![]() ![]() Within the letters, fantastic figures of humans, animals, and mythological beasts clamber through the tangled foliage and occasionally transform into letters themselves. On the pages of medieval manuscripts, vines and luxuriant leaves twist together to create letter forms. Initial D (detail) from a psalter, English, 1420–1430 Moreover, nothing other than words written by hand existed in Western Europe at this time.November 13, 2007–Januat the Getty Center Our only evidence is the books they have left us, and from these we can at least infer that they were emulating handwriting. No information survives on Gutenberg and his collaborators’ process. Notice the connected letters, diacritical marks, punctuation, and the last word in the last line: famosissim. Scholars who have studied the Gutenberg Bible have derived that he used approximately 290 different characters. ![]() We still refer to the spacing between lines as leading, for the lead strips that sit between each line of type. For every book printed with movable type, every letter, accent, piece of punctuation, diacritical mark, accent, contraction, every space between letters, all the space between lines, in short, everything we see and everything we don’t see, all are physical objects. Gutenberg’s better way was nothing less than a digitization of handwriting and arguably the invention of the modern alphabet. Single leaf from a paper copy of the Gutenberg Bible, with the text of Ecclesiasticus 16:14-18:29, Mainz, 1455. So, how to take apart the stream of writing, a series of letters, contractions, and punctuation always strung together in continuous strands? Before solving the technical challenges of cutting punches and casting types, the earliest printer first needed to break the flow of the handwritten word into individual characters, to conceptualize and demarcate modular units that could be combined and recombined to create every word, letter, and phrase in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. I remember that moment in elementary school when someone pointed out that we were surrounded by air, and not “nothing” (my contention). We’re like the fish who don’t know about the water. We feel that when we write, we’re pulling from the alphabet, but really, the alphabet was pulled from handwriting. Type, typewriters, the alphabet, we take them all for granted. We live in a post-print culture, so this is hard to grasp. Sold October 2018 for $106,250.īefore Gutenberg, nothing other than handwriting existed. Reysen und Wanderschaffen durch das Gelobte Land, attributed to Jean de Mandeville, Strassburg, 1488. It is prominently on display in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and all of America’s fundamental documents, but it is still a source of confusion for modern readers.Įxample of woodcut printing with “erst” in the headline. Its use in the type cases of western printers continued uninterrupted in Europe and the colonial world from Gutenberg through to the end of the eighteenth century. The long s comes from handwriting, and was in use in ancient times, the dark ages, the middle ages, the renaissance, long before the invention of printing. Who is this strange letter, and how are we supposed to read it? This bisector does not go all the way through, as seen with a proper f it just hangs demurely to the left. If you look closely, you’ll see that in most typefaces, this mysterious character has a shorter line through its vertical that only exists on its left side. The long s is an s and never was and never will be an f. Title page of The Defence of Poesie by Sir Philip Sidney, unauthorized first edition, London, 1595.
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