Typography

Member lesson

History of type from Gutenberg onward

Lesson 18 of 34 in Typography.

04 – Gutenberg and printing · Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
Lesson

Movable type existed in East Asia long before Europe. Bi Sheng made ceramic type in the eleventh century and Korea was printing with metal type by the thirteenth, with the Jikji of 1377 surviving as the oldest known book printed from metal movable type.

An old print workshop where one man casts metal type, another inks a frame of type and a third pulls a wooden screw press, with sheets drying overhead.
A fifteenth-century workshop casts identical metal letters, inks them and prints on a wooden press. The mould, the ink and the press together let printing grow.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Individual reusable characters. Used in East Asia centuries before Europe.”

    • Structural contrast
    • Movable type
    • Superfamily
    • Entry point
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Books printed before 1501. The first fifty years of European printing.”

    • Naskh and Kufic
    • Positional forms
    • Cursive by nature
    • Incunabula
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The person who cut the steel punch each letter was struck from.”

    • Point
    • Outline font
    • Punchcutter
    • Phototypesetting

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