History of Type Response

I think the most interesting piece of information in this whole history is that Gutenberg had his shop repossessed before he ever mass-produced a book! If his investors only knew that he would make them their money back 100x over with his breakthrough in technology...or maybe they did.

This reading really makes me appreciate how much printed material we have at our fingertips. The reading said that to have a dozen (only 12!) volumes of a book constituted a library back in the early 1400s! And, 100 was an awe-inspiring collection. Now, you can go the the library, and there are so many books that when you look from one end of an aisle to the other, the people on the opposite end from you look small and blurry!

I learned that in the 1950s they came out with photo-compositional type. This new way of using light projected onto light-sensitive paper allowed for negative kerning and tracking to occur, giving the typesetters more creative freedom.

Now, we have all sorts of digital typefaces and methods of printing. What's next? Is there a next set of have we reached the pinnacle of the creative freedom and experimentation that can be experienced with type?

I think a mash-up between digital and manual--like letterpress-- will occur. People might start printing letterpress--using only one or two colors--and then switch the paper out onto an inkjet printer to get multiple colors onto the paper, and have some sweet debossed typography with colorful, digital images in the background. That's what I would do anyways!