Old printing art


Since I’m currently moving between two jobs (actually the only really relaxing vacation if you don’t think about what your colleagues in the office are up to), I was able to use the time today for a stroll through Hamburg’s city center. In the Thalia bookstore on the Große Bleichen, there is an exhibition of the Museum of Work, which shows how printing was done on old printing presses. Apart from the fact that you can have a bookmark printed there free of charge with the names of your loved ones, I noticed that the names of today’s fonts were written on the drawers of the type cases; the typesetter told me when I asked that Futura and Bodoni were not inventions of the computer age, but had already been around for quite a few years. Nasty knowledge gap.

The Futura dates from 1928, Bodoni is even from the 18th century. The fact that the size is given in pt has nothing to do with pixels (as I thought so far), but with an old unit of measurement.

The friendly typesetter also answered a few other questions for me, for example character spacing, what Microsoft Word can’t do, and so on. Until August 26, you can visit the ladies and gentlemen of the museum there.

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