Letterpress printing in the context of "Wood type"

Bookbinding is the process of building a book, usually in codex format, from an ordered stack of paper sheets with one's hands and tools, or in modern publishing, by a series of automated processes. To bind a book, groups of pages are joined together, often by thread or adhesive but other options exist such as loose-leaf rings, binding posts, twin-loop spine coils, plastic spiral coils, and plastic spine combs. A cover to protect the contents, usually bearing publication information such as title and author, is generally attached; this can be as simple as a single sheet of paper or an elaborate construction of boards covered in cloth, leather, parchment, etc. with many types of decoration. Processes of making books vary significantly by time period and geography/culture. Mechanised bookbinding was introduced in the 19th century with the industrial revolution, alongside machine papermaking, faster methods of leather tanning, and other changes in manufacturing that affected the book.

The trade of bookbinding includes the binding of blank books and printed books. Blank books, or stationery bindings, are books planned to be written in. These include accounting ledgers, guestbooks, logbooks, notebooks, manifold books, day books, diaries, and sketchbooks. Printed books are produced through letterpress printing, offset lithography, or other printing techniques and their binding practices include fine binding, edition binding, publisher's bindings, and library binding.

In the manufacture of metal type used in letterpress printing, a matrix (from the Latin meaning womb or a female breeding animal) is the mould used to cast a letter, known as a sort. Matrices for printing types were made of copper.

However, in printmaking the matrix is whatever is used, with ink, to hold the image that makes up the print, whether a plate in etching and engraving or a woodblock in woodcut.

In letterpress printing and typesetting, a composing stick is a tray-like tool used to assemble pieces of metal type into words and lines, which are then transferred to a galley before being locked into a forme and printed. Many composing sticks have one adjustable end, allowing the length of the lines and consequent width of the page or column to be set, with spaces and quadrats of different sizes being used to make up the exact width. Early composing sticks often had a fixed measure, as did many used in setting type for newspapers, which were fixed to the width of a standard column, when newspapers were still composed by hand.

The compositor takes the pieces of type from the boxes (compartments) of the type case and places them in the composing stick, working from left to right and placing the letters upside-down with the nick to the top.

A type case is a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing.

Modern, factory-produced movable type was available in the late nineteenth century. It was held in the printing shop in a job case, a drawer about two inches (5 cm) high, three feet (90 cm) wide, and about two feet (60 cm) deep, with many small compartments for the "sorts" (various letters and ligatures). The most popular and commonly used job case design in America was the California Job Case, which took its name from the Pacific Coast location of the foundries that made the case popular. These cases allowed type to be compactly transported.

In printing and typography, hot metal typesetting (also called mechanical typesetting, hot lead typesetting, hot metal, and hot type) is a technology for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mold that has the shape of one or more glyphs. The resulting sorts or slugs are later used to press ink onto paper. Normally the typecasting machine would be controlled by a keyboard or by a paper tape.

It was the standard technology used for mass-market printing from the late nineteenth century until the arrival of phototypesetting (also called cold type) and then electronic processes in the 1950s to 1980s.

A platen (or platten) is a platform with a variety of roles in printing or manufacturing. It can be a flat metal (or earlier, wooden) plate pressed against a medium (such as paper) to cause an impression in letterpress printing. Platen may also refer to a typewriter roller which friction-feeds paper into position below the typebars or print head. It can refer to the glass surface of a copier, and the rotating disk used to polish semiconductor wafers.

Electrotyping (also galvanoplasty) is a chemical method for forming metal parts that exactly reproduce a model. The method was invented by a Prussian engineer Moritz von Jacobi in Russia in 1838, and was immediately adopted for applications in printing and several other fields. As described in an 1890 treatise, electrotyping produces "an exact facsimile of any object having an irregular surface, whether it be an engraved steel- or copper-plate, a wood-cut, or a form of set-up type, to be used for printing; or a medal, medallion, statue, bust, or even a natural object, for art purposes."

In art, several important "bronze" sculptures created in the 19th century are actually electrotyped copper, and not bronze at all; sculptures were executed using electrotyping at least into the 1930s. In printing, electrotyping had become a standard method for producing plates for letterpress printing by the late 1800s. It complemented the older technology of stereotyping, which involved metal casting. By 1901, stereotypers and electrotypers in several countries had formed labor unions around these crafts. The unions persisted into the 1970s, but by the late 20th century, after more than a century in widespread use for preparing plates, the two technologies had been bypassed by the transitions to offset printing and to new techniques for the preparation of printing plates.

A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype, for letterpress printers. Today's digital type foundries accumulate and distribute typefaces (typically as digitized fonts) created by type designers, who may either be freelancers operating their own independent foundry, or employed by a foundry. Type foundries may also provide custom type design services.