Metal Type

Letterpress from metal type. Mark and Charles Kerr, Edinburgh, printers. Holy Bible, page from Jeremiah 51. 1795. 9 11/16 x 8" (24.6 x 20.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Richard Benson

Handwritten manuscripts were costly to make, and could exist only in limited numbers, available to the well-to-do and the powerful. In the mid-fifteenth century, in their efforts to produce less expensive versions of written language, printers began to use metal type, unleashing the great revolution of language-based information available to the masses. Prince and pauper alike got the same information from the printed page, and I have always thought that democracy as we know it would have been impossible without this innovation. The use of metal type spread rapidly, and over the 400 years from 1500 to 1900 the technology of printing words by making them up out of little metal letters in relief remained basically unchanged.

Hand lettering. Artist unknown. Page from a missal. c. 1350. 5 3/4 x 4 1/8" (14.6 x 10.5 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Richard Benson. A small manuscript page written in a southern Gothic book hand.

Technological innovation tends to derive from need, and the development of printing from moveable type was such an innovation that its initial technology did not require much further development for this astonishingly long period. Words printed with moveable type look completely different from those made by hand: no letter can touch another, and when they are packed onto the page the distances between the letters and between the words they form can be very similar. It is little wonder that those accustomed to handmade books considered early printing from metal type mediocre.

Detail from Hand lettering. Artist unknown. Page from a missal. c. 1350. 5 3/4 x 4 1/8" (14.6 x 10.5 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Richard Benson. Handwritten letters can vary according to their neighbors, and individual letters often run together. This practice gives a strong identity to the words, and reinforces the fact that letters by themselves mean nothing; content only exists when words and sentences are formed.