A Little Book of Making Tools and Equipment for the Studio: Includes Instructions for Making a Printing Press, Line Printing Blocks, Rubber Stamp Making, Stencil Cutting and Stencilling

A Little Book of

Making Tools and

Equipment for the Studio

Includes Instructions for Making a Printing Press,

Line Printing Blocks, Rubber Stamp

Making, Stencil Cutting and Stencilling

Copyright © 2023 Old Hand Books

This edition is published by Old Hand Books,

an imprint of Read & Co.

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

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www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Contents

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PRINTING PRESS

MAKING A PRINTING PRESS

MAKING SYMPATHETIC OR INVISIBLE INKS

MAKING LINE PRINTING-BLOCKS AT HOME

LETTER FORMATION FOR TICKET AND SIGN-WRITING

RUBBER STAMP MAKING

STENCIL CUTTING AND STENCILLING

A BRIEF HISTORY

OF THE PRINTING PRESS

A printing press is a device for evenly printing ink onto a wide variety of mediums, generally paper or cloth. Printing presses apply pressure to a print medium, resting on an inked surface made of movable type, thereby transferring the ink. Typically used for texts, the invention and spread of the printing press are widely regarded as among the most influential events in human history, revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe the world they live in, and ushering in the period of modernity.

The world's first movable type printing was invented and developed in China by the Han Chinese printer Bi Sheng

(990-1051 CE) between the years 1041 and 1048. It was made from porcelain. His contemporary Shen Kuo (1031-1095) wrote extensively about the new movable type printing technology in the Dream Pool Essays, which were published in 1088. This technology was transmitted to Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty, where Korean inventors subsequently made many technological improvements and innovations upon the original technology. In 1234, they created the world's first metal movable-type press for printing paper books. This was a full 216 years before Gutenberg's printing press.

These early eastern developments led to the printing of a Korean book, using the ancient Chinese writing system, known in Korean as the Jikji, in 1377. It is the oldest extant movable metal printed book. This form of metal movable type technology has been described by the French scholar Henri-Jean Martin as similar to Gutenberg's, and meant that block printing became common in China as early as 1300. Images printed on cloth for religious purposes could be quite large and elaborate, and when paper became relatively easily available, around 1400, the medium transferred very quickly to small woodcut religious images and playing cards printed on paper. These prints were produced in very large numbers from about 1425 onward, and also became popular in Europe.

Around the mid-fifteenth century, block-books (woodcut books with both text and images, usually carved in the same block), emerged as a cheaper alternative to manuscripts and books printed with movable type. These were all short heavily illustrated works, the bestsellers of the day, repeated in many different block-book versions: the Ars moriendi and the Biblia pauperum were the most common. There is still some controversy among scholars as to whether their introduction preceded or followed the introduction of movable type, with the range of estimated dates being between about 1440 and 1460.

The rapid economic and socio-cultural development of late medieval society in Europe created favourable intellectual and technological conditions for Gutenberg's invention: the entrepreneurial spirit of emerging capitalism increasingly made its impact on medieval modes of production, fostering economic thinking and improving the efficiency of traditional work-processes. The sharp rise of medieval learning and literacy amongst the middle classes also led to an increased demand for books, which the time-consuming hand-copying method fell far short of accommodating. His invention is traditionally dated to 1450, though the exact date of Gutenberg's press is debated based on existing screw presses that were an essential component of the printing press device.

Gutenberg, a goldsmith by profession, developed his printing system by both adapting existing technologies and making inventions of his own. His newly devised hand mould made possible the rapid creation of metal movable type in large quantities. The printing press displaced earlier methods of printing and led to the first assembly line-style mass production of books. A single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing prevalent in East Asia, and a few by hand-copying. Books of bestselling authors such as Luther and Erasmus were sold by the hundreds of thousands in their lifetime.

Printing soon spread from Mainz, Germany, to over two hundred cities in a dozen European countries. However the first book printed in English was not published until 1475, some twenty years later. By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes. In the sixteenth century, with presses spreading further afield, their output rose tenfold to an estimated 200 million copies. The operation of a press became so synonymous with the enterprise of printing that, by metonymy, it lent its name to a new branch of media; 'the press'. The importance of printing as an emblem of modern achievement and of the ability of so-called