Guttenberg Printing Press

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/sable/recherche/catalogues/annual_register/images/printing_press.jpg

500 years ago, his printing machine was one of the most revolutionary inventions since the wheel.  One of the first and finest books ever created was the Guttenberg Bible. Johannes Guttenberg knew that books were growing in popularity. Universities and Churches were in need of materials for worshippers and students, and Guttenberg sought out to find and create a press that allowed quick adaptations.

Scribes were very important in their day. Scribes wrote out bibles for the churches, alphabets for students, and scripts of everyday life. The main objective of the printing press was printing the word of God in Bibles for the church. Guttenberg would then change the importance of scribes forever.

Mainz Psalter in 1457 combines woodcut illustrations and text together. Two styles developed from the 1400’s to the 1500’s were Black Letter and Old Style. Old style resembled that of the text of the Greek.

The Industrial Revolution came along and the steam press was invented. Koenig Steam Press was built in 1814 and sold in London at the time. Soon millions of printed pages were being printed each week. Graphic Designers came about when these posters were being printed out to quickly to have an exact layout and eye appeal. The objective of the industry was to print out quantity instead of quality.

Soon, printing companies were hiring artists to attain eye appeal in their printed advertisements.

 http://traviscase.org/Graphics/Religious/GutenbergBible.jpg

Comic Booking

http://blog.mtviggy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/batman-color2.jpg


I can say I’ve read a few comic books in my lifetime and I can see how popular they became at their birth. Rising artist’s were very free at the beginning of comic booking. Government brought halts to the industry by coding and limiting.

Superman was created in 1938, and it’s a bird it’s a plane it’s superman became very popular, very quickly. As an industry, they began printing more and more each week. Comic books were becoming very popular and flashy. The skill of the artist started coming into play. Kirby supported the war and the troops by writing his comics. The growing popularity of comic books forced newspaper companies to produce comics in their columns to keep customers interested in news as well as comics.

1950’s were creeping up and the comics themselves were changing. Not only were there superhero comics, there were sci-fi comic books as well as Love comic books.

Comic books were becoming grosser and grosser. The government was eventually looking at comics a different way. Comic books were becoming more mature and grotesque. Great crimes were depicted and also sexual activity and lust. Do not forget that comic books had a young audience and the government was claiming that these cartoons were changing the youth into believing certain ideals. Ideas of stealing or killing were what the government was concerned about. Words like terror and weird were ruled out of comic books due to code changes. The code put anything that was good in comics out of business. A pre-requisite to art was freedom and the code brought down many industries of comic books. Robert Crumb wanted to do things his own way. The media was only buying the mainstream comic books about superheroes. Parody created many artists to become victims of copyrights and lawsuits. American Splendor contained real content and real stories.

Batman was one of only a few superheroes that survived the decades. Many comic book writers wanted to live through their stories, and so they did and created stories they felt were interesting and disregarded the media and government.

http://goremaster.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/stan-lee.jpg

Elbert Hubbard: An American Original

http://www.nndb.com/people/212/000048068/elbert-hubbard.jpg

Elbert Hubbard established a well-known campus named Roycroft. In 1900, the New York Times claimed Roycroft was a crafting paradise. Elbert Green Hubbard knew how to make things happen.  Hubbard began selling soap in Illinois and was a very successful salesman. With his charm he pulled people in and sold the goods. Buffalo was where his company brought him to take over at Larkin Soap Company. As an adult, Hubbard wishes he had never been subject to religious sermons. Even though his village was very religious, he was close to becoming a priest.

Hubbard was a lover of ambition and ego. Society demanded that those who bore children were to be married so when Hubbard and Alice had a child, Alice’s sister took the child and Hubbard and Alice separated. Arts and Crafts were becoming mass-produced by machines and were losing the human aspect of handiwork. At the turn of the century, he was in the eye of the perfect storm.

Middle Class could not afford the furniture that Hubbard was producing. Therefore, Hubbard had to concentrate on the business issue at hand. Hubbard resulted in using machines of many types to ease the process of furniture making. Although he strayed from using machines for many years, his business would explode once he gained the skill of using machinery.

Many people were calling Hubbard brash, because Elbert Hubbard began marking his territory and carved his mark into every piece of work. He was eventually a spokesman for the Arts and Crafts movement in America. He was known to be the embodiment of the American dream. Bertha was a great wife, but Hubbard was secretly writing Alice. After 15 years of writing each other, a public lawsuit came forward from Miriam’s stepparents for unpaid child support bills. Hubbard and Alice would soon become married and their daughter would find out her true parents.

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/utopia/gallery_images/uc14.jpg