When Isaac Newton’s Principia was published in 1687, every copy was made by hand. Not written by hand (that era had ended with Gutenberg), but assembled, inked, pressed, folded, gathered, and bound by workers whose skills had been refined over two centuries of printing practice. The text was set letter by letter in movable type. The diagrams were engraved line by line into copper plates, part of a rich tradition of scientific illustration in the seventeenth century. The paper was made sheet by sheet from linen rags. Every stage of production required specialized knowledge and physical labor that left its mark on the finished book.
Understanding how scientific books were produced in the seventeenth century changes how you read them. The visual appearance of a page, the placement of diagrams, the size and spacing of the type, the quality of the paper, are not accidents. They are the results of decisions made by printers, engravers, and publishers working within the constraints and possibilities of their technology. The book you hold is not just a container for ideas. It is a crafted object, and the craft is part of the story.
Setting the Type
The text of a seventeenth-century book was composed using movable type: individual metal letters cast from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, stored in compartmented cases and assembled by hand into lines of text.
The compositor (the worker who set the type) stood at a type case, a large wooden cabinet divided into dozens of small compartments, each holding copies of a single letter, numeral, or punctuation mark. Capital letters were stored in the upper case, lowercase letters in the lower case (this is the origin of the terms “uppercase” and “lowercase”). The compositor picked up individual letters with one hand and placed them into a composing stick, a hand-held tray that held a single line of type.
Each line had to be justified (spaced so that both margins were even), which required the compositor to insert thin strips of metal (spaces) between words to fill each line exactly. When a line was complete, it was transferred to a galley, a flat tray that held multiple lines. When enough lines had been set to fill a page, the type was locked into a metal frame called a chase, creating a forme: a rigid block of type ready for printing.
For a book like the Principia, this process was extraordinarily time-consuming. The text contained Latin prose, mathematical symbols, geometric references, and marginal notes. Mathematical notation had to be assembled from individual type pieces, often requiring custom-cast characters. A skilled compositor could set perhaps 1,500 characters per hour in straightforward text. Mathematical text was significantly slower.
The Printing Press
The forme was placed on the bed of a wooden hand press, a device whose basic design had changed little since Gutenberg’s time. The press consisted of a flat bed (on which the forme rested), a platen (a flat block that pressed the paper against the inked type), and a screw mechanism that the pressman operated by pulling a lever.
Before each impression, the forme was inked using leather-covered ink balls (pads stuffed with wool or horsehair), which the pressman rolled across the surface of the type to deposit a thin, even layer of ink. A sheet of dampened paper was positioned on the tympan (a hinged frame above the forme), and the platen was lowered by pulling the press bar. The pressure transferred the ink from the raised surfaces of the type to the paper.
A skilled press crew (one man inking, one pulling the press) could produce about 250 impressions per hour. A typical print run for a scientific book in the 1680s was between 300 and 500 copies. The first edition of the Principia had a print run of perhaps 300 to 400 copies, a number that reflected both the limited market for advanced mathematics and the cost of production.
Copperplate Engraving for Diagrams
The Principia contains numerous geometric diagrams that were essential to Newton’s arguments. These diagrams could not be printed from movable type (type consists of letters and symbols, not images). They were produced using copperplate engraving, a separate and more expensive printing process.
An engraver cut the diagram into a smooth copper plate using a burin (a sharp, chisel-like tool). The lines of the diagram were incised into the surface of the plate, creating grooves that would hold ink. After engraving, the plate was inked, wiped clean (leaving ink only in the grooves), and printed on a rolling press (a different machine from the typographic press) that forced dampened paper into the grooves to pick up the ink.
Copperplate printing was slower, more expensive, and required a different press than typographic printing. This meant that text and diagrams could not be printed simultaneously on the same sheet. In many seventeenth-century books, the diagrams were printed on separate sheets and bound into the book as folding plates or inserts. In others, the text pages were printed first, and the diagrams were added in a second pass through the copperplate press, printed directly onto the text pages in reserved blank spaces.
