Printing

Among printing techniques, the relief printing process developed by Johannes Gutenberg around 1454 — often referred to as letterpress printing — is the best known. Along with intaglio, planographic, and transfer printing, as well as other techniques, it has been part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2018. However, type casting is also an important part of the history of printing.

With industrialization and the founding of the German Empire (1871), Berlin became a major center for the printing industry. Around 1910, there were as many as 150 daily newspapers. In the so-called “Newspaper District” — the southern part of Friedrichsstadt, now known as Kreuzberg — there were over 500 publishing houses, companies, and printing shops in the graphic arts industry. In the 20th century, this sector encompassed over 40 specialized professions.

Before the introduction of movable-type printing, books were copied by hand. Consequently, they were rare and valuable. The printing process — in which letters and characters could be rearranged repeatedly — required large quantities of type, known as “letters.” Type casting made it possible to produce individual metal type characters both quickly and in large quantities.

The process of making a single letter consisted of three steps, which are on display in the exhibition:

1. The type design in the form of a hand-cut or engraved matrix — a die for each letter or character.

2. The production of the counter-type for each individual character, the matrix.

3. Type casting using hand-operated casting tools or, later, type-casting machines.

Several original exhibits, for example from the extensive collections of H. Berthold AG, are on display in this section. 

In manual typesetting, metal letters — arranged in type cases according to their frequency — are assembled into individual words using a set square. Gradually, these form the eventual printing form in a typesetting tray, assembled into a coherent text or column. 

Faster processes were needed, especially in newspaper printing, by the end of the 19th century. Typesetting machines and line-casting and typesetting machines — which could now be operated using a keyboard — replaced manual typesetting in these fields. A fully functional Linotype typesetting machine — named “Linotype” after “a line of type,” meaning “a row of letters” — from 1972, on loan from the Bundesdruckerei, vividly illustrates this impressive technology. 

The centuries-old craft-based printing trade evolved into the printing industry in the 19th century. Large-format offset and rotary printing presses and machines can no longer be displayed in the exhibition, even though they are part of the collection.

The exhibition traces the technical evolution from a 17th-century wooden hand press — reproduced here — to a steam-powered high-speed press. Among the items on display are an iron Standhope press from Decker’s Royal Prussian Court Printing Office in Berlin (1835), a high-speed press from Maschinenanstalt Hamm (1895), and a Heidelberg platen press (1963) with a pneumatic sheet-guiding system dating from 1913. 

Unlike today, printing images was a very labor-intensive process well into the 19th century. Four display cases feature printing plates, prints, and tools used in various image-printing techniques. These include lithography, a flat-printing technique that emerged in the late 18th century. Lithography made it possible for the first time to produce images in large print runs, even in larger formats. 

Between 1804 and 1930, Berlin was a major center for lithography. The lithography workshop of Berlin-based master stone and offset printer Dietmar Liebsch, which was acquired in 2017, brings this technique to life. Among other works, prints were created in his workshop using the original plates by the Prussian painter, draftsman, and lithographer Adolph von Menzel.

The various stages of development and different designs of the typewriter are on display through 30 examples dating back to 1872. Even though the typewriter has been almost entirely replaced by computers, many of its functions, terms, and symbols have been preserved on computer keyboards to this day. 

Written music consists of a system of notes, lines, slurs, symbols, performance instructions, and text. One of Berlin’s oldest music engraving shops, founded by Conrad Paris as the “Anastatische Druckerei,” was located in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood until 1991. Incidentally, Berlin’s only female music engraver, Annelotte Paris, also worked at this business, which was run by four generations of the family. The process of printing sheet music is illustrated using a few examples from the workshop adopted from there.