Wood Type
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Wood Type
In letterpress printing, wood type is movable type made out of wood. First used in China for printing body text, wood type became popular during the nineteenth century for making large display typefaces for printing posters, because it was lighter and cheaper than large sizes of metal type. Wood has been used since the earliest days of European printing for woodcut decorations and emblems, but it was not generally used for making typefaces due to the difficulty of reproducing the same shape many times for printing. In the 1820s, Darius Wells introduced mechanised wood type production using the powered router, and William Leavenworth in 1834 added a second major innovation of using a pantograph to cut a letter's shape from a pattern. This made it possible to mass-produce the same design in wood repeatedly. In the twentieth century lithography, phototypesetting and digital typesetting replaced it as a mass-market technology. It continues to be used by hobbyists and artistic p ...
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Wood Type Close-up (cropped)
Wood is a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic materiala natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin that resists compression. Wood is sometimes defined as only the secondary xylem in the stems of trees, or it is defined more broadly to include the same type of tissue elsewhere such as in the roots of trees or shrubs. In a living tree it performs a support function, enabling woody plants to grow large or to stand up by themselves. It also conveys water and nutrients between the leaves, other growing tissues, and the roots. Wood may also refer to other plant materials with comparable properties, and to material engineered from wood, or woodchips or fiber. Wood has been used for thousands of years for fuel, as a construction material, for making tools and weapons, furniture and paper. More recently it emerged as a feedstock for the ...
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Phototypesetting
Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing (digital typesetting). The first phototypesetters quickly project light through a film negative of an individual character in a font, then through a lens that magnifies or reduces the size of the character onto photographic paper or film, which is collected on a spool in a light-proof canister. The paper or film is then fed into a processor, a machine that pulls the paper or film strip through two or three baths of chemicals, from which it emerges ready for paste-up or film make-up. Later phototypesetting machines used other methods, such as displaying a digitised character on a CRT screen. Phototypesetting offered numerous advantages over metal type, including the lack of need to keep heavy metal type and matrices in stock, the ability to use a much wider rang ...
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James Mosley
James Mosley (born 1935) is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design. The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, where he curated and worked to expand the museum's large collection of printing and lettering materials, books and examples. This collection greatly expanded with the close of the metal type era, which saw many companies and printing shops selling off their equipment and archives. Mosley also expanded the library's collection of lettering and signs. He has also been a lecturer and professor at the University of Reading since 1964, and founded the British Printing Historical Society in that year. Particular areas of focus of his career have been, in Britain, William Caslon, Vincent Figgins and Talbot Baines Reed, Eric Gill (with whose brother Evan he worked in the 1950s), and, in Europe, the Romain du Roi. Education Mosley grew up in Twickenh ...
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Harry Carter (typographer)
Harry Graham Carter (27 March 1901 – 10 March 1982) was an English typographer, translator and writer. He was a well-known historian of type. He was the father of type designer Matthew Carter. Biography Carter studied at the progressive Bedales School (where he was a friend of John Rothenstein), and at The Queen's College, Oxford "where he became competent in French, German, Spanish, and Russian". (He would later learn Arabic, and design a Hebrew font.) Though he was studying law, Carter became interested in typography and bought a printing press. His first work with type came in 1928 and 1929 as an apprentice at the Monotype Corporation. At this time he formed friendships with Jan van Krimpen, Stanley Morison, Francis Meynell, and Oliver and Herbert Simon (cousins of his school-friend, John Rothenstein). He became involved the Curwen Press, and after leaving the Monotype Corporation worked briefly at the Kynoch Press in Birmingham. In 1931 he and Herbert Simon published ''Pri ...
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Alfred F
Alfred may refer to: Arts and entertainment *''Alfred J. Kwak'', Dutch-German-Japanese anime television series * ''Alfred'' (Arne opera), a 1740 masque by Thomas Arne * ''Alfred'' (Dvořák), an 1870 opera by Antonín Dvořák *"Alfred (Interlude)" and "Alfred (Outro)", songs by Eminem from the 2020 album ''Music to Be Murdered By'' Business and organisations * Alfred, a radio station in Shaftesbury, England *Alfred Music, an American music publisher *Alfred University, New York, U.S. *The Alfred Hospital, a hospital in Melbourne, Australia People * Alfred (name) includes a list of people and fictional characters called Alfred * Alfred the Great (848/49 – 899), or Alfred I, a king of the West Saxons and of the Anglo-Saxons Places Antarctica * Mount Alfred (Antarctica) Australia * Alfredtown, New South Wales * County of Alfred, South Australia Canada * Alfred and Plantagenet, Ontario * Alfred Island, Nunavut * Mount Alfred, British Columbia United States * Alfred, Maine, a ...
