“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 Although this traditional method has been replaced by offset and digital printing, there are single print shops in Hong Kong and Taiwan that still keep extensive collections of their lead type and press machines.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.

One of these recent projects involved typesetting a wedding invitation in Garamond Italic with swash capitals and alternate terminal letters. My collection of Garamond is quite extensive (8pt through to 72pt) and originates from the Cambridge University Press, where it was cast, and I have spent many hours acquainting myself with the incredible selection of ligatures and swash characters in the collection. My only issue with my casting of Garamond Italic (Monotype) is that the capital W is cast on almost a full width body with very little overhang, necessitating work to remove part of the body to enable kerning.

To remove portions of the type bodies, I used a hand mitre machine (also known as a ‘bowler’) set at 45 degrees and images of the kerned letters can be viewed below.  Interrobang Letterpress have posted a set of Flickr photo’s  here showing how they have kerned Garamond Italic using a circular saw.

Prior to 1737, little standardisation existed in the sizes of printing types and typefounders cast types to their own sizes and dimensions. In this year, the Parisian typefounder  Pierre Simon Fournier introduced a new system that he derived from dividing two inches of the pre-metric French foot into one hundred and forty-four equal parts. Fournier gave the resulting unit a name – ‘points’ – and they measured 0.137 of the English inch, which is close to the present point system.

Around 1780, after the death of Fournier,  François Ambrose Didot further developed the ‘point’ system so that is became based on the legal French foot measure. The Didot point measured 0.148 of the English inch and became the dominant system of type measurement throughout continental Europe, its former colonies, and Latin America.

Although Didot’s system became widely used, it never gained favour in Britain and North America and it wasn’t until the late 19th Century that standardisation, in the form of the American point system, became adopted by British typefounders.

Although many of the old English names for type bodies have disappeared, Pica and Nonpareil are still commonly used by letterpress typesetters and printers. However, they are now used in conjunction with the American point system, rather than to describe the varying and non-standard type body sizes in place before the long process of standardisation started by Fournier in the 18th Century.