Just published in Heritage Science, ‘The manufacture of the Baskerville typographic punches: the versatile chaîne opératoire of an eighteenth-century printing workshop’ uses the ‘material turn’ within the humanities to provide new possibilities for investigating historical technologies, and the chaîne opératoire offers a powerful framework for such research. Taking the history of printing as the research arena, we present the first science-based study of typographic punches, focusing on the eighteenth-century collection manufactured by John Baskerville in Birmingham. By combining typology, microscopy, µCT, radiography, and FTIR, with craftspeople knowledge and historical sources, we reverse engineer the chaîne opératoire deployed to produce these tools. We characterise the technological tradition followed in Baskerville’s workshop and compare it to nineteenth/twentieth-century punch-making. Baskerville’s workshop was very versatile, and technological choices took into account performance factors and high craftmanship standards. Many of the recored choices are not described in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punch-making texts. This reference study presents a chapter of the history of printing previously unexplored through material culture, and provides the method and theoretical framework for others.
Full article is free to download here.
Authors: Julia Montes-Landa; Mark Box; Caroline Archer-Parré; Ann-Marie Carey4; Maciej Pawlikowski; Marcos Martinón-Torres