Task 4: Potato Printing

For Task 4, I created potato stamps for the five-letter word PLANT. I chose this word because it has no repeated letters, and the letters were relatively easy to carve. Carving took about an hour and a half, with N being the hardest to mirror and cut. I first wrote the letters mirrored on paper as a guide, which helped me accurately transfer them to the potato. During the process, I realized that curved letters like S or Q would have been much harder to carve, which shows why mechanization reduced errors. In a way, my stamps acted like rudimentary movable type, with each piece needing careful carving and alignment, just as early printers did. Some old paints were dry, so a few letters ended up different colours — a small imperfection that showed how painstaking manual production could be. I also noticed how difficult it was to make my two stamped copies identical, highlighting how mechanized printing was revolutionary not just for speed, but for producing consistent, reliable text.

This hands-on process gave me a deeper appreciation for the effort involved in producing text before mechanized printing. Watching the letterpress video, I noticed how much time it took to produce a single page, which made modern printing, photocopying, and typing feel effortless in comparison (Cooke, 2012). Reflecting on historical mechanization, the printing press dramatically increased production: from 20 to 200 pages per hour in the 1500s, to nearly 100,000 per hour by the late 1800s, increasing literacy (Module 4, n.d.). Listening to the Lamb and McCormick (2020) podcast emphasized the evolution from scroll to codex and the importance of papermaking, showing how revolutionary mechanized writing was for making knowledge accessible to many rather than a few elites.

Comparing this to modern technology, typing and editing on a computer feels effortless, and we often take it for granted. Yet this activity reminded me how much care and skill early writers and printers invested in every page. It also made me appreciate the personal touch of manually creating something, a sense of individuality largely lost once printing became mechanized.