The Printing Press In 1440, German inventor Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press process that, with refinements

and increased mechanization, remained the principal means of printing until the late 20th century. The inventor's method of printing from movable type, including the use of metal molds and alloys, a special press, and oil-based inks, allowed for the first time the mass production of printed books.

In the mid-15th century Johannes Gutenberg invented a mechanical way of making books. This was the first example of mass book production. Before the invention of printing, multiple copies of a manuscript had to be made by hand, a laborious task that could take many years. Later books were produced by and for the Church using the process of wood engraving. This required the craftsman to cut away the background, leaving the area to be printed raised. This process applied to both text and illustrations and was extremely time-consuming. When a page was complete, often comprising a number of blocks joined together, it would be inked and a sheet of paper was then pressed over it for an imprint. The susceptibility of wood to the elements gave such blocks a limited lifespan .

In the Far East, movable type and printing presses were known but did not replace printing from individually carved wooden blocks, from movable clay type, processes much more efficient than hand copying. The use of movable type in printing was invented in 1041 AD by Bi Sheng in China. Since there are thousands of Chinese characters, the benefit of the technique is not as obvious as in European languages.

In China, there were no texts similar to the Bible which could guarantee a printer return on the high capital investment of a printing press, and so the primary form of printing was wood block printing which was more suited for short runs of texts for which the return was uncertain

It is not clear whether Gutenberg knew of these existing techniques or invented them independently, though the former is considered unlikely because of the substantial differences in technique. Europeans use xylography (art of engraving on wood, block printing) to produce books and used by European textile makers to print patterns on fabric.

Gutenberg began experimenting with metal typography (letterpress printing) after he had moved from his native town of Mainz to Strassburg around 1430. Knowing that wood-block type involved a great deal of time and expense to reproduce, because it had to be hand carved, Gutenberg concluded that

metal type could be reproduced much more quickly once a single mold had been fashioned.

When Johannes Gutenberg began building his press in 1436, he was unlikely to have realised that he was giving birth to an art form which would take center stage in the social and industrial revolutions which followed. He was German, his press was wooden, and the most important aspect of his invention was that it was the first form of printing to use movable type.

His initial efforts enabled him in 1440 to mass-produce indulgences -- printed slips of paper sold by the Catholic Church to remit temporal punishments in purgatory for sins committed in this life, for those wealthy enough to afford indulgences. Although Laurence Koster (Coster) of Haarlem, Netherlands also laid claim to the invention, scholars have generally accepted Gutenberg as the father of modern printing.

Gutenberg left Strasburg, presumably about 1444. He seems to have perfected at enormous expense his invention shortly afterwards, as is shown by the oldest specimens of printing that have come down to us, the "Poem of the Last Judgment", and the "Calendar for 1448"). The fact that Arnolt Gelthuss, a relative of Gutenberg, lent him money in the year 1448 at Mainz points to the same conclusion.

Legal documents indicate that Gutenberg probably began printing the Bible around 1450. It was in this year that Gutenberg entered into a partnership with Johann Fust who lent him money to finance the production of a Bible. Gutenberg certainly introduced efficient methods into book production, leading to a boom in the production of texts in Europe -- in large part, owing to the popularity of the Gutenberg Bibles, the first mass-produced work, starting in 1452. Even so, Gutenberg was a poor businessman, and made little money from his printing system. The earliest dated specimens of printing by Gutenberg are papal indulgences (notes given to Christians by the Pope, pardoning their sins) issued in Mainz in 1454. In 1455, Gutenberg demonstrated the power of the printing press by selling copies of a two-volume Bible for a price that was the equivalent of approximately three years' wages for an average clerk, but it was significantly cheaper than a handwritten Bible that could take a single monk 20 years to transcribe.

In 1455, just as the project was nearing completion Johann Fust sued Gutenberg, taking possession of his printing equipment and the almost completed edition of the Bible. Fust subsequently entered into

partnership with Peter Schoffer, who had been Gutenberg's assistant, and the project was finally completed in 1456 whereupon Fust undertook the task of marketing the bible. Fust first attempted to sell the Bibles as manuscripts but once potential purchasers observed the uniformity of the volumes, he had to reveal the means by which they were produced.

The mortgage covered the copious stock of type which had evidently been already prepared for the edition of the Psalter, which was printed by Fust and Schoffer in August, 1457. This included new type in two sizes, as well as the world-famous initial letters with their ingenious contrivance for two-color printing.

In 1457 Fust and Schoffer published a large Psalter, known as the Mainz Psalter, which featured printed red and blue intitials along with the black text. There is some debate about how these coloured letters were printed. They were either printed from two part metal blocks that were inked separately, reassembled and then printed with the text, or they were stamped on after the main text was printed. Either way the process was time consuming and expensive so for several years it was more common for such decorative elements to be added by hand. The Mainz Psalter was also the first book to bear a printer's trademark and imprint, a printed date of publication and a colophon. About 1457 Gutenberg also parted with his earliest-constructed founts of type, which he had made for the 40-line Bible,.Long before this Bible was printed the type had been used in an edition of the "Poem of the Last Judgment", and in the "Calendar for 1448", in editions of Donatus, and various other printed works. Most of this type fell into the possession of Albrecht Pfister in Bamberg.1460

The first person to print illustrated books was Albrecht Pfister. Around 1460 he published a book titled Der Ackermann von Bohmen (The Farmer from Bohmen). The only surviving copy of the first edition contains no illustrations but space has been left for them. A second edition printed in 1463 does include images. In 1461 Pfister printed an edition of Der Edelstein (a series of fables in German) which contained 101 woodcut illustrations. The woodcuts were in simple outline and were probably intended to be hand colored. (Most surviving copies have in fact been colored.)

Gutenberg next manufactured a new printer's outfit with the assistance he received from Conrad Humery, a distinguished and wealthy doctor of law, leader of the popular party, and chancellor of the council. This outfit comprised a set of small types fashioned after the round cursive handwriting used in

books at that time and ornamented with an extraordinary number of ligatures. The type was used in the so-called "Catholicon" (grammar and alphabetic lexicon) in the year 1460, and also in several small books printed in Eltville down to the year 1472 by the brothers Echtermnze, relatives of Gutenberg. The Elector of Mainz, Archbishop Adolf of Nassau, presented him with a benefice (an ecclesiastical office in 1465) yielding an income and various privileges. Gutenberg's invention spread rapidly after his death in 1468.. It met in general with a ready, and an enthusiastic reception in the centers of culture. The names of more than 1000 printers, mostly of German origin, have come down to us from the fifteenth century. In Italy we find well over 100 German printers, in France 30, in Spain 26. Many of the earliest printers outside of Germany had learned their art in Mainz, where they were known as "goldsmiths". Among those who were undeniably pupils of Gutenberg, and who probably were also assistants in the Gutenberg-Fust printing house were (besides Schoffer), Numeister, Keffer, and Ruppel; Mentel in Strasburg (before 1460), Pfister in Bamberg (1461), Sweynheim in Subiaco and Rome (1464), and Johann von Speyer in Venice (1469).

The blocks used to illustrate early printed books were small and the images were often generic. There is evidence that printers exchanged blocks, with the same images being used in different editions of books. For example, two hundred woodcuts were used in a 1476 edition of Aesop's Fables and appear again in an edition by a different printer in 1480. There are also examples where the same image has been used to represent different subjects. In early illustrated books the text and illustrations were printed in separate operations, possibly because the type and the wood blocks were of different heights, but later examples were printed in one impression.

The first use of copper engravings for illustration occurred in 1476. Early experiments in using engraving for illustrations were not successful because the two different methods of printing not only required two operations; they required different types of equipment. As a result registration problems occurred. The solution was to print the images on separate sheets of paper and bind them into the book or to print on thin paper and cut out and paste the images in place. William Caxton learned the printing trade in Europe and set up his press in Westminster, England. 1476 Many early printing types were calligraphic - they imitated handwriting. Caxton used and was famed for his Black Letter type which imitated the writing of the Haarlem monks. Artistically, he was perhaps the finest printer of his day although, as a man of politics and letters, he was an amateur.

The new printing presses had spread like brushfire through Europe. By 1499 print-houses had become established in more than 2500 cities in Europe. Fifteen million books had been flung into a world where scholars would travel miles to visit a library stocked with twenty hand-written volumes. Scholars argue about the number. It could've been as few as eight million or as many as twenty four. But the output of new books had been staggering by any reasonable estimate. The people had suddenly come into possession of some thirty thousand new book titles.

While the Gutenberg press was much more efficient than manual copying, the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of the steam powered rotary press allowed thousands of copies of a page in a single day. Mass production of printed works flourished after the transition to rolled paper, as continuous feed allowed the presses to run at a much faster pace.

