machines, the latter with continuous rotation speed and high output, first built in 1846, and later perfected by Ippolito Marinoni and Giulio Derriey, and generally used for the simultaneous printing of several sheets of a newspaper.
As regards composing machines, on the other hand, the first to have the idea of a "type machine" was Robert Gaubert, who in 1826 experimented with a rudimentary system for moving and distributing type, later perfected by John Mac Millian (1884). Once the prejudice that one could print only with ready-made type was abandoned, special machines were built in the 19th century that later proved particularly useful in the printing industry: punch machines, which impressed the characters onto a plastic substance intended to serve as a matrix for casting the type; and matrix, or recess, machines, which cast the type letter by letter or line by line. These are the so-called monotype and linotype, the former realized after a laborious succession of attempts by the American Tolbert Lanston (1897) and composed of a keyboard and a composing-casting machine; the latter created by the German watchmaker Othmar Mergenthaler (1885), and built in such a way that in a single block it carries out the composition, the justification, the casting and the distribution of the matrices, completing the entire work cycle almost always without the intervention of labor: the "linotypist" need only strike a keyboard which, with the so-called matrix magazine and the casting apparatus, constitutes the or-
(phot. Enc. Catt.)
TIRABOSCHI, GIROLAMO - Portrait - Rome, Biblioteca Angelica.
essential organ of the machine. The entirely mechanical process of placing the matrix in the composing stick, in the casting chamber where the line of composition is formed, in the distributor, and then in the channel from which it started, allows a production of seven to eight thousand letters per hour. On the same principle other machines were later built, such as the typograph, the barotype (1890), the intertype (1913). Taking advantage of phototechnics, new improvements were made to typographic machines. In 1915 Bawtree and Lee created the photoline, which photographically reproduces characters by using, through transparency, glass disks 25 cm. in diameter on which they are arranged concentrically. Uniformity of the body size is obtained by moving the matrices closer to or farther from the sensitive surface, as happens with an ordinary camera. Better results were achieved with his machine by Robertson (1922), using glass plates rather than disks, with the image of the letter transparent on a black background. With the teletypesetter (1929) an attempt was made to apply to printing the system of long-distance transmission of telegrams. This is a central transmitting apparatus connected with other receiving apparatuses by telegraph or wireless system, whose signals emitted at a distance perforate a roll of paper connected to the receiver and applied to a linotype equipped with a device with automatic controls.
Other systems of mechanical composition are the orotype of Max Ullman (1935), the typar, the thothmic of the Englishman Hunter, the uhertype of the German Uher, the latter of which has opened new horizons for book technology. - See plate XV.
