Monday, October 4, 2010

History of typography

In 1456 Johann Gutenberg used a printing press to print the first book in the Western world. The Chinese and Koreans had been printing with moveable wood type for years, but their written languages are made of words rather than individual letters, so they were limited in what they could print easily.


-Gutenberg used knowledge gained from working with metal, as a jeweler, to find an alloy which allowed him to form individual letters. He cast the letters in mirror image, and then grouped individual letters into a matrix to form a page.


No comments:

Post a Comment