early 1450s, this was the convention that he used too. He seems to have overreached himself a little though.On his first go, his plan was to typeset everything except the capital letters, leaving a gap for them to be added on the second run-through. Having used black ink first time round, he now fixed the capitals in the frame, changed the ink to red and ran the sheet through for a second time. After a few goes at it, he decided to jack it in and do the capitals by hand. Gutenberg is consistent with this, but it wasnât until the sixteenth century that pretty well all printed material was sticking to the âsentence must begin with a capital letterâ system. Note, it is not grammarians or scholars who are deciding this. It is inky-handed sons of toil.
Gutenberg lived from around 1394 to 1468 and his first work was in Mainz, polishing gems and turning out mass-produced mirrors for pilgrims. His assistant, Peter Schoeffer, a former scribe, is given credit by some for having designed some of the pressâs letters.
For many years it was thought that Gutenberg created the âpunch matrixâ system of printing. Think of a rectangular piece of steel. On one end, the mirror-image of a letter is carved, probably by a highly skilled metal-worker, like a goldsmith. This piece of steel was used as a punch, to make an indentation of the letter in a piece of softer metal, like copper. This is the matrix. To make the âmovableâ type (in other words, a metal letter which will be mounted into the printing machine), the printer pours molten metal (an alloy of lead, tin and antimony) into the indentation in the copper matrix.
It was long believed that Gutenberg invented the punch matrix method, but this has been challenged. In 2001, two researchers at Princeton University, Paul Needham and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, studied Gutenbergâs type by looking at close-up digital images of individual letters in his Bible, produced around 1455. They found that the letters varied so much in appearance thatno two pieces of type could have been cast from the same matrix. In other words, the punch matrix system may not have been what Gutenberg used after all.
Needham and Agüera y Arcas think that Gutenberg may have used an earlier technology to make his type, using moulds of sand. Because these moulds had to be broken to remove the finished piece of type, a new mould had to be used for each individual letter or punctuation sign. This technology had been used in Asia long before Gutenbergâs time.
If this is right, then Gutenberg must have had to create thousands of pieces of type. About 300 different sorts were needed for his two-volume, 1,282-page, mechanically printed Bible (which was in Latin), of which he produced 180 copies, including upper-case and lower-case letters, punctuation marks, special characters, and common abbreviations. Each page required approximately 2,600 individual pieces of type.
To digress for a moment: an interesting question to pose here is whether the invention of the practice of using capital letters at the start of sentences helped construct formal prose or whether itâs the other way round: that formal prose in its popular printed form adopted capital letters to mark what was already there. Just to be clear, we donât talk to each other in formal prose. A transcript of you in conversation will show you interrupting yourself, tailing off, interrupting others, completing what others say, repeating last words, using many exclamations and single words, far more pronouns, far more colloquial and local dialect forms, and slang connected with your locality, work or leisure activity. This would suggest that we donât think in formal prose either â or at least not for much of the time.
Meanwhile, we call on formal prose to do many things: tell fictional stories, give accounts of events, present arguments,summarize views, pass on news, inform friends of arrangements, make
Gutenberg lived from around 1394 to 1468 and his first work was in Mainz, polishing gems and turning out mass-produced mirrors for pilgrims. His assistant, Peter Schoeffer, a former scribe, is given credit by some for having designed some of the pressâs letters.
For many years it was thought that Gutenberg created the âpunch matrixâ system of printing. Think of a rectangular piece of steel. On one end, the mirror-image of a letter is carved, probably by a highly skilled metal-worker, like a goldsmith. This piece of steel was used as a punch, to make an indentation of the letter in a piece of softer metal, like copper. This is the matrix. To make the âmovableâ type (in other words, a metal letter which will be mounted into the printing machine), the printer pours molten metal (an alloy of lead, tin and antimony) into the indentation in the copper matrix.
It was long believed that Gutenberg invented the punch matrix method, but this has been challenged. In 2001, two researchers at Princeton University, Paul Needham and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, studied Gutenbergâs type by looking at close-up digital images of individual letters in his Bible, produced around 1455. They found that the letters varied so much in appearance thatno two pieces of type could have been cast from the same matrix. In other words, the punch matrix system may not have been what Gutenberg used after all.
Needham and Agüera y Arcas think that Gutenberg may have used an earlier technology to make his type, using moulds of sand. Because these moulds had to be broken to remove the finished piece of type, a new mould had to be used for each individual letter or punctuation sign. This technology had been used in Asia long before Gutenbergâs time.
If this is right, then Gutenberg must have had to create thousands of pieces of type. About 300 different sorts were needed for his two-volume, 1,282-page, mechanically printed Bible (which was in Latin), of which he produced 180 copies, including upper-case and lower-case letters, punctuation marks, special characters, and common abbreviations. Each page required approximately 2,600 individual pieces of type.
To digress for a moment: an interesting question to pose here is whether the invention of the practice of using capital letters at the start of sentences helped construct formal prose or whether itâs the other way round: that formal prose in its popular printed form adopted capital letters to mark what was already there. Just to be clear, we donât talk to each other in formal prose. A transcript of you in conversation will show you interrupting yourself, tailing off, interrupting others, completing what others say, repeating last words, using many exclamations and single words, far more pronouns, far more colloquial and local dialect forms, and slang connected with your locality, work or leisure activity. This would suggest that we donât think in formal prose either â or at least not for much of the time.
Meanwhile, we call on formal prose to do many things: tell fictional stories, give accounts of events, present arguments,summarize views, pass on news, inform friends of arrangements, make
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