A Millennium of Printing

 by Brett Rutherford

Those of us old enough to have touched and used metal type have a sense of the astonishing printing progress made in the last half-century. The all-digital generations following us will have grown up with digital cameras, desktop publishing, and instant Internet access to vast libraries of “virtual” books. To them, the history of printing will be quaint and charming. Its only inheritance may be the traditional esthetics that distinguish fine design and printing from semi-literate junk. People will know that printing looked better in the “good old days,” but they won’t know why.

            Our printing descendants, if they visit a museum displaying printing presses and typesetting machinery, might marvel at how printers, at the turn of the 20^th century, still rubbed greasy ink on raised metal type and pressed it against paper, much as Johannes Gutenberg had done in the 1450s.

            The chronology of printing is fascinating, with its long letterpress “stone age,” followed by a burst of 19^th Century inventions such as the rotary press, the Linotype machine, the halftone screen, and photoengraving. The triumph of offset lithography after World War II, however, started a revolution in invention that is now reaching its apogee — with innovations coming so fast that the industry can barely keep up with them.

            The printing industry, even as late as the 1970s, would still have been recognizable to a printer of 100 years earlier. The industry we are becoming in the post-2000 world, though, will be one the old-fashioned printer could not even imagine. We are already at the point where we can get a book or magazine to a printing press without consuming any materials such as film, chemicals, proofs, or plates. In less than two decades, the book or magazine itself will become a  “virtual” product, with readers printing out text passages or color images only if they want to keep or share them. Coffee table art books will transfer images to virtual paintings on our walls. Virtual magazines will have moving, talking advertisements, and celebrity interviews that can be heard as well as read. Libraries will be accessible 24 hours a day, with on-line reading/printing of public domain texts. 

            We really can’t even imagine where it will all lead, but all these things are steps along the way to the inventor’s ideal: imaging machinery that has no moving parts, never wears out, and uses no “consumables” other than energy.

 

How We Got Here

            Gutenberg, Senefelder, Mergenthaler and other inventors who moved us toward our all-digital age might be startled to see where the industry they steered has gone. Most of the inventors of the past sought a short-term goal, and envisioned the profits they would make because their machines could copy words and pictures faster, cheaper and better.

            We can look back on certain inventions and say, with some certainty, that they mattered a great deal in liberating printing from the days of scribes to the days of ink dots and pixels. Here are the creative landmarks that I believe have mattered most to the printing industry in the millennium now ended, a timeline of inventions and “firsts.”

            AD 800. Books are produced in quantity in Korea and Japan from hand-carved woodblocks.

            1041. Books are printed in China from movable ceramic clay type. Although books are printed and widely distributed by Imperial order, Europeans remain unaware of Chinese printing methods for almost half a millennium.

            1221. Books are printed in China from moveable type made from hand-carved wood blocks. As many as 30,000 separate Chinese characters were required!

            1453 to 1456. Gutenberg’s Bible. The first finished, complete European book proving that cast metal type could be used to produce a Bible comparable to the best work of scribes and illuminators. By the year 1500, there would be ten million printed books in Europe. By 1507, the Church began censoring some printed books, banning others. A few printers are ordered strangled or burned at the stake.

            1495. In Venice, Aldus Manutius is the first successful printer-publisher. He uses elegant, readable typefaces, woodcut illustrations, and smaller page sizes to produce affordable copies of Greek and Latin classics.

            1535. First printing press in the New World is set up in Mexico.

            1550. Wood engravings are the predominant method of producing illustrations, but intaglio engravings in copper gain appeal. The tradition of “multi-process” books, with text produced by one method and illustrations printed on separate sheets or signatures by another method, takes shape.

            1639. First printing in North America -- “The Freeman’s Oath” in Massachusetts.

            1725. The first stereotype plate is cast from a metal type form in Scotland. This is the first instance of a permanent “plate” apart from handset type. This meant that the original type could be redistributed and re-used. The method was not widely used, though, until much later in the 18^th century.

