The printing process

These famous images come from a series of engraved depictions of new discoveries of inventions entitled Nova Reperta published in Antwerp sometime around 1600 by Johannes Stradanus, also known as Jan van der Straet. To the left, three compositors read the manuscript texts mounded in the ‘visorium’ in front of them, pick individual letters from the boxes in front of them with their right hands, and arrange them into strings of text on compositors’ sticks in their left. Once these strings have been assembled to create a whole line, they are put into ‘galleys’ to compose whole pages of text; the man in the background at the centre-right background then inks these finished pages of type with pads made of gooseskin. The man behind him carries stacks of paper to the printer on the right, who pulls a long handle to turn the screw pressing an individual sheet of paper down onto the inked textblock. In the centre-left middle ground, a man in spectacles proofreads a printed sheet before mass production begins. To the right, printed sheets hang to dry. The boy in the foreground stacks multiple copies of the same dry sheet, which are tied in bundles in the table in the centre, to be assembled into books elsewhere. The bearded man in the fur-lined cloak on the extreme right appears to be clutching a roll of paper: this may be an author dropping by the printing shop to check on the progress of work. Meanwhile, in a vignette in the upper righthand corner, a solitary monk copies a single book by hand, while in the streetscape glimpsed through the central archway, a tower clock reminds us of the enormous advantage of this whole production process in accelerating the production of texts. The caption reads, ‘Just as one voice can be heard by many ears, [the printers] daub a thousand pages with just a single written one.’

The first video below, made by the Folger Shakespeare Library, is in part a commentary on this image. A slightly more thorough treatment is provided by the second video, produced by the Cambridge University Library.

Credit: Howard Hotson (May 2019)