Gutenberg's invention did not make him rich, but it laid the foundation for the commercial mass production of books. The success of printing meant that books soon became cheaper, and ever wider parts of the population could afford them. More than ever before, it enabled people to follow debates and take part in discussions of matters that concerned them. As a consequence, the printed book also led to more stringent attempts at censorship. This was a sign that it was felt by those in authority to be dangerous and challenging to their position. Gutenberg's Movable Metal Type In the Far East, movable type and printing presses were known but did not replace printing from individually carved wooden blocks, from movable clay type, processes much more efficient than hand copying. The use of movable type in printing was invented in 1041 AD by Bi Sheng in China. Since there are thousands of Chinese characters, the benefit of the technique is not as obvious as in European languages.

It is not clear whether Gutenberg knew of these existing techniques or invented them independently, though the former is considered unlikely because of the substantial differences in technique.The print technology that produced the Gutenberg Bible marks the beginning of a cultural revolution unlike any that followed the development of print culture in Asia.

Gutenberg was a goldsmith, a worker in metals, and a lapidary, and his invention both in conception

and execution shows the worker in metals. Gutenberg multiplied the separate types in metal molds. The types thus produced he built in such a way that they might be aligned like the manuscript he was copying. His aim, technically and sthetically so extremely difficult, was the mechanical reproduction of the characters used in the manuscripts, i.e. the hand lettered books of the time. The works printed by Gutenberg plainly prove that the types used in them were made by a casting process where the letterpatterns were cut on small steel rods termed patrices, and the dies thus made were impressed on some soft metal, such as copper, producing the matrices, which were cast in the mold in such a manner as to form the "face" and "body" of the type at one operation.

The printing type represents therefore a multiplicity of cast reproductions of the original die, or patrix. In addition to this technical process of type-setting, Gutenberg found himself confronted with a problem hardly less difficult, namely, the copying of the beautiful calligraphy found in the books of the fifteenth century, constantly bearing in mind that it must be possible to engrave and to cast the individual forms, since the types, when set, must be substantially replicas of the model.

The genius of Gutenberg found a brilliant solution to this problem in all its complicated details. Even in the earliest types he made (e.g. in the Calendar for 1448), it can recognize not only the splendid reproduction of the actual forms of the original handwriting, but also the extremely artistic remodeling of individual letters necessitated by technical requirements.

The type reproductions were the work of a calligraphic artist of the highest order. He applied the welltested rules of the calligraphist's art to the casting of types, observing in particular the rudimentary principle of always leaving the same space between the vertical columns of the text. Consequently Gutenberg prepared two markedly different forms of each letter, the normal separate form, and the compound or linked form which, being joined closely to the type next to it, avoids gaps. It is significant that this unique kind of letter is to be found in only four types, and these four are associated with Gutenberg.

No typographer in the fifteenth century was able to follow the ideal of the original inventor, and consequently research attributes to Gutenberg types of this character, namely, the two Bible and the

two Psalter types. Especially in the magnificent design and in the technical preparation of the Psalter of 1457 do we recognize the pure, ever-soaring inventive genius of Gutenberg. Gutenberg's Printing Press The spread of literacy and the development of universities meant that by the 15th century, despite an assembly line approach to the production of books, supply was no longer able to meet demand. As a result there was widespread interest in finding an alternative means of producing books.Before books could be mass produced, several developments were necessary.

A ready supply of suitable material that could be printed on was required. Manuscript books were written on vellum and this material was used for some early printed books, but vellum was expensive and not available in sufficient quantity for the mass production of books. The introduction of the technique of making paper and the subsequent development of a European papermaking industry was a necessary condition for the widespread adoption of print technology.

Although a number of people had previously attempted to make metal type or had experimented with individual woodcut letters, it was not until a technique was devised for producing metal type in large quantities that printing with moveable type became economically feasible. Gutenberg, who had initially trained as a goldsmith, was to devise a means of producing metal type in sufficient quantities at a reasonable cost. This involved the design of a type-face and the production of molds used for making the individual pieces of type, as well as the development of an alloy that was soft enough to cast yet hard enough to use for printing.

It was also necessary to develop suitable inks for printing with the new type. The water-based inks used for hand lettering and for block printing will not stick to metal type, therefore a viscous oil based ink was required.

