Punches from Half a Millennium Ago

I found out from kottke.org that the Cambridge University library has digitized the Baskerville punches, sizes 16 and 60. 

Check that link out for an explanation of how punches were (and still can be) used to create metal type, and a little bit about who John Baskerville was. 

Here's a basic diagram to give you an idea of how the process works:


What Kottke's post made me think of was the time I visited the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, where I saw some of Claude Garamond's punches. That's Garamond as in Garamond…the typeface. But more importantly, his eponymous typeface was one of the earliest examples of what came to be called old style type, which dominated the printed word in the West for about 250 years, and continues in popularity to this day.

Plantin Moretus itself is a piece of history, since it was a working print shop for about 450 years. This is the hall on the second floor where the punches are housed in the wooden and glass cases along the walls:

 

The museum has two sizes of Garamond punches, a large set in the Greek alphabet and a text size in the Roman alphabet. 

 
My close-up photo of the small punches is not great, but imagine these letters are not much larger than if you broke off the end of a pencil tip. (If you want to see good photos of small punches, check out Cambridge's 16 point Baskerville photos. I think this Garamond type is several points smaller than that.) 

These are matrices that were stamped into copper from the larger Greek punches.

  
Each matrix would be placed into one half of a two-piece mold like one of these, the parts of which could slide to create different widths. Hot metal would be poured into the hole at the end of the mold to make the body of each piece of type.

If you click to zoom in on this picture, you can see that the Greek at left was printed from the composed type shown in the center. And that the accompanying Roman type below is in Dutch (or probably Flemish, my apologies). 

I remember at the time I took these photos, seven and a half years ago, I had that weird reaction I get to seeing talismanic historical objects. Today's Kottke post brought that feeling back, and I can't believe I never posted about this at the time.