Through Old Techniques to New Ideas

In the "Museum of Work" in the northern German metropolis of Hamburg, visitors may learn how in earlier days, wood type was manufactured, and in the process how prints were made. The graphic designer David Janssen restored the last wood type manufactory in Germany for the museum, and built it into a demonstration workshop.

Most of the time it is posters that notify us about special offers, event announcements, or election campaigns in curt slogans, and clear-cut letters. Not only the images on them, but also the words should be legible already from a distance. Yet, before the dawn of the modern era of printing presses and computer technology, how did these oversized letters get onto paper? Earlier, large print characters were sawed or milled out of wood, laid out in typeface on a plate, and then printed in lettering onto sheets.

Rugged Letters Made of Wood
Since the manufacturing of large letters out of lead involved a great expenditure of effort and was costly, letters were manufactured out of wood. The wood came from pear, maple, or box trees, which because of their robust structure were particularly good at withstanding the heavy load from printing rollers, and also leant themselves ideally to processing because of their short fibers. Wood letters were already introduced into the printing of posters and headlines by the beginning of the 19th century. Especially in England and in the United States, in the train of emerging advertising, the need for new fonts with unconventional designs grew ever larger. Numerous firms specialized in the production of wood characters, so-called poster type. In Germany, where production was introduced towards the middle of the 19th century, things were different: here, wood lettering was manufactured exclusively by type foundries that also produced lead lettering. Furthermore, the foundries were less experimental, so that German poster type closely followed the strict and rectilinear forms of the lead fonts in larger format.

However, wood characters did not hold up nearly as long as letters made of lead. The longer they were used, the more severely their surface and edges wore down, so that print quality became increasingly less sharp. After about 30 years, wood characters could no longer be used in printing. Given increasing automization through offset printing in the 20th century, the demand for wood characters grew ever smaller. Accordingly, German type foundries stopped producing wood type during the 1960's. What little demand remained was met by the "Gedi-Schriften" company owned by the Diller brothers in Bamberg. Even so, demand soon became so small that in 1975 they stopped manufacturing wood type altogether.

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