Six Centuries of Type & Printing tells the story of the evolution of type and printing. It starts in Asia, before Johann Gutenberg, then takes you generation by generation through increasing sophistication in metal and relief printing and type manufacture.

A two-page spread from the book from a section on the common press

You learn what made it possible in the 1450s for printing to become a medium of mass reproduction, its stagnation until the 1800s, and the abrupt 20th century shift into flat offset printing and photographic, then digital typesetting and reproduction.

Bound in cloth with foil stamping

The 64-page book, hardbound in green cloth with brass-colored foil stamping, uses modern printing techniques – digital type and offset lithography – to tell a historic story. I created this book from hard-earned personal experience in printing and graphic design since the 1980s, coupled with decades of research. Download a preview of the book that contains a few short chapters.

I’ve distilled this knowledge into a book that aims for you, as a general reader or typophile, to breathe in the scope of printing and type history without having to work through the hundreds of books and thousands of hours I’ve spent to get here. It’s an engaging tale, full of remarkable achievements that spans an epoch.

You can order one or more copies of this beautiful hardcover edition and also receive the ebook edition, which contains end notes, a bibliography, and full index.

The print edition can be ordered with an inscription and signature. You can also have it gift-wrapped in custom wrapping paper. You can add the audiobook edition for a small fee. The ebook and audiobook can be purchased separately. Letterpress-printed bookmarks may be added to a print order.

the roots of printing

Printing is a modern art for humanity. The most vigorous modern roots date to Europe 600 years ago, though short-lived but successful attempts appeared hundreds of years earlier in China, Korea, and elsewhere in Asia. Johann Gutenberg’s innovations in c.1450 around four distinct technologies allowed printed books to mature from hand-crafted artifacts largely drawn one letter at a time on expensive prepared animal hides to mass-produced objects on paper. 

This changed the world.

William Caxton’s printing of Boethius’s “De consolatione philosophiae,” c.1478 (St Bride Printing Foundation, London, with Bob Richardson, 2017)

If you ever wondered exactly what Gutenberg invented, you will get a firm grounding on his adaptations and innovations in manufacturing and setting type, formulating ink, preparing paper, and creating a printing press. You’ll also discover the marvel of pantographs, devices that trace a template to cut or carve an identical copy, often much smaller. Learn about the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Linotype hot-metal typesetter! Uncover the roots of modern type and how Steve Jobs’s love of letters led to the Macintosh’s sophistication in handling fonts and printing by laser. (A full table of contents appears below.)

I’ve paired the love of type and printing in my approach to the design, production, and typesetting of this book. It’s set in Monotype Bembo, a classic typeface used extensively in the hot-metal era and still popular today. The hardcover volume is bound in green cloth with a debossed, foil-stamped title and spine. The interior paper is a creamy textured stock with black text and illustrations in a second color. The endpapers are printed in black on a sharp, bright red.

The history of printing is told in objects on the vivid endpapers, the design of which is also used for gift wrapping.

The book features illustrations drawn from historic sources and new renditions.

The book features line drawings of equipment, like this Barth pivotal caster, introduced in 1888, for speeding up metal type manufacture.

the book’s history

I wrote an earlier version of this book as part of the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule, a project that resulted in creating just over 100 tiny two-drawer, custom-made cabinets of typographic and printing artifacts. This project carried the promise of sending these artifacts into the future with a detailed explanation to preserve their meaning. (That project successfully funded in 2019.) 

The Tiny Type Museum, 2019–2020

The Tiny Type Museum included a letterpress-printed version of Six Centuries of Type & Printing, which was sold separately after the campaign at a price tag of $125 to $175. This high cost was due to the complexity and expense of making a modern letterpress book: it was typeset in hot metal in North Yorkshire, England, printed by letterpress in London, and bound in Germany. That was the easiest way! The letterpress version sold out in 2024.

In this new printing, I took the opportunity to revise the text of the book and improve it throughout, updating it with insights I’ve gleaned over intervening projects and research in the last five years. It went through a fresh editing and proofreading pass. The book was digitally typeset in historically accurate Monotype Bembo, closely matching the letterpress edition. Several images were replaced or improved.

about glenn fleishman

After becoming one of the last people trained to become a typesetter, in the 1980s, I studied graphic design in college and worked on the weekly newspaper. Throughout my writing, design, and production career, I’ve intertwined type, printing, and explanation, including writing dozens of computer how-to books and thousands of Macworld magazine columns. I began to write extensively about printing history in 2017 and have created several books and projects since, all funded through Kickstarter.

My latest book found life in March 2024 on Kickstarter as How Comics Were Made, a history of newspaper cartoon production and reproduction. After shipping thousands of copies in October 2024, the book was acquired for future printings by Andrews McMeel Publishing, and shipped in a bookstore edition in June 2025 as How Comics Are Made.

other works by glenn

You may be interested in some of my other books.

How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel, 2025): This book celebrates the evolution of the comic strip: from the Yellow Kid and early syndication through the very latest webcomics. This covers the whole ball of wax of how artists, knowing their newsprint medium, drew their comics and marked drawings up for color reproduction; how printers put that work through the most arcane and impossible-to-believe operations to get them onto paper; and how modern cartoonists produce cartoons for print and online or web-only.

London Kerning (2018): London has long been a place where type design and graphic design coalesced, and where the machinery of making fonts and the people with an eye to create them intermingled. London Kerning captures a slice of both the contemporary part of it and its history, especially regarding type designer Berthold Wolpe. The print edition is sold out; you can download the ebook at no cost.

Not To Put Too Fine A Point on It (2017): This ebook is a collection of 10 researched and reported articles and essays about type, printing, and language: the history of SHOUTING WITH CAPITALS, Google’s effort to make a font with all the scripts of all the languages in the world, archiving a Web site for 10,000 years, a look at Walt Whitman’s history as a printer, how letterpress printing has come back from the dead, and more.

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