            1796. Alois Senefelder develops the art of stone lithography, printing from a flat, grained stone surface. This is the predecessor of offset lithography.

            1800. America’s first “coffee table” art book is published, a book of hand-colored engraved plates of “The City of Philadelphia.”

            1806. Machine-made paper becomes available for the first time, thanks to the invention of the Fourdrinier paper machine—the process still used today for papermaking. Before this time, all paper was hand-made.

            1814. The London Times uses steam power to print newspapers on a cylindrical press.

            1829. First typewriter is patented in Detroit, Michigan. Typewriters capable of working at the same speed as writing longhand would be not developed until the 1870s.

            1835 to 1841. W.H. Fox Talbot develops the techniques for making photographic negatives, and from them, any number of positive copies. Modern photography is born, with a profound impact on printing. The discovery that light-sensitive materials could capture and preserve toned images of real life was a bombshell. Until then, only a trained artist could represent reality, and only using hand tools and complicated techniques to represent tone and shadow.

            1840. First paper made from wood pulp instead of rag fibers. Bookworms started the march to extinction since they couldn’t eat paper made from wood pulp.

            1844. Richard Hoe’s first letterpress using an image carrier (stereotype) cylinder.

            1850. First stone lithographic press with automatic inking and impression cylinders. Lithographs rapidly became the principal means to produce posters and low-cost art reproductions.

            1860. First rotary gravure printing on paper in France. Gravure would one day become a printing giant, used for Sunday supplements, catalogs, and long-run magazines.

            1864. The halftone screen is invented. For the first time, a printing press could reproduce a photograph, simulating all its gradations of tone using dots of various sizes.

            1865. First web press built by William Bullock, with rotary letterpress image carrier and impression cylinders. Web printing is off and running.

            1868. First rotary litho press using zinc plates.

            1870. In-line folding machines fold sheets into signatures as they come off press. Laid-off New York City bindery girls, in desperation, become dance hall performers.

            1872. Photoengraving of letterpress plates is introduced. Engravings of halftones or line drawings can now be printed on the same form with metal type.

            1875. Carl Klitsch develops photochemical engraving for gravure printing.

            1879. Thomas Edison invents the electric lamp, with a profound impact on American culture and industry. The electrification of cities and factories means the end of reliance on steam and human power for printing machinery.

            1886. Ottmar Mergenthaler unveils the Linotype machine, the first successful device to automate typesetting. The Linotype, one of the greatest inventions of all time, cast individual, justified lines of metal type, using matrices that dropped from an overhead compartment. After being used to cast the type in molten lead, the matrices were automatically redistributed. Productivity was 500% greater than setting type by hand. His invention would sweep the world and would be the dominant method of typesetting for more than 60 years.

            1891. Tolbert Lanston introduces the Monotype typesetter.

            1892. First color printing using three-color halftone screens.

            1904. Offset lithography is invented. The act of printing “second hand” from a cylindrical rubber blanket instead of by direct contact with the image carrier had profound implications – so profound that offset, in less than half a century, would become the dominant printing process.

            1930. First four-color offset press is installed. American “photolithographers” would spend decades perfecting the four-color printing process.

            1942. Magnetic tape introduced. Although it took decades for cheap, recordable/ erasable magnetic media to impact the graphic arts, today we rely on it to store all our jobs.

            1951. First color television. A technology that would lead to color computer monitors and the whole world of color perceived as RGB.

            1954. Phototypesetting begins with the introduction of the Harris Fotosetter. During the next 20 years, phototypesetting became faster and cheaper, and the typesetting industry came into its glory days as entrepreneurs bought the new technology. Metal typesetting was all but obsolete by 1970.

            1957. Helvetica typeface introduced. A dark day for printing.

            1960. Invention of the laser. No single invention since the Linotype has had more impact on the graphic arts industry. The laser’s ability to focus a microscopic dot at high energy levels has brought it into use in all kinds of imaging devices – and the end is not in sight.

