Terms 

• folio
• foolscap
• Gothic typefaces
• illuminations
• incunabula
• leaves
• letterpress
• linotype
• manuscripts
• monotype
• offset printing
• orthography
• paper
• parchment
• quartos
• Roman typefaces
• rubrications
• serifs
• signature
• typefaces
• vellum

People 

• William Caxton
• Johannes Gutenberg
• Nicolaus Jenson
• Aldus Manutius
• Stanley Morris

Chronology

Resources

McMurtrie, Douglas C. The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943.

--. A History of Printing in the United States. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969. 

Olmert, Michael. The Smithsonian Book of Books. New York: Wings Books, 1995. 

Pickens, Judy E. The Copy-to-Press Handbook: Preparing Words and Art for Print. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1985. 

Rouse, Parke, Jr., and Thomas K. Ford. The Printer in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, 1995. 

Thorpe, James. The Gutenberg Bible: Landmark in Learning. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975.

Updated February 12, 2001
© Mark Canada, 2001
mark.canada@uncp.edu
 

Writing and Printing

Although linguists generally focus on speech, English and most other languages also live separate lives in books, newspapers, letters, and various other places where the sounds of speech are represented in graphic symbols.  In most respects, this form of language--which we might call "transcribed speech"--is identical to the spoken language; that is, it conveys meaning through words arranged in sentences.  In a few interesting ways, however, the language that appears on a page or screen is different from its spoken counterpart. 

Orthography

Media

In the middle of the 15th century, a German businessman named Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized book production when he developed movable type and a printing process that came to be known as letterpress.  In this process, printers such as Gutenberg took individual letters, each cast in a raised position on a small block, and arranged them backwards in a frame, or chase. When they finished the chase, which usually contained between two and 16 pages, they placed it on the bed of the printing press, applied ink to the raised letters, and laid a sheet of paper over the frame. By applying pressure to the paper with a large plate, they forced the ink on the letters to make an impression on the paper. This method, which was popular until the middle of the 19th century, enabled printers to produce and reproduce books relatively quickly and cheaply.  Using the letterpress method, William Caxton established a printing business in London in 1476, eventually printing some 100 books there. Because his books--and the standardized English contained within them--reached many parts of England, some scholars have credited him with helping to bring about a standard English dialect at a time when, as Caxton himself complained in one preface, residents of different parts of the country had trouble understanding one another.
 

In the last few centuries, printing has undergone several more developments.  The monotype machine, invented in the 19th century, allowed printers to cast an individual piece of type simply by pressing a key, as though typing.  Similarly, the linotype machine allowed operators to cast type by pressing keys, in this case casting an entire line of type instead of individual letters. This form of typesetting, which was invented in 1886 in New York, was the most common in America until the 1950s.  Since that time, printers have used offset printing, in which letters are photographed instead of cast in type.  After photographing pages, printers shine light through the negatives onto photosensitive plates, causing letters and pictures to appear on the plates, where they will accept ink. These thin plates then are wrapped around rollers, inked, and pressed against rubber rollers, which then are pressed against rolls of paper, creating pages.

The development of movable type introduced the art of typography, or type design.  Early type designers such as Nicolaus Jenson and Aldus Manutius knew that each letter in the English alphabet must be fairly distinctive; that is, an a must look about the same on any piece of movable type.  They also knew, however, that they could introduce an infinite number of small variations to the design of each letter.  For example, they could use tiny lines, or serifs, on the ends of letters.  They also could vary the thickness of the strokes in the letters or the consistency of the space they occupied on a page.  The results were hundreds of different typefaces-- particular sets of letters, a through z, along with punctuation marks, designed to be used together in printing a body of text.  In the 15th century, for example, the Frenchman Jenson perfected Roman typefaces, clean faces that replaced the dense, highly ornamented Gothic typefaces that Gutenberg and others had used.  In the 20th century, British type designer Stanley Morris gave the world some of its most popular typefaces, including Baskerville, Garamond, and Times New Roman.

Whether handwritten by scribes or printed in one of the various printing processes, the letters and other symbols that make up the graphic form of a language eventually must appear somewhere--on the pages of a book, for example, or on a computer screen.  Traditionally, printers began with a piece of foolscap, a standard-sized sheet of parchment, which was made from sheepskin or goatskin;vellum, made from calfskin; or paper, made from wood pulp or other plant fibers.  If they folded this sheet only once, they produced two leaves; since each leaf could be printed on both sides, this sheet with a single fold had four pages.  When bookbinders assembled all of these sheets, each now called a signature, the result was a type of book called a folio.  If the foolscap was folded twice, once in each direction, each signature had four leaves, eight pages.  Books made up of these signatures were called quartos.  Other popular book sizes included octavos and 16mos.  Especially during the days of the early manuscripts and the incunabula, books printed before 1500, books could be highly ornamented works of art.  In addition to text, some featured ornate initial letters called rubrications and painted designs called illuminations. 

Exercises

1. Typography: Visit the World Wide Web sites for the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) and Men's Health (www.menshealth.com). Analyze at least three features of each publication's typography. What do typographical features such as the presence or absence of serifs, thickness of strokes, and weight of letters suggest about the publication's goals, image, and audience? 
2. Spelling Reform: Should English speakers reform their spelling system? Defend your answer. 
3. Descriptive Bibliography: Describe the bibliographic features of a book published before 1850. For example, note the number of signatures, the typefaces used, and the size of the leaves. How do such features affect a reader's reception of the book?