Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography is a standard text—you can learn a lot from that book—but it can sometimes be a little hard to imagine how the various processes he describes would have worked in practice. Fortunately, intrepid biblionerds have taken to YouTube to show us how it’s done. If you watch only one video, start here, as this one gives you an overview of traditional typesetting, presswork, folding and binding in under four minutes:
For a more detailed look at the various stages of book production, keep reading after the jump.
Paper
The University of Iowa’s Center for the Book has worked to understand early paper-making by practical experiments in recreating traditional methods. This first video offers a good introduction both to traditional methods and Iowa’s own approach:
(In 2014, the folks at Iowa tried but failed to hit the daily production levels of early modern papermakers. They tried again in 2016, though, and managed to make 2,000 sheets in nine hours and fifteen minutes. For a shorter video on that experiment, see another of their videos.)
Another video worth watching is available here (embedding has been disabled for that video, or I’d put it here.) This is a video made at one of the last working mills producing hand-made paper in England in 1976. Note the larger moulds in this video.
Making type
This series of four videos walks us through the process of making type. This is a nice, thorough discussion, but each one is about ten minutes long. If you find yourself getting restless, you can probably fast-forward through parts while still getting the gist.
First, a punch for each letterform has to be carved out of hard steel:
The punch is then hardened and tempered so that it can be used to strike a matrix in a piece of soft metal, like copper:
The matrix is fitted into the mould, and molten amalgam (a mix of lead, antimony, and tin) is poured into the mould to form the type sort:
Finally, the sorts have to be dressed so that they’re ready to be used:
Typesetting/compositing
It’s surprising to note that the same methods of setting type by hand in the early modern period continued in widespread use well into the twentieth century. This is an vocational filmstrip from—get this—1959 that gives a pretty good sense of the methods that had been in use for hundreds of years (and that continue to be used in fine letterpress shops today):
Presswork
This video shows a common press in action. This sort of press, with minor modifications, was in use for hundreds of years. As the presenter notes, presswork was usually done by teams of two pressmen: a “puller” (the one who inserted the paper in the tympan and actually pulled the bar of the press) and the “beater” (who re-inked the type as necessary).
In this video, what’s being printed is a single sheet “broadside.” For book production, the pages of type would have to be “imposed” (i.e., arranged in the forme) in the proper pattern for the intended format. For a book in folio, for example, each sheet of paper would be folded once, creating two “leaves.” Since each leaf has two sides, a sheet of folio can hold four pages of type. To print a sheet of a folio book, each sheet would require two formes (one for each side of the sheet: the inner and the outer), and each forme would hold two pages of type. For a book in quarto (folded twice: four leaves, eight pages), each forme would hold four pages of set type, and so on.
Binding
The brief video at the very beginning gives you a pretty good sense of traditional bookbinding. This next video offers a more detailed sense of most of the steps, but uses what I believe is a more contemporary method of attaching the boards to the text block. I’m not an expert on binding, by any means, but I suspect this method is simpler and less bulky, but probably not as durable:
If you want to get a (lot) more detailed sense of bookbinding processes, here are two multi-video series: one is silent, the other is in Italian. You can try turning on closed captioning, then selecting Subtitles from the settings menu (the gear icon) and choosing Auto-translate to English. The English subtitles you get are… well, about what you’d expect from an automated translation into English of Italian subtitles that were themselves generated automatically through voice recognition. Frankly, you’re probably better off just listening to music while you watch.