Following in Gutenberg’s footsteps, the business card above was printed with movable type, with the individual letters assembled by hand. The origin of the terms “upper-case” and “lower-case” letters lies in old print shops, where the capital letters were kept in a drawer above the “lower-case” letters. The individual pieces are called “sorts,” and in the past, when you ran out of the sorts for a single character, or all those ones were broken, you were “out of sorts.”
Some print shops today have letterpress printing presses as an option for their customers. Not all letterpress printing is with sorts assembled manually, as it is with this card.
Letterpress engages the senses:
- Printers report that one can smell the ink on the finished product,
- We see the depth of the text and images and
- We feel the weight of the paper.
The International Printing Museum in Carson, California is one of the institutions that offers classes in letterpress.
Great research on the cases and the sorts!
Thanks. The sorts was a new one for me. I learned it from a cool video on the Int’l Printing Museum website. Videos are under “visit” and I learned it from the one with the comment, “Wonderful” above the screen. I almost linked it but had computer problems on that page. Maybe it is just my problem network here.
Video is pessimistic about future of letterpress, but seems to be renewed interest in it since video was made.