A Brill Calendar: November 6

Aloys Senefelder and the "March" of Typography

Few technologies have shaped the face of the world and minds of its population as pervasively as typography.

‘The printing press as an agent of change’ was already a conceptual ‘common-place’ before Elizabeth Eisenstein’s monograph with that very title was published in 1979, by the Cambridge University Press. Its very wording may evoke a quaint timelessness, one that descended over the globe shortly after Johannnes Gutenberg’s technical success of multiplying manuscripts in a great number of identical copies. Still, Gutenberg didn’t ‘discover typography’ in the sense that a new continent or a new star is discovered.

It is seldom appreciated that there is such timelessness in a technology that has served all human activities since the 15th century. What started with moveable, loose letters that could be arranged by hand became also a technical catalyst, annexing and incorporating other technologies of printmaking on parchment & paper, involving wooden surfaces and metal plates; a fascinating march through centuries of technological history, and the end isn’t in sight yet.

Considering the manifold changes in this voyage of discovery, November 6 is as good a date to use as any other. On that calendar-day in 1771, Aloys Senefelder was born in Prague; in early adulthood a penniless playwright who couldn’t find a printer cheap enough - and willing enough - to process his manuscripts for actors, theatre directors and audiences. When Aloys, (having decided in the meantime to become his own printer), exchanged his experimental ‘D.I.Y.’ copper plates – this action due to an accident – for a stone surface, the immiscibility of oil and water made him discover lithography in 1796.

Two decades later he unveiled his secret in his book ‘Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey’. In chronological dimensions, Aloys is closer to the digital era than he is to Gutenberg.