The method of printing our media has long since changed from the days of Gutenberg and the introduction of movable type. Come to think of it, what a revolution that was! Put yourself in that position: the days of hand written books, usually by monks, had gone. We now had a process that allowed us to print the same thing over and over again without having a labour-intensive manual process. It was almost inevitable that because of the breakthrough of Gutenberg, things were going to move on at a rapid pace. Imagine the amount of books that could now be published at a rate only dreamt about. Type founders sprang up all over the world, mainly in Europe it has to be said. They were creating new and wonderful designs of types for all occasions. Customers were now able to order all types of documents, make a selection of how they would look and have the product delivered within a more than reasonable time. The offshoot for this of course would be the production of the paper itself. Where parchment type paper was the order of the day before the invention of movable type, now varying qualities of the product could be used to print whatever type of article you required. It followed logically that the for the more mass produced element such as newssheets and general news "media" the quality of paper need not be as good as say for medical or educational journals. Paper, in the news sense at the time, probably in the seventeenth century and maybe before, became the first "throwaway" printing item of the time. This of course led to our first example of recycling. Old paper would be pulped and reused, although the process was not streamlined until the early part of the 20th century. The 20th century itself brought major changes in printing technology. As development of typefaces and typesetting methods occurred, so too did the evolution of the printing press. Now great behemoths were used to print amazingly large runs of newspapers. America probably led the field in the size of newspapers, in terms of the number of pages. It was quite common in the 20s to produce papers of 80 pages in sizes - fairly common in today's print media - but at the time an 80 page broadsheet, would have been somewhat of an industrial miracle. The 20s and 30s also brought revolution in terms of typefaces for the printing industry. The Bauhaus trend in Germany brought many "new age" fonts such as Gill Sans to the fore and in fact, the Bauhaus also had a great influence on interior design, particularly in furniture as well as the lesser-known introduction of increased wallpaper production. During all this development, one piece of equipment was being improved and modified beyond industrial beliefs. This was the Linotype machine. The concept was thought of in the latter part of the 19th century, but a man called Otmar Merganthaler takes the credit for its "invention". This machine really increased the pace of the production of newspapers in particular from a pre-press perspective. There are some people, myself included, who feel that this piece of equipment was without doubt the most efficient production tool within the printing industry that has ever been used. I look forward to developing this theory later. |
