These days, the term
Movable Type is more likely to make people think of a blogging platform than anything involving paper, but it used to refer to the letters, words, and graphics typically cast in an alloy of lead, tin and antimony or carved from wood, that could be rearranged by a letterpress printer for each individual job. In an environment where toner serves most of our current printing needs, the endangered art of letterpress printing now has a roving champion. Her name is Kyle Durrie, and she is the proprietor of
Power and Light Press in Portland, Oregon. Back in March
she bought herself a 1982 Chevy step van, gutted it, and then installed a work area and a couple of printing presses in the back. She stocked it with a variety of type and ornaments and she is now driving it all over the U.S. teaching folks about the joys of printing with pressure. Maybe if you ask nicely,
she'll stop by your neighborhood and show you how to print, just like
Bi Sheng first did over a thousand years ago.
posted by Toekneesan
on Jul 26, 2011 -
12 comments
The Fifteeners: The Earliest Printed Books. Incunabula or incunables are the very first examples of books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed with moveable type in Western Europe. They range from the very first examples of the two-column Latin Bible produced by Johann Gutenberg in the 1450s to works printed through the end of the year 1500. The term "incunable" derives from the Latin word cunabula for "cradle" or "origin", hinting at their status as
the earliest of all books. Incunabula are also sometimes referred to as "fifteeners" from their appearance in the fifteenth century.
In 2002, the Countway Library embarked on an ambitious and long-needed project to describe and catalog fully its holdings of incunabula and make online descriptions of these items accessible to scholars and researchers for the first time. All of the books and woodcuts in this exhibit have been drawn from the collections of the Boston Medical Library and the Harvard Medical Library and have one common element—each is at least five hundred years old. The Fifteeners highlights some of the extraordinary treasures in the Countway's incunabula collection and allows the public a glimpse of these rarest of printed medical works. [
Previously]
posted by sluglicker
on Jul 10, 2006 -
11 comments
I'm done with Movable Type. After months of little useful communications about their plans, Ben and Mena have for all intents and purposes ditched the free version of their once-shining weblogging software. Now, MT is a "publishing platform" that costs at least $69 (with limited functionality). Lucky for us that, while MT slept, we have discovered a much improved and free
Blogger, a truly open source
WordPress, and a similarly priced but more powerful
ExpressionEngine.
posted by johnnydark
on May 13, 2004 -
192 comments
MovableType, , the blogging software of choice (well, for a lot of us), have launched a new user-friendly service on their own servers, called
TypePad (
here's the press release). Is this a first direct hit at Blogger, a service they have denied gunning for, in light of Google's move? Will it work? My vote: Hell yes. MovableType have not put a foot wrong yet, and now they've got
Anil Dash on board, the lucky tyke...
posted by wibbler
on Apr 24, 2003 -
29 comments
Moveable Type, a new entrant in the weblog management system applications arena, has just been released! Let's hear what the Mefi masses think...
posted by fooljay
on Oct 8, 2001 -
59 comments
