June 2025
If someone said Fleet Street to you, what would you think of? Probably newspapers and journalism.
We visited the St Bride Foundation just off that famous road to learn about history of printing and also see some lovely historical examples of books and typography.
We discovered the origins of moveable type and how it was made by carving a reverse image of the letter on the end of a metal punch - a very skilled job which appeared to put one's fingers at risk! Once complete the punch was used to create an indentation in a copper block called a matrix and then molten metal (primarily lead) was poured into a hand mould containing the matrix to create a piece of type.
Moving on we learnt about monotype machines where strips of letters were produced using a complex "typewriter" to assemble the matrices and then cast the type.
For the other half of our tour we were looking at ancient books including examples printed by William Caxton in the 15th century. Looking at the works, we commented on how intense the ink was - a really jet black.
With European moveable type being developed principally in Germany, the initial punches were all for central European letters, English type did not exist. Not that it was a big issue since there was not a lot of agreement on the spelling of English words so they used what they had - hence a "Th" sound use a "Y" like symbol in German so "The" became "Ye".