            1962. First Xerox copier. The copier would come to dominate the black and white printing market within two decades.

            1964. Introduction of word processing systems. The existence of text in stored media instantly presented both challenge and opportunity to typesetters and printers. By 1975, word processors became affordable standalone units with disk storage. The first inklings here of putting the prepress into the hands of the customer – another trend that isn’t over yet.

            1968. First all-digital typesetter. No more film fonts, since fonts are now “software.”

            1972. First color copiers. A harbinger that “color on demand” would one day be the customer’s credo.

            1980. The desktop laser printer. Within 20 years, there would be a desktop printer accessible to almost anyone with a computer.

            1981. Introduction of PostScript by Adobe, Inc. , the first device-independent file format for text and graphics. Today’s wildly popular PDF format is an offshoot of PostScript.

            1984. Apple Computers introduces the Macintosh, the first computer whose operating system included on-screen type and graphics.

            1985. Desktop publishing is introduced to Mac users in Aldus Pagemaker, and to PC users with Xerox Ventura Publisher. For the first time, ordinary computer users are able to lay out complete publications and see them represented on screen exactly as they will print.

            The 1990s. Well, you’ve lived through them. An explosion of new technology, at plummeting prices. Cheap color printers, cheap scanners, 50-cent type fonts, huge PC disk drives, the Internet, digital presses, wide format printing – yegods, where will it all lead us?

The Future of the Book

by Brett Rutherford

Sometime in 1988 or 1989, I talked to a writers' group, The Rhode Island Writers' Circle, about the future of the book, and what I expected to see happen in book publishing. This was back when the Adobe Acrobat PDF format was becoming the world standard for document publishing, making it possible to design a book, and then to view or print it on any device. It's interesting to see what I predicted 30 years ago, against what has and has not not happened. I was still working as a journalist and as a consultant to publishers at that time, and had not yet started my "back to school" adventure.

Every fact you know today about books, their production, their publication, their distribution and their sales will be only history in less than ten years. Every one of us will have access to a personal library bigger than the Great Library of Alexandria, from our homes, and costing us nothing. Universities will lose their "monopolies" over the storage, preservation and dissemination of printed knowledge. All the rare and obscure and out of print books you want will be available in virtual copies you can read on a thin sheet of plastic no heavier than a magazine, in full color. The portable plastic book will be an appliance that you carry to school, into the bathtub and, yes, even to the beach. You can read War and Peace while listening to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, with your headphones connected to your portable book.

Yes, new ink-on-paper books will still exist. They will be luxury items -- coffee table art books, gift books, photography books, commemorative and historical books. But for all the books that the multitudes crave for instant gratification -- Tom Clancy novels, Steven King tremblies, political exposes, and celebrity gossip, half of us will read these things without killing a tree, while others will continue on their merry way paying $40 to $90 for a single book. Meantime, printing plants are already shutting down, paper mills are closing, and the squirrels and bald eagles are rejoicing. By my estimate, 500 North American printing presses are shut down every month, and not replaced by new capacity. And even though there are some 15,700 magazines published today, and more books published every year than ever before, the press runs are shorter and shorter. I have heard one estimate from book printers that 80% of all books now how have runs under 1,000 copies. This means that most book distribution is either local to the author, or is being done by on-line or mail order.

The generation that comes after ours will have no interest in reading or owning books or periodicals on paper. Only the old and eccentric will haunt used bookstores. The physical books on the shelves at libraries will dwindle since virtual copies of most old books will be readily available. No waiting lists, no overdue books, etc.

Traditional book publishers, consumed by media giants, will go down screaming. They will bolster their profits short term by banking all their annual profits on a few bestsellers, whose authors will gamer 80% of all the money paid to authors. For all other books, the original art for every new book will exist as a virtual or e-book, and either a bookstore or an on-line service like Amazon will process orders for single copies of books for those stubborn enough to want a physical book. The book publishers will throw up their hands in despair and become multimedia entertainment companies. War and Peace in print will be in a gift box with the DVD of the mini-series. Most copies of the "mid-range" books printed will continue to wind up sold as "remainders," which I regard as a pre-planned way to achieve break-even on printing costs. Authors receive NO royalties on all those books sold in the remainder bins or from remainder catalogs.

