Output details

Delight of men and gods: Christiaan Huygens's new method of printing

This essay gathers together, for the first time, all surviving materials associated with a new method of printing – effectively stencil duplicating – invented by the 17th-century mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Christiaan Huygens. The materials, which include Huygens’s autograph account of the method, printed samples, a printing plate, and correspondence of Huygens and others, are subjected to several forms of analysis and scrutiny. These are: (a) the detailed physical examination of artefacts (held in Leiden and London), to ascertain the nature and process of the printing work, the difficulties encountered by Huygens, and the qualities of the samples he produced; (b) close readings of the classical Latin texts Huygens employed for his samples and printing plate, to detect conceptual relationships between the texts, the method of printing, and broader philosophical ideas; and (c) the tracing of discussions about the printing method in Huygens’s correspondence, exchanged with the Royal Society in London. Huygens’s new method of printing is then considered relative to contemporary printing methods intended to emulate or reproduce handwriting (autographic), or which were used to mark out texts using stencils; the method is also assessed as a forerunner of subsequent printing methods that, in the later 19th century, culminated in stencil duplicating.This research provides a new understanding of an almost unknown sphere of work pursued by Christiaan Huygens, one of the 17th century’s most important scientific figures. It adds to the understanding of early modern text and document production, and efforts to devise semi-formal means of duplicating and circulating knowledge that at the same time allowed for a good degree of authorial control. The several forms of artefact analysis produce results that are of value in themselves and when turned outwards and contextualized in larger spheres of intellectual and technological culture.