Reading Text
Book production at Cambridge University Press — the world's oldest publisher and longest continuously operating printer — has evolved in step with the broader industry, remaining perpetually at its technological (1) .......... throughout a four-hundred-year manufacturing (2) .......... . Perhaps surprisingly, given the (3) .......... span of time involved, only two fundamental changes have occurred in the process by which text is prepared (4) .......... its mechanical transfer onto paper.
Johannes Gutenberg's innovation of 1450, whereby individual metal characters were set within devices known as braces or matrices, (5) .......... for the first time the mass (6) .......... of printed text across Europe, and remained the cornerstone of production standards for the better part of four centuries.
The emergence of phototypesetting in the 1950s, combined with the growing preference (7) .......... the publishing industry for offset lithography, brought to an end nearly five hundred years of letterpress composition as the (8) .......... service provided by the Press.