PRINTING, the art of producing impres sions from characters or figures on paper or other substance. Printing from movable types is of comparatively modern origin, it being less than 500 years since the first book was issued from the press; yet the principles on which it was ultimately developed existed among the ancient Assyrian nations. Printing from blocks and clay tablets was practised in China as early as 50 B.C. The great discovery was that of forming every letter or character of the alpha bet separately, so as to be capable of rearrange ment and forming in succession the words, lines and pages of a work, thereby avoiding the labor of cutting new blocks for every page.
The city of Haarlem in Holland claims that Laurens Janszoon Coster there invented the art of printing in 1423, making use of movable types of wood and afterward of lead and tin ; but no printed works of his can be identified. The claims of Johannes Gutenberg (q.v.) to this invention are now generally recognized. He without question was occupied in various ex perimental researches of a secret nature in Strassburg, and possessed in 1438 printing ma terials, a press, and as it appears movable types. No book, however, was brought out by their use until after Gutenberg had returned (which was about 1450) to his native city of Mainz. Here he associated himself with a wealthy citizen, Johann Faust, who, on learning the secrets of the art, entered into partnership with Gutenberg, and agreed to furnish funds for developing the process. They employed to assist them Peter Sdioffer, a scribe whose previous occupation had been the copying of books, and who appears to have been a man of taste and genius, and well fitted to bring a new process of this sort favor ably before the public. He has the credit of substituting metallic types cast in plaster molds in the place of those which Gutenberg had previously made by carving pieces of wood and metal, and of still further perfecting the art by the invention of punches in hard metal, by the use of which sharpness of outline could be given to the matrices in which the types were cast, and perfect uniformity be retained in the type by continuing to use the same punches for produc ing as many matrices as might be required. The inventors succeeded in printing a con siderable number of books, the first of which known to have been printed with movable types were three editions of Donatus. Printing presses were in operation at Subiaco near Rome in 1465, and the types employed were more like those now called Roman than like the Gothic forms of the Germans, which with the characters imi tating handwriting had up to this time alone been used. In 1469 printing was introduced into Milan and Venice; and the productions of the presses of John de Spira and Christopher Val darfar of the latter city attained great fame for their perfection and beauty. Printing was
introduced into Paris in 1470 and into London in 1474. (See CAxroN, WILLIAM). Before the year 1500, it is stated, printing presses had been set up in 220 places in Europe, and a multitude of editions of the classical writers in their ap propriate Greek and Latin characters were Oven to the world. A Greek grammar wholly in Greek types was printed in Milan in 1476. A Hebrew Bible was printed at Soncino in the duchy of Milan in 1488. Italic type was in vented about the year 1500 by Aldus Manutius of Venice. From the 17th to the 19th century a great variety of ornamental type came into use, the styles differing from each other in the shapes of the letters, in the heaviness or light ness of the lines and in the shading. Great ingenuity has been exercised in multiplying these varieties in so limited a field. The largest size of type for books was formerly called great primer, and is seen in the largest old Bibles; it is now seldom used. The other old names now going into disuse are English, pica, small pica, etc. See table below. The term pica, however, is retained, being one-sixth of an inch, a convenient standard unit for type measurement Late in the 19th century the gpointg system was adopted generally by printers. In this new arrangement one inch equals 72 points and con sequently 12-point would make six lines to the inch. The principal types are designated as follows: For handbills or posters special types are em ployed of extra large sizes and named in mul tiples of pica, as 20-line pica. From about eight-line up they are commonly made of hard wood. A complete assortment of one size is called a font or fount, and the that make up an ordinary font of Roman type are as follows: Three complete alphabets in capi tals, small capitals and small or glower cases letters, making 78 characters; the double letters ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffi (each cast in a single piece on account of the kern or bend of the f not per mitting it to stand separately against another f, an i or an 1), 5; the diphthongs lE, CE, CE, se, ce, 6; figures, 10; marks of punctu ation, 6; the apostrophe, hyphen, parenthesis and bracket, 4; four sizes of dashes and braces in five pieces, 9; the characters &, a, $, f, 5; and the references *, §, II, if, 6; total characters, 129. Besides these, there are required for filling the blanks between words at the end of lines, etc., four sizes of spaces and four of quadrats (the former and the smallest of the latter being subdivisions of the em [m] or square of the size of the type, one equal to it and the other two multiples of it), making altogether 137 sorts.