Early Stereotype Printing in Leiden

What is it about?

The invention of stereotype printing by using lead plates cast from individual typeset pages is often attributed to the Parisian printer Firmin Didot and the English aristocrat Charles, 3rd Earl Stanhope, who independently of each other experimented with this innovation around 1800. This article pleads the case of the German Lutheran minister Johannes Müller, who first practiced the use of stereotype printing plates a century earlier in Leiden. This attribution is based on two sources; first, two small groups of remaining lead plates preserved in the Leiden museum ‘De Lakenhal’ and the Koninlijke Bibliotheek in The Hague; second the renewed contract, dated 1709 and preserved in the Leiden notarial archives, of a Leiden printing and publishing company, consisting of Müller (and after his death in 1710 his widow and son) and the publishing houses of Cornelis Boutesteyn and Samuel Luchtmans. They were assisted by the expert metal founder Philip van der Meij. Stereotype printing was used for titles for which there was much demand and which consequently were printed in large print-runs, with the added advantage that no correction was needed anymore before reprinting. The first Leiden book that was produced with the new method was a self-help book entitled Ars magna et admirabilis for law students to memorize the contents of the Corpus juris, which came out in 1695 with the imprint of Jordaan Luchtmans, Samuel’s father. Other important titles were an as yet unidentified English Bible, three editions of the New Testament in Syriac and the accompanying Syriac-Latin dictionary, edited and compiled by the Leiden orientalist Carolus Schaaf, and five small-format editions of the Latin-Greek New Testament. The mainstay of the Leiden production, however, were no less than twelve editions of the authorized version of the Dutch Bible and the Book of Psalms, which were reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. The last edition came out with Amsterdam publisher Jan Barend Elwe, who had bought the by now much worn-out plates.

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Why is it important?

The article claims that the invention of stereotype printing was not made around 1800 in France and England, but a century earlier in Leiden around 1700. This is important because it shows that Dutch printers and publishers were the first to look for solutions to increase the print-runs of in demand titles, while at the same time economizing on production costs.

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