Before beginning the short, 20 minute documentary, The Making of a Renaissance Book, I mentally prepared myself for what I believed would be an extremely boring video experience. Much to my surprise, I found the documentary to be more interesting than I thought it would be. The documentary is in black and white giving it an older, more almost vintage, feel. The music they play throughout the documentary is enough to give you a headache, making me at times, want to turn it off. The documentary really shows you how precise and time consuming making the letters that are to be used in printing is. Until seeing craftsmen carve out the letters, I hadn’t realized just how time consuming the process is. This made me appreciate all the books we saw at class. When we went to EPI we only printed a sheet. We didn’t have to lay out the letters which is also a time consuming process. Until seeing this video, I hadn’t given as much thought to the process of making the letters as I had to other aspects of printing. Craftsmen had to neatly and precisely create letters of different sizes and fonts. Today, we simply just type away on our computers, just as I am doing now, with a multitude of fonts and sizes to choose from. I always took this for granted.
Watching the craftsman definitely made me appreciate the simplicity of typing out words on our computer. Making an entire set of font must have been extremely difficult, keeping all of the different styles consistent and separate. Also, placing the letters seemed extremely time consuming and tedious. Printing the actual sheets must have seemed like such a relief after arranging letters for hours and hours.
I thought the same exact thing when I was watching the videos. I had a preconceived notion of what creating type was like and to my surprise as I was watching the documentary I was struck by exactly how much labor went into every letter. It never occurred to me that each type face would need so many characters. Additionally, this seemed like a lot of work before I considered the actual formation of the text let alone inking and printing.