A week ago I visited the Plantin-Moretus house, the Antwerp printing plant and publishing house of Christoph Plantin, “the first industrial printer since the invention of the printing press,” and his successors through marriage, the Moretus family. (The top photo is from my metro stop in Antwerp, showing an engraving by Plantin-Moretus: note that the idea of a “jackalope” has been around for awhile.)
Sunday was Heritage Day, which meant that all the museums were free. Plus there was a major run going on near the river. This is the main reason I headed out to a more obscure museum. I exited a surprisingly packed subway a little after nine, and did some window shopping in a maze of quiet streets that lead into little piazzas.
The first thing I saw in the was a small printing press with an ink wheel, which is the type of letterpress that my Dad started with. The rest of the house was full of stories—about printing books in the 16th through 19th centuries, about presses, and type—All about type, including how type is designed, cast and stored. I had never thought much about type in different alphabets. Typesetters had to be able to set type (in mirror image) in different languages, and sometimes in several languages at once.
Since my Dad had had a hobby letterpress (“Treehouse Enterprises”) I was familiar with font trays and had handset my own type for a couple of small projects. He had the same kinds of trays as these, but just one cabinet’s worth. I visited this place in his memory and in the memory of his brother, who also had a press and often sent us silkscreened Christmas cards.
Plantin and Moretus published books in Latin, French, Flemish, Italian, German and other languages. Since the press specialized in printing Bibles for the Catholic church, it had Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac font sets.
It also published schoolbooks with parallel texts, for example in Flemish, English, German, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian.
The main press room is still there, with several presses of the type that Gutenberg invented. In another room, a woman was demonstrating how these presses work.
By the time I ascended the floors of the old house for even more stories about the historical technical challenges of printing, I was flagging. But here were displays of multi-color botanical prints; full-sized, illustrated antiphonaries like monks used to inscribe by hand; books filled with mathematical formulae and figures. On the top floor was a type foundry, still in use, with a relatively tiny kiln that looked like a pot-bellied stove (one letter at a time fits into a device about 8” on each side.) Plantin and Moretus bought up many type matrices (sets of molds for forging type) so they could have monopolies on the fonts.
Also on display was Plantins publication of Simon Stevin’s book on calculations using decimals as fractions. I now know that this method was not common in Europe until the 16th century. (Maybe schools want to preserve this history by torturing primary students with fractional arithmetic before finally moving to decimals. I actually remember feeling relief when we got to this topic in math class.)
Wikipedia notes, however, that the method was first developed by the tenth-century Islamic mathematician al-Uqlidisi, and goes on to note:
The importance of Stevin’s book De Thiende was expressed in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics:[2]
The idea of extending the decimal place-value system to include fractions was discovered by several mathematicians. The most influential of these was Simon Stevin, a Flemish mathematician and engineer who popularized the system in a booklet called De Thiende (“The tenth”), first published in 1585. By extending place value to tenths, hundredths, and so on, Stevin created the system we still use today. More importantly, he explained how it simplified calculations that involved fractions, and gave many practical applications. The cover page, in fact, announces that the book is for astrologers, surveyors, measurers of tapestries.
Finally, there were the libraries. They hold not only the Press’s publications, but also the Plantin-Moretus personal collections. The family did business, but they were also scholars and corresponded with people all over Europe. (They also put the daughters to work if they were interested.)
Una Pellegrina nel Mondo 