Finally, a press was needed for transferring the image from type to paper. Precedents existed in the presses used for making wine, cheese and paper and one of Johannes Gutenberg's innovations was to adapt these presses for the printing process. An operator worked a lever to increase and decrease the pressure of the block against the paper. The invention of the printing press, in turn, set off a social revolution that is still in progress.

WORDS OF WISDOM: "In our time, thanks to the talent and industry of those from the Rhine, books have emerged in lavish numbers. A book that once would've belonged only to the rich -- nay, to a king -- can now be seen under a modest roof. ... There is nothing nowadays that our children ... fail to know." - Sebastian Brant, written about the printing press just after 1500. HOW IT WORKS: The printing press which led to a considerable acceleration of the method so far used of taking an impression by rubbing, was a screw press with The basic idea of Gutenberg's invention was the splitting up of the text into individual components such as lower and upper case letters, punctuation marks, ligatures and abbreviations, based upon the tradition of medieval scribes. These individual components were cast in any quantity as type in reverse, then put together to form words, lines and pages. T

he prototype for each letter was the punch. A character was cut into the face of a steel block, resulting in a precise relief in reverse. Now the respective punch was struck into a rectangular block made of softer metal, probably copper, with a hammer-blow.

This matrix had to be worked over again and adjusted turning it into a right-angled cube with even sides. The right-reading picture had to have a uniform depth, therefore the surface was processed with a file. To facilitate the casting of a character, Gutenberg developed the hand casting instrument. Two sections enclose a rectangular casting void closed at one end by the matrix.

After casting the characters in the hand casting instrument, the most important part of the invention, enabled quick casting of the required quantities of the different characters needed. The casting metal was an alloy of lead, tin and further admixtures, that secured fast cooling and a sufficient durability under the high pressure of the press. special equipment for the effective and even transfer of the type from the forms to the paper or parchment.

During the 17th and 18th centuries there was a new interest in learning. Printing began to become very important as a means of communicating new ideas and discoveries. The growth of newspapers played an important part in the expansion of the printing industry. Printers had been using wooden printing presses for 350 years, ever since Gutenberg produced his first printed sheet. With the tremendous demand for newspapers and other printed material

towards the end of the 18th century, it was no longer possible to go on using the wooden printing presses.

In 1803, Earl Stanhope introduced the first hand press with an iron frame. It was stronger and more efficient than a wooden press and rapidly replaced it. The Columbian and Albion were two other iron presses used in the early 19th century. As new technical changes continued, the small craftsmen's workshops disappeared. They gave way to noisy factories housing bigger and faster machines, driven by steam engines.

The 10-feeder press, so called because 10 men could feed paper into it at once, was installed by The Times newspaper in 1861 to meet still greater demands for newspapers. Ten rollers inked the type, which was on a cylinder in the middle of the machine. The press could print 1,000 sheets in an hour. By the end of the century even more efficient machinery could print 30,000 to 40,000 copies an hour.

Small printing presses - known as parlour presses - were introduced In Victorian times, when printing became a hobby. The Old Printing Shop has a vast collection of early printing presses. The earliest printing press is the "Stanhope" which was the first iron press dated 1805. We also have Columbian Albions (standing and table top), Brittania and Atlas. Additionally we have foot treadles and an array of small hand platens. We are hoping these printing presses will be used by any person with an interest in printing, or graphics, throughout the world. We would like these presses to be housed in a working museum and would welcome ideas and suggestions by interested parties
Incunabula An incunabulum is a book, single sheet, or image that was printed not handwritten before the year 1501 in Europe. These are usually very rare and fragile items whose nature can only be verified by experts. The origin of the word is the Latin incunabula for "swaddling clothes", used by extension for the infancy or early stages of something. The first recorded use of incunabula as a printing term is in a

pamphlet by Bernard von Mallinckrodt, "Of the rise and progress of the typographic art", published in Cologne in 1639, which includes the phrase prima typographicae incunabula, "the first infancy of printing". The term came to denote the printed books themselves from the late 17th century. There are two types of incunabula: the xylographic (made from a single carved or sculpted block for each page) and the typographic (made with movable type on a printing press in the style of Johann Gutenberg). Many authors reserve the term incunabulum for the typographic ones only. The end date for identifying a book as an incunabulum is convenient, but was chosen arbitrarily. It does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process around the year 1500. Incunabula usually refers to the earliest printed books, completed at a time when some books were still being hand-copied. The gradual spread of printing ensured that there was great variety in the texts chosen for printing and the styles in which they appeared. Many early typefaces were modelled on local forms of writing or derived from the various European forms of Gothic script, but there were also some derived from documentary scripts (such as most of Caxton's types), and, particularly in Italy, types modelled on humanistic hands. These humanistic typefaces are often used today, barely modified, in digital form.

