The Printed Book Week 2 - 22nd April

During my research of the Gutenberg Bible and William Morris and the Kelmscott Presss, I was interested to find that: The Gutenberg Bible is the first surviving book printed from moveable type on a printing press. This was created by Johann Gutenberg around the same time of the introduction of paper - which was less expensive than vellum and available in a higher quantity. Gutenberg (having been trained as a goldsmith) was able to create a metal type that was suitable for printing, was sufficient in quantity and low in cost. There were several versions of the Gutenberg Bible that were printed both on paper and vellum.The Gutenberg Bible used nearly 300 characters of type including upper case, lower case, ligatures, and punctuation marks. Germany is currently home to the most copies of the Gutenberg Bible (12 in total but only 4 of them complete).

WIlliam Morris, an influential author and artist, founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891. He used this press to produce his own works as well as reprints of works he deemed important. Morris designed the press with preserving the art and books relationship in mind. It was during this time that mechanism in art was becoming quite popular. Morris liked tradition. He made his own paper for his handmade books and designed two typefaces based on 15th century fonts. In only seven years the small press produced more than 18,000 copies of more than 50 different works. In my research I managed to find a site that showed different publications from the Kelmscott Press and a fact on each one:

The advances in printing technologies allowed for printing to become a less tedious job and less manual labour. As printing became and easier thing to do, the cost became a lot lower and the quantities printed became a lot higher. The most important changes that printing technologies made to the books appearance was the ability to allow images and text to be closer together. To begin with text and images often had to be on separate pages because previous printing techniques only allowed for printing on one side of the page. As printing progressed the image and text grew closer together allow for the two to be right next or even right on top of each other. With these changes the image and text were able to better compliment each other. Text books with diagrams could better aid learning and children's books with images could spark more interest in smaller children who are learning to read as well as illiterate people.