Typographical Printing Surfaces title page
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The table of contents represents an analysis of the many different types of typesetting and distributing machines that were available in 1915.
The table of contents represents an analysis of the many different types of typesetting and distributing machines that were available in 1915.
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A: London, England, United Kingdom

"Typographical Printing Surfaces": Documenting & Analyzing 19th Century Advances in Typesetting & Type Founding

1916
Typographical Printing Surfaces binding
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Having researched the literature of typography, typesetting, and type founding in the 19th century for several years, I would suggest that the most authoritative work summing up and analyzing those aspects of printing technology during that crucial period in which the advances of the Industrial Revolution were applied to book production, is Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant's Typographical Printing-Surfaces: The Technology and Mechanism of their Production (London & New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1916). This work of 732 pages is an encyclopedia of virtually all aspects of the printing process except the issues of paper and printing. The authors were both civil engineers who directed their attention to the typesetting and type founding industries. By the time that Legros and Grant published the technologies of hot metal typesetting and type founding that dominated these fields were essentially in place until computerization of typography in the latter part of the 20th century.

As a general observation, most 19th century manuals concerning printing were designed mainly for practical use. The first printer's manual after Moxon that was encyclopedic in scope was Hansard's Typographia, a monumental work written and printed in the most elegant manner. Between Hansard's work of 1825 there does not appear to any comparable work until the publication of Legros and Grant, which admittedly does not cover as wide a scope as Hansard, but considering all the technical advances of the 19th century, has much more information to cover within its defined limitations. It also contains a complete listing of British patents pertaining to printing through 1912, and American patents through 1913.

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