Centuries-old printing technique makes a comeback
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E-mail chinadaily.com.cn, November 20, 2019
Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner. Are you racking your brains to come up with gifts that can aptly show your gratitude or love?
Letterpress items, such as a thank-you note, may be exactly what you need to impress your beloved ones.
We aren't bluffing. Letterpress, a centuries-old printing technique, is making an elegant comeback in China as designers, artists and consumers are rediscovering the beauty and craftsmanship behind it.
Gaining a new lease on life
Essentially a kind of movable type printing, letterpress is a technique of relief printing that came into being in the mid-15th century. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg converted a wine press into a printing press, which turned inked letters into reams of books and remained as the norm of printing for five centuries.
"The movable type printing is our heritage as it was invented by Bi Sheng in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) and then was spread to the West some 400 years later," said Peng Junzhang, initiator of China's first letterpress art festival.
Gutenberg's inventions played a key role in ushering in the era of mass communication, adding fuel to the Renaissance and the Reformation, which enlightened minds and permanently altered the structure of society.
In the West, the computer revolution in the 1970s gave birth to cheaper, faster ways of transferring words and images onto paper, dooming the old practice of arranging clunky type blocks in a massive metal press to obsolescence.
After nearly three decades in oblivion, letterpress came back from the dead as its aesthetic appeal was extolled by media personalities such as Martha Stewart, also known as Queen of Domestic Arts in the US. In the 1990s, her weddings magazine began featuring personalized letterpress invitations, giving rise to the revival of the retro-style printing craft.
While in China, letterpress had remained as the mainstay of the printing industry until Chinese scientist Wang Xuan fathered Chinese character laser-photo-typesetting system in 1974 that gradually brought Chinese character printing into the electrical and digital age.
The revival of letterpress has been in full swing in other parts of the world over the past decade.
"I've been to Japan multiple times and learned that there are over 110 letterpress studios in the country," Peng told China Daily Website.
In Australia, the enthusiasm for letterpress is stronger as only in Melbourne, studios or shops specializing in letterpress number over 100, Peng added.
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