A Blog.

Thanks to a number of creative individuals that I follow on  Twitter, I discovered a fascinating article about the sad demise of letterpress in China. Given my deep interest in letterpress printing, I have often wondered how the method of printing from movable type is possible at all in China, since at least 4,000 Chinese characters are commonly used. Being hamstrung with so many characters seems now to be bringing letterpress printing to an end in China, ironically at a time when the craft is enjoying a renaissance in the West…

“While Western letterpress printing has made a recent revival, what was once considered one of the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China is no longer a sustainable practice in its country of origin.”
Cheryl Yau, 2010

Type specimen book from Tak Hing Matrix Type Founders Company (Photo: Cheryl Yau)

“When entering the Chinese letterpress shop, an instant observation was the vast amount of characters in each set of type. Characters of the Latin alphabet were often organized either by uppercase and lowercase (so named because of the separate cases to differentiate between majuscule and minuscule letterforms) or more recently in a California Job Case. Instead of using of a type drawer, Chinese characters were typically stored in cube shelving with the type stacked into a square or column, facing outward for easy identification. Using a pair of tweezers, printers carefully picked characters out of a wall of tiled type and placed them onto a composing stick before setting up the chase.”

“The use of movable type in China is now a rare business and found only in the rural village of Dongyuan for printing pedigrees. Although this traditional method has been replaced by offset and digital printing, there are single print shops in Hong Kong and Taiwan that still keep extensive collections of their lead type and press machines. Lately, there has been discussion about collecting these existing artifacts and setting up printing museums or digitalizing the complete fonts. Hopefully these projects will come to life soon, sharing and preserving Chinese cultural heritage.”

Cheryl Yau’s entire article on the end of movable type in China can be read  here on the  idsgn design blog.