The last typography endeavor

By June Tsai

Each year, the Taipei City Government celebrates Chinese characters—the medium for transmitting one of the world’s oldest civilizations—by putting on the Chinese Character Festival, featuring lectures, exhibitions and art programs.

No funds are set aside, however, for one individual who has been working tirelessly to preserve the beauty of traditional Chinese characters, and whose ambitious project could really use some financial help.

The man’s name is Chang Chieh-kuan, the proprietor of Ri Xing Typography. His goal: to preserve the last complete set of standard Chinese character molds for lead type casting in the world.

The nondescript Ri Xing Typography store, tucked away in a little avenue not far from Taipei Main Station, gives no indication of what it holds inside: character types, molds, printers and the like—all of which are precious relics of the past, now that technological advances have almost rendered traditional printing processes extinct.

The two-floor plant is home to up to 300,000 “matrices”—the molds used to cast lead characters. They are for about 13,000 Chinese characters and hundreds of foreign letters, each having three fonts with seven sizes.

In the eyes of many people, perhaps, these matrices ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history, or at best recycled, since movable typesetting has fallen into disuse. But they have an entirely different meaning to Chang.

To him, they represent the work ethics of his late father, faithfulness to a longtime trade partnership and his cultural heritage. These are what drive the 58-year-old Chang to continue working.

Even as he showed his interviewer around, Chang attended to his work. One moment he was walking up and down the rows of cabinets, in which hundreds of thousands of lead dies are stored. The next, he excused himself to go to the back of the store to fix a type-casting machine.

In its heyday, Ri Xing had seven type-casting machines that ran nonstop producing lead types, and its more than 30 people had to work overtime on a regular basis.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, due to the progress of offset printing and computer typesetting, the number of print shops began to drop drastically, from more than 5,000 in the 1970s to only about 30 in the 1990s, Chang said.

By that time, Taipei’s four molding plants supplied enough movable types to meet the demand of businesses in the whole country. “However, the largest of the four lead type producers, Chung Nan, closed down in 2000, unable to continue in the face of huge losses,” Chang said.

Two other factories followed suit in 2007, and now Ri Xing is the only one left.

“When I was struggling to decide if I should stay in business, I came to the conclusion that as long as there is one print shop in Taiwan that still needs lead types, I won’t stop,” he said. “We have such good relations with our customers, and I am really doing this for the love of typography.”

The insistence is a tribute to his father Chang Si-ling. Chang Chieh-kuan recalled how his father, a typesetter for a newspaper during the Japanese colonial period, first set up the business in 1969. “He borrowed money to open a printing house in the capital city. But demand for the machines he needed was so high that he had to wait for months to receive them, so while he was waiting he started out by supplying lead types. And with the help of customers who appreciated his work, he survived and continued to be a supplier of lead types.”

The soft-spoken Chang fondly remembers his father’s devotion to the trade. “‘The important thing is not speed, but quality. Praise for the quality of our dies is the kind of feedback that we should want to hear from our customers,’ my father used to say.”

The son learned the craft from his father as a boy and inherited his father’s dedication.

Chang said the precipitous decline of typography caught almost everyone in the industry unprepared, and Ri Xing has not been able to make a profit since 1996.

“My father thought about preserving the typefaces, but he did not live to see his dream realized. And I told myself, I would like to preserve something about typography so that my children and their children may know that this was what their forefathers did for a living.”

In 2008, he formulated a plan to remake the matrices with the help of a Computer Numerical Control matrix-making machine.

Matrices are the key element in the preservation of typography, Chang explained. “Our matrices have been used for almost 40 years and should have long been replaced.”

The costs involved and changes in the printing industry, however, prevented Ri Xing from replacing them during the 1980s. But Chang said he has decided to do it now lest the tradition would disappear completely.”

According to Chang, Taiwan learned to cast movable types for Chinese characters through hand-carved matrices imported directly or indirectly from mainland China after World War II.

The molding skills are difficult to master, even with the help of a computer. “The demand for precision in a mold for a typeface is very high, and one-12th of a hair’s thinness makes a huge difference on the printed page.”

An important part of the restoration work is to scan the typefaces, trim and remake them to their particular shapes and digitize them for reproduction and distribution.

“Typography captures the beauty of Chinese calligraphy and the grace of its strokes better than any other means. It also gives the printed word on the page a three-dimensional quality,” Chang said, with his fingers feeling the pages of an open book while speaking to a group of students of information technology.

The students were visiting Chang’s factory on a field trip. Like more and more of them over the last year, the students noticed his shop and were attracted to it due to an Internet motion to help restore and preserve the printing method using movable types.

Over the past two years, individual designers, publishers, art teachers and bookstore owners have been touched by Chang’s dream to preserve the legacy of typography, and the dream has now grown with their assistance.

Some volunteers helped promote the restoration plan through their blogs; others collaborated with Chang to repackage individual lead types as gifts; still others helped set up Internet working platforms for volunteers to upload and edit every character.

The typeface digitization system has passed initial tests, but some problems remain. Though participants are enthusiastic about the project and most of them are high-tech savvy art students, they have been unable to produce characters that are up to Chang’s exacting standards.

“I began to edit the typefaces on computer by myself two years ago. At the time, it took me around eight hours to fix just one character,” Chang said. “I might be expecting too much from the younger generation. They seldom write things by hand now.”

Chang then decided to invite calligraphy teachers to offer courses to volunteers.

With current materials, manpower and money, Chang estimated the restoration project would take more than a decade to complete. Government resources for the project are not forthcoming, but Chang said the project cannot wait much longer.

In the basement of Ri Xing, graphic artist Yang Chung-ming was giving guided tours to visitors, lecturing them on the history of typography and demonstrating the entire process from picking fonts, setting types to printing.

“Ri Xing’s restoration project involves not only movable types, but craftsmanship and technology as well as the cultural legacy in which the standard Chinese characters were made,” Yang said.

“When old factories discarded their matrices and dies in return for a few quick bucks, when old lead types in the warehouses of newspaper factories are at best incomplete, Ri Xing’s endeavor to preserve the legacy is worth our respect and support more than ever before,” he said.

In the end, Chang hopes all these investments on equipment, digitization and training can be rewarded by the public recognizing the value of typography with standard Chinese typefaces.

Chang hopes to turn the plant with its collections of matrices and machines into a working museum, where people can learn to print the old way, and turn traditional Chinese fonts into inspiration for the cultural creative industry.

The digitized resources, he suggested, could also serve as a databank for cultural study on script traditions of other civilizations of the world. “I see myself as a watcher, rather than a proprietor, of what Ri Xing has to offer to the society,” Chang said.

This article first appeared in online newspaper Taiwan Today Dec. 31, 2010.