How Letterpress Printing Came Back From the Dead
21st June 2017
Johannes Gutenberg’s converted wine press, which turned inked letters into books, remained the same in principle for 500 years. But by the mid-1980s cheaper, faster, and more efficient ways of transferring words and images onto paper doomed the old practice of arranging clunky blocks of type in a massive metal machine to obsolescence.
Yet today letterpress is in the throes of a full-blown revival. In 2000, a flatbed proof press, often used in teaching and for posters, cost Boxcar Press founder Harold Kyle about $100. By 2005, the price rose to a few thousand. Today, if you could persuade someone to part with it, you might pay $15,000.
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Beneath the old-timey patina of letterpress goods is a full-scale digital reinvention that drags Gutenberg’s great creation into the full embrace of modern technology.