The Year of the Book and the Week of Literacy:there are plenty of reasons to discuss the 'The Book of the Printed Book', an overview of more than five hundred years of the history of printing.
Printing and designing books have been closely linked since the invention of the printing press around 1450. We don't talk about "printing art" for nothing. But even with the cheapest pocket, consideration is given to the design of the letters, any images and the cover.
Monastery books
'The book of the printed book' provides an overview of the western development of the design of the printed book. Author Mathieu Lommen (design historian and curator of graphic design at the University of Amsterdam) starts with the invention of the printing press and then has more than four hundred pages to get to the year 2010. A difficult task, because is it even possible to summarize more than 500 years of design history in one work?
In any case, Lommen tries to show a lot:he discusses 125 examples of books on the basis of large color photos. To arrive at this selection, the author searched the Special Collections of the University Library of the University of Amsterdam. This naturally limits the choice, despite the extensive and age-old collection. For example, the original Protestant city library from 1578, which confiscated the books from the Catholic monastery library, is also part of the Special Collections.
The beautiful photos of all these special books make this thick reference book a real coffee table copy. Very nice to browse through, look at pictures and also learn something. The publisher aims at a wide readership, from designers and design historians to book lovers and collectors. This works quite well despite the author throwing in graphic jargon here and there.
Printers and designers
The book does not consist of numbered chapters, but Lommen lists the names of all printers and designers he discusses in the table of contents in chronological order. He elaborates this in the book itself into a short informative text accompanied by the photos. The author also provides an introduction with additional information for each century or important geographical movement. This division allows you to see the developments within science, especially in the early centuries. Furthermore, the short texts contain enough unexpected facts. For example, to make typefaces, the earliest printers used the techniques of goldsmiths, mints and tinsmiths.
The first part of the book is about traditional printing. From Mainz, where Johann Gutenberg (c. 1394 – 1468) started the earliest known European movable type printing business in the Gothic style, the art of printing spread across Europe. Within twenty years there were hundreds of printing houses, with some printers printing more than a thousand copies of a single book. They operated their printing presses manually, which was a lot faster than the painstaking work of a written book.
Rapid developments in science and religion and the emergence of popular genres such as travel stories stimulated the demand for books in the sixteenth century. With the printing of books and pamphlets, new ideas could be quickly disseminated, which was against the sore leg of many European kings and ecclesiastical leaders. In the more tolerant Netherlands of the seventeenth century, banned books still came out of the printing presses. Despite the increase in scale, in many countries books were still expensive and intended for the elite, but in the same period Dutch printers started with cheaper editions for the common man, such as small bibles and moralistic emblem books.
Mass production
The nineteenth century was one of the great technical developments, which forms a fault line in the book. The author's jargon also becomes a bit more technical, but on the other hand, the printed matter resulting from modern printing processes is a lot more recognizable for the reader. Who ever considers that in the days of the manual printing press, books were sold without covers? Buyers had to have their own copies bound. With the advent of the mechanical printing press after 1830, the circulation increased enormously and the price of books fell as a result.
The versatility of mechanical printing techniques also increased. The German Alois Senefelder developed lithography or lithography. Until the end of the eighteenth century, images had to be engraved in wood or copper, which took a lot of time and was very laborious. In lithography artists draw directly with chalk or special ink on stone. This method gave much more freedom and turned out to be very suitable for color printing.
The invention of photography (1839) influenced graphic design from 1868, when it became possible to print photographs on a large scale. As a result, the number of magazines and newspapers for a wide audience grew strongly. Another important invention came from the New York Tribune newspaper. In 1886 they started working with the linotype machine, which no longer required the use of individual letters. As a result, the newspaper rolled off the press a lot faster than with its competitors.
Artists
In the twentieth century, graphic design took off as an art and usage form. Painters, architects or interior designers also designed new typefaces and covers for the printing house. They deviated from earlier styles by, for example, using a lot of asymmetry and designing new typefaces without serifs (the dashes on letters). The author mentions Piet Zwart (1885-1977) as the most important Dutch designer. This versatile artist designed everything from kitchens for Bruynzeel to national stamps. At the end of the book, the post-war minimalist modernism and the exuberant postmodernism from the eighties and nineties also come along.
While printers from the eighteenth century still designed their own style of type (still recognizable by their name, such as lettertpye Baskerville, designed by John Baskerville, 1707-1775), today designers have completely adopted the design. That's not to say that's the end of the book. An e-reader is nice to be able to put a lot of reading material on, but there is nothing like having a beautifully designed book in your hands.'The book of the printed book' is a good example of this:the content remains somewhat limited the plain because it wants to treat a lot, but there is little wrong with the design.