The quality of the engraving depended entirely on the skill of the engraver. A fine engraver could produce diagrams of extraordinary precision and beauty, with line weights that conveyed depth and emphasis. Newton’s diagrams in the Principia are models of geometric clarity, and their clean, precise lines reflect the skill of the London engravers who produced them.
Paper: Made from Rags
The paper used in seventeenth-century books was made from linen rags. Cotton and wood pulp paper would not become common until the nineteenth century. Rag paper was made by soaking linen scraps in water, beating them into a pulp, and then forming individual sheets on a wire screen (a mould). Each sheet was made individually by a skilled worker who dipped the mould into a vat of pulp, lifted it out, and shook it to distribute the fibers evenly. The wet sheet was then pressed between felts to remove water and hung to dry.
The quality of the paper varied enormously. Fine paper, made from clean white linen, was smooth, strong, and durable. Cheaper paper, made from colored or dirty rags, was rougher and weaker. The paper used for an important scientific work like the Principia was typically of good quality, chosen for its ability to take a sharp impression from both the type and the engraved plates.
Rag paper has one enormous advantage over modern wood-pulp paper: it lasts. Linen fibers are chemically stable and do not become acidic over time. A book printed on rag paper in the seventeenth century can remain in excellent condition after three centuries. Many copies of the Principia, the Opticks, and other works from this period survive in near-perfect condition, their paper still white and flexible, their type still sharp. The paper has outlasted the civilization that made it.
Binding: The Final Step
After printing, the sheets were folded (each large sheet was folded two, three, or four times to produce a group of pages called a quire or gathering), gathered (the quires were arranged in the correct sequence), and sewn together through the folds onto cords or thongs. The sewn text block was then attached to wooden boards covered in leather (calf, goat, or sheepskin), which were tooled with decorative patterns using heated metal stamps.
Binding was often done not by the publisher but by the bookseller or the buyer. Books were frequently sold as unbound sheets or in temporary paper wrappers, and the buyer would have them bound to their own specifications. This is why surviving copies of the same edition can appear in radically different bindings: one in plain calf, another in gilt-tooled morocco, a third still in its original paper wrappers.
The entire process, from setting the first line of type to delivering a finished, bound copy, could take months for a complex scientific work. The Principia was in production from roughly early 1686 to mid-1687, a period of about eighteen months, and the book was almost never published at all.
The Cost of Knowledge
Scientific books in the seventeenth century were expensive. The combination of skilled labor (compositors, pressmen, engravers, binders), materials (type metal, copper plates, paper, leather, ink), and small print runs produced books that cost as much as a week’s wages for a skilled worker. The Principia was sold unbound for about seven shillings in 1687, equivalent to several hundred pounds in today’s money.
This cost limited the audience for scientific works. Only universities, wealthy individuals, and well-funded institutions could afford to buy them. The Republic of Letters (the informal network of scholars who communicated across national boundaries) depended on personal copies, library access, and the generosity of patrons. A scientist in a provincial town might wait years to read a book published in London or Amsterdam.
The physical craft of book production thus shaped the intellectual history of science. The speed at which ideas spread, the number of people who could access them, the visual quality of diagrams and mathematical notation: all of these were determined by the capabilities and limitations of the printing technology. Understanding the craft is understanding the medium through which science itself was communicated.
From Craft to Collection
Today, the books produced by this painstaking craft are collectors’ items. First editions of the Principia, Opticks, and other landmark scientific works are among the most valuable printed books in existence. Their value reflects not only the importance of the ideas they contain but also the visual tradition of portraying scientific genius and the quality of the physical objects themselves: the sharp impression of the type, the precision of the engraved diagrams, the durability of the rag paper, the elegance of the binding.
Kronecker Wallis’s editions of Newton’s Principia and Opticks honor this tradition of scientific book craft. The Portraying Science collection, with its 400 pages of scientific portraits across centuries, is itself an artifact of the tradition it documents: a book about the visual representation of science, produced with the same care for materials, design, and craft that characterized the best scientific publishing of any era.
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