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Hong Kong Letterpress: Wai Che Printing Company

JA August 10

idesgn have put up a great profile of the Wai Che Printing Company, one of the last letterpress studios still operating in China. Cheryl Yau writes:

Movable type, made influential by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, was one of the greatest technological advances defining typography as we know it today. Invented in China by Bi Sheng 400 years earlier during the Song Dynasty, movable type was created as a system to print lengthy Buddhist scripture. As Chinese characters were mostly square, characters of uniform size and shape were easily interchangeable for printing. Kerning was not an issue; the letterforms had a balanced visual appearance by nature.

Yet apparently letterpress, already a rare art in English-speaking countries, is even less sustainable in China, due to the sheet volume and complexity of the written language:

a language with over 45,000 unique characters. Typesetting in Chinese took “minding p’s and q’s” to a whole new level, and accuracy was challenging when characters were essentially compounds of many radicals and ideograms. Running a Chinese letterpress shop required an enormous storage space and basic literacy of at least 4,000 commonly used characters … The use of movable type in China is now a rare business and found only in the rural village of Dongyuan for printing pedigrees.

IMG_1592
(via Jerome Lim)

specimen-book (via idesgn)

lead-type__full (via idesgn)

IMG_1589
(via Jerome Lim)

cast (via idesgn)


 

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