Incunabula from Germany. Late 15th century

Incunabula from Italy. End of 15th century.

Incunabula from France. End of 15th century Printers tended to congregate in urban centres where there were scholars, ecclesiastics, lawyers, nobles and professionals who formed their major customer-base. Standard works in Latin inherited from the medieval tradition formed the bulk of the earliest printing, but as books became cheaper, works in the various vernaculars (or translations of standard works) began to appear. Famous incunabula include the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 and the Liber Chronicarum of Hartmann Schedel, printed by Anton Koberger in 1493. Other well-known incunabula printers were Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg, Gnther Zainer of Augsburg, Johann Mentelin of Strasbourg and William Caxton of Bruges and London. The design of the books shows all the characteristics of a transitional period: Although they still resemble their medieval counterparts where ornamentation, initials and bordering are concerned they are certainly no longer as dark and dense as the medieval illuminated manuscripts: Already we see a move towards whiter, lighter pages. Some of this can also be attributed to the import of paper manufacturing technologies which lessened the cost of book production. While columns were already present during earlier times, during the incunabula book designers far greater use of them for design purposes. The gridding which set type necessitated technologically caused the books to adhere to a grid system, yet another novelty in design. Further reading and images http://www.ndl.go.jp/incunabula/e/index.html http://www.psymon.com/incunabula/ http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/incunabula/ The introduction of rag paper The word paper comes from the ancient Egyptian writing material called papyrus, which was woven from papyrus plants. Papyrus was produced as early as 3000 BC in Egypt, and in ancient Greece and Rome. Further north, parchment or vellum, made of processed sheepskin or calfskin, replaced papyrus, as the papyrus plant requires subtropical conditions to grow. In China, documents were ordinarily written on bamboo, making them very heavy and awkward to transport. Silk was sometimes used, but was normally too expensive to consider. Indeed, most of the above materials were rare and costly. Some historians speculate that paper was the key element in global cultural advancement. According to this theory, Chinese culture was less developed than the West in ancient times prior to the Han Dynasty because bamboo, while abundant, was a clumsier writing material than papyrus; Chinese culture advanced during the Han Dynasty and preceding centuries due to the invention of paper; and Europe advanced during the Renaissance due to the introduction of paper and the printing press.

Paper remained a luxury item through the centuries, until the advent of steam-driven paper making machines in the 19th century, which could make paper with fibres from wood pulp. Although older machines predated it, the Fourdrinier paper making machine became the basis for most modern papermaking. Together with the invention of the practical fountain pen and the mass produced pencil of the same period, and in conjunction with the advent of the steam driven rotary printing press, wood based paper caused a major transformation of the 19th century economy and society in industrialized countries. Before this era a book or a newspaper was a rare luxury object and illiteracy was normal. With the gradual introduction of cheap paper, schoolbooks, fiction, non-fiction, and newspapers became slowly available to nearly all the members of an industrial society. Cheap wood based paper also meant that keeping personal diaries or writing letters ceased to be reserved to a privileged few. The office worker or the white-collar worker was slowly born of this transformation, which can be considered as a part of the industrial revolution. During the incunabula period, Europeans used rags to make paper by the following method: the rags were cut into small pieces; fermented; ground by watermill; and scooped into a mould to dry. Therefore handmade paper does not have a uniform thickness; it varies in thickness according to the mesh of the mould. If held against the light, the thinner part of handmade paper appears brighter, and it is possible to detect thick lines spaced several centimeters apart, as well as thin lines closely spaced crossing the thick lines at a right angle. The thick lines are referred to as the "chain line" and the thin lines the "wire line." Further reading and images http://www.paperonline.org/history/history_frame.html http://www.wipapercouncil.org/invention.htm Johannes Gutenberg (1398 1468) was a German goldsmith and inventor who achieved fame for his invention of the technology of printing with movable types during 1447. Gutenberg has often been credited as being the most influential and important person of all times, with his invention occupying similar status. The A&E Network ranked him at #1 on their "People of the Millennium" countdown in 1999.

