The EconomistDecember 21st 2019 Hot-metal type 232 why it’s such fun. Only fanatics are interested in it.”
There are perhaps eight million items in the Type Archive she
has created, the earliest probably dating back to the 16th century.
Nobody really knows, however, because it has not been cata-
logued. Doing so would be a huge and difficult task. The Monotype
collection alone contains 5,700 drawers of patterns (large metal
plates engraved with the shape of a letter) and 22,000 containing
matrices. The former are made of a thin layer of copper backed
with lead. Many of the drawers in which they are stored, though
only a few inches deep, are too heavy for one person to lift.
Every stage of the process is there. Alongside the patterns and
the matrices are thousands of boxes of punches—small metal let-
ters which are derived from the patterns and used to stamp their
shape into a matrix. And there are thousands of varieties of type, in
different fonts, sizes and alphabet: Roman, Cyrillic, Sinhala and
the 20 Indian languages the Monotype Corporation once serviced.
On the upper floor are 79 of the machines used in the different
stages of the hot-metal process. Some are collecting dust, but
most—like those used to set the title for this article in Albertus,
created for Monotype in the 1930s by Berthold Wolpe—are clank-
ing away. This year, as a result of Mr Maret’s curiosity, they have
been making the first new Monotype hot-metal font for 40 years.
Temples of print
Letterpress printing hung on longer in poorer countries than in
Britain, but now its near extinction is global. “Letterpress has been
wiped out completely in India,” says Aurobind Patel, who designed
the font, called Ecotype, that this newspaper used from 1991 to 2018
(we now use Milo). It is “like the backdrops of the Alps that photo
studios used to have, that are photoshopped in these days.”
Thousands of tonnes of metal type must have been melted
down. But some has been bought up by collectors like Ahmad Ma-
tar, a Saudi Arabian artist. His biggest haul was from an Armenian
library in Cairo, but he reckons that Beirut may have the greatest
potential, for it was the centre of the Arabic printing industry.
“There is an Arabic saying,” he says from his studio in Jeddah,
where the walls are lined with wooden cases full of type. “Cairowrites. Beirut prints. Baghdad reads.”
The most enthusiastic conservators are former
printers. The employees of dying industries often feel
a powerful nostalgia for the machines with which they
have spent their lives. The feeling is perhaps magnified
among those whose business was disseminating hu-
man culture. When Izumi Munemura was looking for
material for the Printing Museum he opened in Tokyo
in 2000 he was approached by former employees of
Toppan, a printing company, which had largely
stopped using letterpress by 1985. They had been stor-
ing some of the company’s hot-metal type. “They
opened the door to the warehouse and said, ‘Here you
go: we have been waiting for this moment.’ It was like a
scene from Indiana Jones.”
Not all the old fonts and machines were consigned
to museums or melted down. In a few corners of the
world, such as Kazui Press in Tokyo, they continue to
operate. Kazui was run by Juzo Takaoka from 1956 until
his son, Masao, took over in 1995. The younger Mr Taka-
oka still runs the firm.
Letterpress is a far more arduous business in Japa-
nese than in English; it takes 3,000-4,000 characters to
print a book or newspaper. It is also expensive—Kazui
business cards are ¥20,000 ($185) per hundred. But Mr
Takaoka still has plenty of customers. In explanation,
he points to a grey ceramic cup into which he has
poured tea. “You can serve or drink tea in a plastic or
paper cup. The process would be the same: you bring
the cup to your mouth and you drink tea. But it’s more
tasteful to drink from a ceramic cup, no?”
Nobody knows the size of the letterpress industry,
but there is an agreement that, in at least some places,
it is rebounding. “When I got started, old presses were
practically scrap metal,” says Harold Kyle, who found-
ed Boxcar Press in Syracuse, New York two decades ago.
“Now they go for anything from $3,000 to $25,000.” 1