Prints Charming.
I recently watched the BBC’s Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press in which the peerless Mr Fry took us through a rebuilding of the daddy of all printing presses, the machine that started it all. Quite aside from the fact that the presence of Stephen Fry instantly elevates any programme to a higher level, the producers admirably resisted the urge to raid the wardrobe department and glue muttonchops to the pimpled cheeks of unemployed actors in the name of ‘period reconstruction’, a curse that affects too many historical documentaries. Instead, we were taken on a gentle but information-packed journey on which the enthusiasm of Fry and the experts building the press was evident.
Gutenberg wasn’t the first to use movable type for printing; as with so much technology it was the Chinese who got there first with letters made from either clay or wood, rather than the lead, tin and antimony alloy pioneered by Johannes. It was his press, though, that made print possible on industrial levels. Before Gutenberg, individual printing plates would be carved from wood, with a separate whole plate needed for every page of a book – an incredibly labour-intensive process. Movable type allowed pages to be assembled much faster and more cheaply, and then simply disassembled into the constituent letters once a print-run was complete, ready for the next job.
On a totally self-regarding level, I wouldn’t be a graphic designer today without the developments and innovations branching from the Gutenberg Press. Yet despite the massive impact that the Gutenberg Press had, one of its main principles has become almost obsolete. These days, using automation rather than by hand, we have the ability to once again produce whole plates for each page of a print job, albeit a separate plate for each colour used. Movable type is rarely seen except in specialist letterpress printers, and is likely to disappear altogether in the next decade or so. It may well be that even the inky goodness of printing itself will decline over the next fifty to a hundred years, overtaken by computer and electronic technologies and harried by the environmental concerns raised over the chemicals and paper required.
The principles behind movable type might have more longevity. To take music as an example, I can see remixing and sampling as being somewhat analogous – taking the building blocks of one or many songs and recombining them into something new. It is the concept of having reusable, generic units in a limited selection of forms that can be unified and integrated into almost limitless variety. As nanotechnology advances, I’m sure we will see similar techniques come into use. Already, molecular manipulation of carbon into basic forms such as nanotubes and buckyballs shows how this building block approach is useful.
Nevertheless, the sheer world-changing importance of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention cannot be overstated. It’s the revolutionary alteration to the flow of knowledge within society that is the Gutenberg legacy. Writing allowed humankind to record information; printing allowed that information to be spread. Books are a vector for change – they bridge gaps between diverse societies and spur development on a whole different scale.
The documentary is available for a short while on the BBC’s own iPlayer here (do a search for Gutenberg), and also separated into parts on YouTube starting here, where I’m sure it will shortly be quietly disappeared by the powers that be.