At the Type Archive
28th July 2020
The? Type Archive near Stockwell in London used to be a hospital for cab horses and circus animals, but since 1992 it has been home to every sort of mould, matrix, burin, bodkin and slug. The archive holds typographical apparatus from the last six hundred years, but its main collection relates to the technology of Monotype printing. That capital letter is important: this isn’t the single-print practice of fine artists (for ‘monotypes’, see Degas) but the huge and complex letterpress hot-metal printing system created by the Monotype Corporation in the late 1800s. Along with its competitor, Linotype, it bridged the gap – or formed the continuum – between manual letterpress printing (see Gutenberg), where a compositor arranges individual characters in rows for inking, and computerised printing. In the Monotype system, the text to be printed is freshly machine-cast from molten lead. Instead of having to assemble a book or newspaper line by line, letter by letter, the typesetter could type the text into a keyboard and a machine would issue forth its metal mirror.
I have always been fascinated by hot-type printing systems.