3 friends, an old-model printing press and a whole lot of metal type

October 27, 2024 1:47 AM

In 1877 the Brits were holding a celebration of “400 years of printing” to commemorate William Caxton’s introduction of the first printing press to the Isles. At that event, the British public was invited to see examples of domestic and foreign printing. It wasn’t pretty: British printing was visibly behind that of the Austrians. Tuer and Hailing decided to elevate British printing through a fresh scheme called the Printer’s International Specimen Exchange: a compilation of the finest printing examples from around the world. This is the biggest collection of scans from the Printers’ International Specimen Exchange.
posted by chavenet (8 comments total)

Oh, this is right up my alley. I've loved the printing process since taking a course at Uni. The beautiful presses, the delicious smell of the inks. These are glorious examples of a time when beauty and design mattered. We've lost that I think. Now we settle for the Nike swoosh as a symbol of beauty.
posted by Czjewel at 2:18 AM on October 27 [2 favorites]

Oh, wow -- these are all of a time, but still so varied!

I love this, as someone who worked for a few years in electronic prepress in the 90s, and -- like the job printers -- saw so many ads and magazine/book layouts in the course of a work day.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:36 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

Just a heads-up for the more impatient of us...There are gigaton of images in that link, so the page might take a little while to fully load. It’s well worth the wait, though.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:09 AM on October 27 [2 favorites]

So much beauty in their show-offy maximalism! It reminds us--as did that brief revival in the early 2000s--that the best design is to put as many words as possible, using as many different typefaces as possible, on the page.
posted by mittens at 7:50 AM on October 27 [3 favorites]

Wow am I enjoying these images. It's making me miss printed magazines, zines, and also the era where websites were idiosyncratic, weird, wacky and wonderful.
posted by birdsongster at 9:12 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

This is great! The early many-to-many distribution having such an effect; this is late enough that printers (especially) must have suspected it would from the effects of letters-sections, but figuring out how to do it with the fancy pages was so clever.

So… how did Austria get there earlier?
posted by clew at 10:10 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

The compilation and redistribution method sounds a lot like an Amateur Press Association (APA), which also compile copies of submissions sent in by participants and redistribute them. The earliest of these started in 1876 in the U.S., so roughly contemporaneous with Tuer and Haling’s efforts. The APA later became a common practice in science fiction fandom, comics and has also been utilized in mail art.
posted by larrybob at 10:22 AM on October 28 [1 favorite]

Lotta immigration from Austria and the Germanic states to the US between 1848 and 1876. Journalists, famously; printers, probably?
posted by clew at 10:31 AM on October 28