Where do writers fit in all this? There will be fewer large publishers, fewer magazines that pay, fewer opportunities for writers seeking to have others publish them. There is little incentive in the real world for a Random House to publish a book that will sell 2,000 copies. Yet paradoxically, the new technologies that are transforming "the book" are going to give writers more power than they have had at any time in history. If the word "publish" means "to send abroad," every writer has power to publish his or her work undreamt of by our ancestors. Imagine the Bronte sisters with a web site and e-mail. Imagine Emily Dickinson peddling a book she designed herself on Amazon.com. Imagine Walt Whitman updating "Songs of Myself' in a daily poetry blog. Imagine every word you have ever written and will write, and every word everyone in this room has ever written or will write, contained on a disk that costs 29 cents to make.

The act of publishing, and the mere fact that one person writes and another publishes, is the result of the fact that few authors are rich enough to produce their own books, and that the means of production -- design, paper, ink, binding, printing presses, bindery equipment-- are scarce and expensive. The physical book is one of Western civilization's two greatest inventions (the other is the modem piano), and it is complex enough to daunt most people. Even the making of a shabby paperback makes most people quail. Publishers, and the printers who do the actual labor for them, have always banked on their monopoly over the means of production. Only they could efficiently and profitably design, produce, and distribute books. Booksellers were those grubby people at the bottom of the food chain who put the books out in front of the great unwashed.

The production of books was complicated and involved a long list of craftspeople. Designers, typesetters, platemakers and engravers, printers, binders. The materials consumed were staggering: metal type, film, plates, paper, ink, glue, varnish, cloth, leather. The machines included cameras, linotypes, phototypesetters, computers, stat machines, plate burners, presses, folding machines, a whole medley of case binding devices, and ominous guillotine cutters. It was a maze of conveyor belts, knives, folders, rotating drums, gears and a hundred places where something could go wrong -- and something often did. The consumption of natural resources to make books and magazines the traditional way is staggering, and our descendants will judge us mad.

In all this, all the author did was write down the words - first on a typewriter, and later, onto a disk inserted in a PC or Mac. That was it. Authors sat around like spinsters waiting to be married off - a few were summoned, but the rest languished. And as for money, the bookstores and book distributors ands publishers, and the IRS, got theirs, while most authors -- well, you know the story ...

Since 1985, when desktop publishing hit the personal computer, all that has changed. The author now has the power and ability to take his or her work, typeset it, design it, illustrate it, and make it up into a "virtual book." What you view on the screen is exactly what you would see in the physical book. That author's book can be instantly turned into the futuristic e-book, or given to a printer who produces as few or as many books as you want. The same original can also be sold to any traditional publisher foolhardy enough to publish the work.

All the creative steps in making a book have now been transferred back into the author's control, if the author is willing to learn some of the basics of how to transform a raw manuscript into a book. Many of the "rules" developed during the days of metal type and hand presses are still good rules today because they produce beautiful and highly legible pages.

The biggest breakthrough in the last ten years has been the worldwide adoption of Adobe's Acrobat, or Portable Document Format (PDF). By now, probably 100 million copies of Adobe's document reader software have been downloaded. It's free, and the ability to read PDFs is now built into many web browsers. What this means is that I can design a book here in Providence, and someone in Nairobi or Beijing can view and read my book, line for line, character for character and dot for dot. The printing industry is throwing away all its old photographic and mechanical production methods and is saying to publishers, "Just give us the PDF and we'll print it."

Open Source software is also bringing design and typesetting power to everyone. It used to cost about $1,000 to get into the desktop publishing arena. Now it's just a few hundred dollars, or nearly free if you use Open Source software, created by computer fanatics and distributed free on the Internet. Simply put, if you have a computer, you can make your own book.