Far too many books have been written about printing to do justice to the subject in a few brief posts. Folks who want to build a private library around this subject are very strongly encouraged to obtain a copy of Bigmore & Wyman's A Bibliography of printing with notes and illustrations. The 2001 Oak Knoll reprint combines the three original volumes into a single volume, adding an index, which the original volumes sorely lacked. For more current titles, G. Thomas Tanselle's Introduction to Bibliography: Seminar Syllabus, used in a number of Rare Book School classes, would be a useful addition to one's bookshelves:
If you cannot afford a print edition of these titles, both are available online, free of charge, by going to this blog's left-hand column and clicking on the appropriate links under Selected Bibliographic Resources.
Nowadays, anyone struggling to decipher a text printed in multiple fonts and purple ink on a green background may be forgiven thinking that the eternal verities of printing, like readability, are dead. Fortunately, this is not entirely true. Hardy bands of like-minded souls still pursue traditional printing, communicating with each other via electronic media like email lists, as well as through the pages of printed journals that often are exemplars of their craft.
Among the most notable of these are the much lamented, for now deceased, journals such as Ars Typographica (1918-1934), The Fleuron (1923-1930), Fine Print ((1975-1989) and Bookways ((1991-1995). If you seriously are interested in building a private library about printing, and you ever come across a complete set of any of these periodicals in the marketplace, you owe it to yourself to snap it up:
Fortunately, we still have with us such exemplary journals as Devil's Artisan (1980-), Parenthesis (1998-), Printing History (1979-) and, most illustrious of all, Matrix (1981-):
Tomorrow, we will look at how some traditional printers have been commemorated....
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