In letterpress printing, wood type is movable type made out of wood. First used in China for printing body text, wood type became popular during the nineteenth century for making large display typefaces for printing posters, because it was lighter and cheaper than large sizes of metal type.
Wood has been used since the earliest days of European printing for woodcut decorations and emblems, but it was not generally used for making typefaces due to the difficulty of reproducing the same shape many times for printing. In the 1820s, Darius Wells introduced mechanised wood type production using the powered router, and William Leavenworth in 1834 added a second major innovation of using a pantograph to cut a letter's shape from a pattern. This made it possible to mass-produce the same design in wood repeatedly. Wood type was manufactured and used worldwide in the nineteenth century for display use.
In the twentieth century lithography, phototypesetting and digital typesetting replaced it as a mass-market technology. It continues to be used by hobbyists and artistic printers.
Historical background
Both in China and Europe, printing from a woodblock preceded printing with movable type.
Along with clay movable type, wooden movable type was invented in China by Bi Sheng in 1040s CE/AD, although he found clay type more satisfactory, and it was first formally used to print by Wang Zhen. Wood type was hand-carved to make individual types for the very large character set of Chinese. Clay type and metal type were also used in printing in China. The problem with wood and clay types was that they could not be made to accurate dimensions, leading to metal type being adopted from the late fifteenth century. Manufacturing, selecting and redistributing sorts for a large character set was cumbersome, and much printing in China continued to be made from custom-cut woodblocks of entire pages of text, rather than from movable type.
In Europe, woodblock printing precedes European movable type printing, and the block book appeared in Europe around the same time as letterpress printing. However, a major disadvantage of woodcut lettering is that once made by wood engraving, it could not be easily duplicated by casting, whereas metal casting could be used to quickly create many metal copies of the same letter, and with the smaller character set of European languages it was practical to cast type for every letter needed. European printing from the beginning used cast metal type.
In European printed books, wood engraving was used for both decorations and for large lettering, like titles. With care, it was possible to duplicate woodblocks by casting in sand, a technique known to have been used by Hendrik van den Keere to create his large types. According to John A. Lane "the duplication of woodblocks by sandcasting is documented in 1575, probably goes back further, and... duplicated decorated initials became common in the Netherlands around 1615."
Large sandcast metal types for printed posters began to emerge around the mid-eighteenth century. James Mosley comments that "there is evidence that English typefounders only began to make big letters for posters and other commercial printing towards 1770, when Thomas Cottrell made his 'Proscription or Posting letter of great bulk and dimension' and William Caslon II cast his 'Patagonian' or 'Proscription letters'" and that "there is probably a prehistory of wood types in big letters cut by hand, especially among provincial printers, but there is no evidence that wood letter was widely used until machine-cut types were introduced."
In the early nineteenth century, London became a centre of development in bold display typefaces, the arrival of the printed poster spurring demand for bold new types of letter like the fat face and later the slab serif. However, these types were initially made in metal. In 1810, William Caslon IV introduced "sanspareil" matrices, made like a stencil by cutting out the letter in sheet metal and riveting it to a backing plate. This produced much sharper type than sandcasting and was easier to use; it was quickly copied. The large metal types produced were cast with hollows in them to reduce the weight. Mosley and Justin Howes have documented some cases in the early nineteenth century where woodblock lettering was used shortly before metal type became available in the same styles; heavy roman types on lottery advertising before the arrival of fat face types, and later a slab serif woodblock a few years before the first known printing type.