A Brill Calendar: February 26

Senefelder and Lithography

Few inventions can compare with Gutenberg’s innovation: printing separate metal letters with type – especially when it comes to changing both the face of the earth and destinies of its peoples.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, ‘doyenne’ of typography’s historic origins, called her master-piece monograph: ‘The Printing Press as an Agent of Change’ for the best reason imaginable. One crucial cause for the unbroken power of this agent is its capaciousness to absorb and assimilate new attainments of human ingenuity; even if they seem to be fierce competitors.

In this respect, printing & publishing resemble human traditions and also all individuals shaping them: they remain themselves by changing continuously. Often in a hardly noticeable way, sometimes relatively quickly - given the enormous vested interests of economies relying on their services & functioning. Johannes Gutenberg would hardly recognize printing devices existing today as rightful descendants of his very private and personal ingenuity. After all, he didn’t mean to create an industry; all he wanted to realize was an inexpensive way of replicating & multiplying medieval manuscripts.

February 26 is as good a day as any to glance briefly at such considerations. In 1834 it was the calendar-day Aloys Senefelder died, aged 62, in Munich, Bavaria. After Senefelder managed to keep his accidental discovery and great invention, lithography - printing from a limestone or a roughened metal plate - hidden in mystery for two decades, he decided to publish his ‘Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey’ in 1818. It is seldom that unveiling an industrial secret evoked so rapidly rich cultural rewards; as from then the technology was embraced by the visual arts, starting from France. When Honoré Daumier (born February 26 1808) made it his means of expression for commenting visually on public affairs, the technology was still young.