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Talbot Baines Reed
Talbot Baines Reed (3 April 1852 – 28 November 1893) was an English writer of young adult fiction, boys' fiction who established a genre of school story, school stories that endured into the mid-20th century. Among his best-known work is ''The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's''. He was a regular and prolific contributor to ''The Boy's Own Paper'' (''B.O.P.''), in which most of his fiction first appeared. Through his family's business, Reed became a prominent type foundry, typefounder, and wrote a standard work on the subject: ''History of the Old English Letter Foundries''. Reed's father, Charles Reed (British politician), Charles Reed, was a successful London printer who later became a Member of Parliament (MP). Talbot attended the City of London School before leaving at 17 to join the family business in Fann Street. His literary career began in 1879, when the ''B.O.P.'' was launched. The family were staunchly Christian, pillars of the Congregational church, Congregational Chur ...
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Wood Engraving
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image or ''matrix'' of images into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the ''valleys'', the removed areas. As a result, wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than copper-plate engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character. Thomas Bewick developed the wood engraving technique in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century. His work differed from earlier woodcuts in two key ways. First, rather than using woodcarving tools such as knives, Bewick used an engraver's burin (graver). With this, he could create thin delicate lines, often creating large dark areas in the composition. Second, wood engraving traditionally use ...
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Block Book
Block books or blockbooks, also called xylographica, are short books of up to 50 leaves, block printed in Europe in the second half of the 15th century as woodcuts with blocks carved to include both text (usually) and illustrations. The content of the books was nearly always religious, aimed at a popular audience, and a few titles were often reprinted in several editions using new woodcuts. Although many had believed that block books preceded Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the first part of the 1450s, it now is accepted that most of the surviving block books were printed in the 1460s or later, and that the earliest surviving examples may date to about 1451. They seem to have functioned as a cheap popular alternative to the typeset book, which was still very expensive at this stage. Single-leaf woodcuts from the preceding decades often included passages of text with prayers, indulgences and other material; the block book was an extension of this form. Block books ar ...
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Woodblock Printing
Woodblock printing or block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Each page or image is created by carving a wooden block to leave only some areas and lines at the original level; it is these that are inked and show in the print, in a relief printing process. Carving the blocks is skilled and laborious work, but a large number of impressions can then be printed. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220 AD. Woodblock printing existed in Tang China by the 7th century AD and remained the most common East Asian method of printing books and other texts, as well as images, until the 19th century. ''Ukiyo-e'' is the best-known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique for printing images on paper are covered by the art term woodcut, except for the bl ...
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Written Chinese
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly Logogram, logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great number of characters: college-educated Chinese speakers know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets or other complementary systems as auxiliary means of representing Chinese. Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC,William G. Boltz, Early Chinese Writing, World Archaeology, Vol. 17, No. 3, Early Writing Systems. (Feb., 1986), pp. 42 ...
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Wang Zhen (inventor)
Wang Zhen (, 1290–1333) was a Chinese mechanical engineer, agronomist, inventor, writer, and politician of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). He was one of the early innovators of the wooden movable type printing technology. His illustrated agricultural treatise was also one of the most advanced of its day, covering a wide range of equipment and technologies available in the late 13th and early 14th century. Life and works Wang Zhen was born in Shandong province, and spent many years as an official of both Anhui and Jiangxi provinces.Needham, Volume 6, Part 2, 59. From 1290 to 1301, he was a magistrate for Jingde, Anhui province, where he was a pioneer of the use of wooden movable type printing. The wooden movable type was described in Wang Zhen's publication of 1313, known as the ''Nong Shu'' (), or ''Book of Agriculture''. Although the title describes the main focus of the work, it incorporated much more information on a wide variety of subjects that was not limited to the sco ...
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Bi Sheng
Bi Sheng (; 972–1051 AD) was a Chinese artisan, engineer, and inventor of the world's first movable type technology, with printing being one of the Four Great Inventions. Bi Sheng's system was made of Chinese porcelain and was invented between 1039 and 1048 in the Song dynasty. Movable type printing Bi Sheng was born in Yingshan County, Hubei a commoner, and his ancestry and details were not recorded. He was recorded only in the '' Dream Pool Essays'' by Chinese scholar-official and polymath Shen Kuo (1031–1095). The book records a detailed description of the technical details of Bi Sheng's invention of movable type printing: The government official Wang Zhen ( fl. 1290–1333) improved Bi Sheng's clay types by innovation through the wood, as his process increased the speed of typesetting as well. Later in China by 1490 bronze movable type was developed by the wealthy printer Hua Sui (1439–1513). Legacy Bisheng Subdistrict () in Wenquan, Huanggang, Hubei is named fo ...
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