![]() To most, the introduction of the printing press, with its identical typefaces, indicates a rise of uniformity, a removal of the beautiful scripts of Poggio and other scribes. When the 15th-century Italian scribe Poggio developed what is now the template for Roman typefaces, he did so in the service of constructing a clear and legible script that more people could read, thus making different texts more available to a wider audience. During the centuries since the Irish developed spaces between words, the process of copying texts by hand has transformed into an art form in and of itself. In 1455, Gutenberg printed the first Bible with moveable type. By adding space and reading silently, early readers could take in information more quickly. Specifically, it allowed readers to comprehend the text separate from its oral performance. “Altering the neurophysiological process of reading simplified the act of reading,” he explains. In his book Space Between Words, the medievalist Paul Saegner argues that spaces were directly responsible for the development of silent reading. The invention of spaces between words changed the process of reading entirely. The solution? When copying the Bible, they separated the words with a small space. Having never heard Latin spoken before, the Irish had an understandably difficult time reading it. When Roman Catholicism made its way to Ireland by the fifth century, the Irish were given Bibles written by hand in the original scriptura continua Latin. We have the Irish to thank for the spaces between words. To differentiate between words, readers had to sound them out no one read silently. In the Middle Ages, the Bible was only reproduced in its original Latin scriptura continua, meaning there were no spaces between the words. Today, people associate reading with solitude and quiet, but this wasn’t always the case. It is never seen, but without it, everything printed would be nonsense. It just holds printable type together in a tight grid, creating spaces between words. ![]() The en space isn’t type-high-it doesn’t sit proud like an ordinary character-so it doesn’t catch ink when it’s run through the press. An en space is a rectangular piece of metal or wood whose primary purpose is to be smaller than the metal or wood type being printed. When typesetting, a printer has to think about negative space as something tangible. Every space between words, every space between lines-every bit of white space is an object. ![]() Not only is every letter an object, but every space between every letter is also an object. To understand letterpress printing, imagine that every letter you see on your screen is an object, a tiny piece of metal. But in truth, the actual printing portion takes less than half the time. When people think of printmaking, most imagine the printing press itself-someone running paper through a large machine, turning out sheets of words or colorful posters. I sorted metal and wood type into words, composed pages, and ran them through countless presses. I silk-screened, marbled, and block-printed paper. I bound pages together and stitched intricate leather shells for them. I made paper by hand from recycled cotton tee shirts. In the years after college, I learned how to make a book traveling from print shop to print shop across the country. I didn’t know it at the time, but these wood blocks are probably centuries old-they were once used to create spaces between words on a letterpress printer. Though they resemble antique children’s toys or minimalist Etsy crafts, they were stolen from a mostly defunct letterpress shop. Four small, wooden blocks hang from a yellow string around my neck.
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