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My wife and I visited what was arguably the most important printing house in history, the Plantin-Moretus family business in Antwerp. It was a challenging photography environment.
Christoffel Plantin published his first book in 1555, and 20 years later his company was publishing more than half of all the scientific books printed in Europe at the time. Among others, he published the first world atlas ("Theatre of the World," by one of my heroes, Abraham Ortelius) and the book that inspired Thomas Jefferson to organize U.S. currency on the decimal system ("The Tenth," by Simon Stevin).
The odd contraption below, wrapped in string, was used to cast individual letters from molten metal. You have, no doubt, heard of the font named Garamond. Claude Garamond was a 16th century French type designer, and Plantin purchased all of Garamond's fonts for his company's exclusive use. He also had the largest collection of foreign-language fonts, which meant that Plantin could print books that other houses could not. I counted six printing presses in one room, and this location was just one of numerous printing plants in cities around Europe.
One might argue that early printing like this was not truly "mechanized," because everything was made by hand. But without the printing press, The Mechanized World would never have come into existence.
Christoffel Plantin published his first book in 1555, and 20 years later his company was publishing more than half of all the scientific books printed in Europe at the time. Among others, he published the first world atlas ("Theatre of the World," by one of my heroes, Abraham Ortelius) and the book that inspired Thomas Jefferson to organize U.S. currency on the decimal system ("The Tenth," by Simon Stevin).
The odd contraption below, wrapped in string, was used to cast individual letters from molten metal. You have, no doubt, heard of the font named Garamond. Claude Garamond was a 16th century French type designer, and Plantin purchased all of Garamond's fonts for his company's exclusive use. He also had the largest collection of foreign-language fonts, which meant that Plantin could print books that other houses could not. I counted six printing presses in one room, and this location was just one of numerous printing plants in cities around Europe.
One might argue that early printing like this was not truly "mechanized," because everything was made by hand. But without the printing press, The Mechanized World would never have come into existence.
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