When I was living in Seattle, I used to own a computer store for 12 years. I have always been interested in typesetting and design and printing (my Mom's family owned a large commercial paper warehouse and I would get to visit various printers as a kid riding along with the salesmen) and when companies like Dell and Gagway ...sorry... Gateway started selling decent systems for less than I could build them, I started focusing entirely on copies and printing.
Bought two offset presses, set up a darkroom and had a lot of fun for five years. Ran into this nice article at idsgn (a design blog):
The end of movable type in China
While Western letterpress printing has made a recent revival, what was once considered one of the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China is no longer a sustainable practice in its country of origin.
Wai Che Printing Company, preserved by its 81-year-old owner Lee Chak Yu, has operated on Wing Lee Street with its bilingual lead type collection and original Heidelberg Cylinder machine for over 50 years. Curious to learn more, I visited Wai Che - one of the last remaining letterpress shops in Hong Kong - to understand how Chinese movable type differed and why this trade has become obsolete.
Movable type, made influential by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, was one of the greatest technological advances defining typography as we know it today. Invented in China by Bi Sheng 400 years earlier during the Song Dynasty, movable type was created as a system to print lengthy Buddhist scripture. As Chinese characters were mostly square, characters of uniform size and shape were easily interchangeable for printing. Kerning was not an issue; the letterforms had a balanced visual appearance by nature.
A delightful read. What struck me is the comparison between the job cases for Western and Eastern type. In China, you do not have very many typefaces but you have as a minimum, about 4,000 different characters that are used on a regular basis. Here is the storage for Western type -- each typeface and size is stored in a separate drawer of what is known as a California Job Case (Image swiped from here):
And here is one font of Chinese type:
