For decades now, typographic sorts that were unavailable on typewriters have been available to everyone on digital devices. We’ve always had hyphens, but now we can also use dashes. read more…

Here’s an illustration of how early printers marked the space for hand-lettered versals (‘drop caps,’ or enlarged initial letters). read more…

Indulgence form printed by Guttenberg (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel)

“Since the eleventh century, indulgences and pardons had been awarded by the Church for the remission of sins, earned either by prayer or through donations. An indulgence took the form of a preset document with a space left for the name of a penitent as proof of his or her right to divine forgiveness. For the Church, this involved costly, labour-intensive procedures where thousands of identical documents would be written by hand.”
—Paul McNeil, The Visual History of Type read more…