The Gutenberg Bible. 1455 Block printing, whereby individual sheets of paper were pressed into wooden blocks with the text and illustrations carved into them, was first recorded in Chinese history, and was in use in East Asia long before Gutenberg. By the 12th and 13th centuries, many Chinese libraries contained tens of thousands of

printed books. The Chinese and Koreans knew about moveable metal type at the time, but because of the complexity of the movable type printing it was not as widely used as in Renaissance Europe.

Movable type and typesetters box. It is not clear whether Gutenberg knew of these existing techniques, or invented them independently, although the former is considered unlikely because of the substantial differences in technique. Some also claim that the Dutchman Laurens Janszoon Coster was the first European to invent movable type. Gutenberg certainly introduced efficient methods into book production, leading to a boom in the production of texts in Europe in large part, owing to the popularity of the Gutenberg Bibles, the first mass-produced work, starting on February 23, 1455. Even so, Gutenberg was a poor businessman, and made little money from his printing system. Gutenberg began experimenting with metal typography after he had moved from his native town of Mainz to Strasbourg (then in Germany, now France) around 1430. Knowing that wood-block type involved a great deal of time and expense to reproduce, because it had to be hand-carved, Gutenberg concluded that metal type could be reproduced much more quickly once a single mould had been fashioned.

In 1455, Gutenberg demonstrated the power of the printing press by selling copies of a two-volume Bible (Biblia Sacra) for 300 florins each. This was the equivalent of approximately three years' wages for an average clerk, but it was significantly cheaper than a handwritten Bible that could take a single monk 20 years to transcribe. The one copy of the Biblia Sacra dated 1455 went to Paris, and was dated by the binder. (View the Gutenberg Bible)

The Korean Jikji: Oldest movable type.1377 The Gutenberg Bibles surviving today are sometimes called the oldest surviving books printed with movable type although actually, the oldest such surviving book is the Jikji, published in Korea in 1377. However, it is still notable, in that the print technology that produced the Gutenberg Bible marks the beginning of a cultural revolution unlike any that followed the development of print culture in Asia. The Gutenberg Bible lacks many print features that modern readers are accustomed to, such as pagination, word spacing, indentations, and paragraph breaks.

Further reading and images http://www.mainz.de/gutenberg/english/index.htm http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blJohannesGutenberg.htm http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0228.html The Golden canon of page construction Ral Rosarivo, in his "Typographical Divine Proportion", first published in 1947, was the first to analyze Renaissance books with the help of compass and ruler and concluded that Gutenberg applied the golden canon of page construction to his work. His work and assertion that Gutenberg used the "golden number" or "secret number" to establish the harmonic relationships between the diverse parts of a work, was analyzed by experts at the Gutenberg Museum and re-published in the Gutenberg Jahrbuch, its official magazine. Historian John Man points out that Gutenberg's Bible's page was based on the golden section shape, based on the irrational number 0.618.... (a ratio of 5:8) and that the printed area also had that shape.

Building on Rosarivo's work, contemporary experts in book design such as Jan Tschichold and Richard Hendel, assert as well that the page proportion of the golden section (21:34), has been used in book design, in manuscripts, and incunabula, mostly in those produced between 1550 and 1770. Hendel writes that since Gutenberg's time, books have been most often printed in an upright position, that comform losely, if not precisely, to the golden ratio. Further reading and images http://learning.north.londonmet.ac.uk/epoc/tschichd.htm http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1259091 Albrecht Duerer (1471 1528) was a German painter, wood carver, engraver, and mathematician. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, he is best known for his woodcuts in series, including the Apocalypse (1498), two series on the crucifixion of Christ, the Great Passion (14981510) and the Little Passion (15101511) as well as many of his individual prints, such as Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencholia I (1514). In this latter work appears the Drer's magic square. His Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (14971498), part of the Apocalypse series, is also celebrated. He is also known for his numerous self-portraits. He is important for the history of graphic design in that he spent considerable time on the geometry of letters as well as book design. Best known of the books on the geometry of letters is Drer's Unterweysung der Messung [A Course on the Art of Measurement]. The text is printed in a form of textura, a black letter style. The book presents the principles of perspective developed in Renaissance Italy, applying them to architecture, painting, and lettering. Drer's designs of Roman capital letters, shown below, demonstrate how they can be created using geometrical aids.

Pages from Albrecht Duerer famous book on design fundamentals: "De Symmetria" (Unterweysung der Messung), 1525

Albrecht Duerer, drawings from 1497 to 1525

Albrecht Duerer, watercolours from 1497 to 1525

Albrecht Duerer, paintings from 1505