Printing

• 1. Introduction

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  Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. Before paper carried any of it, the impressions came from cylinder seals and objects like the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The earliest known form of printing grew out of ink rubbings, taken on paper or cloth from texts carved into stone tablets, during the sixth century. From those rubbings to a steam-powered press throwing off thousands of pages an hour, the distance is enormous. How did pressing an inked image onto paper move from a temple in East Asia to a workshop in fifteenth-century Europe? Who first cast letters from metal, and who turned that idea into a machine that helped feed the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution? And once books became cheap, what did the act of reading itself become?

• 2. Rubbings And Woodblocks

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  In the mid-sixth century in China, the earliest examples of ink-squeeze rubbings and possible stone printing blocks appear. Woodblock printing originated in China in antiquity, first as a method of printing on textiles and later on paper. A type of mechanical woodblock printing on paper began during the seventh century, in the Tang dynasty, and spread from there throughout East Asia.

  Nara Japan printed the Hyakumantō Darani in enormous numbers around 770, distributing them to temples across the country. In Korea, an example of woodblock printing from the eighth century surfaced in 1966. That document, a copy of the Buddhist Dharani Sutra known as the Pure Light Dharani Sutra, was found in Gyeongju, inside a Silla dynasty pagoda repaired in 751. Though undated, it must predate the reconstruction of the Shakyamuni Pagoda of Bulguk Temple in 751, and is estimated to have been created no later than 704.

  By the ninth century, printing on paper had taken off. The first completely surviving printed book is the Diamond Sutra of 868, held by the British Library and uncovered from Dunhuang. By the tenth century, some sutras and pictures were being printed in runs of 400,000 copies, and the Confucian classics were in print. A skilled printer could turn out up to 2,000 double-page sheets per day. The technique reached Persia and Russia, then arrived in Europe by around 1400, where it was used for old master prints and playing cards.

• 3. Amulets And Talismans

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  From 900 to 1444, wooden and tin block printing, known as a ṭarsh, was in use throughout the Islamic world. Its appearance in tenth-century Muslim Spain marks the earliest instance of block printing in Europe. The craft was largely a minority enterprise of street magicians and tricksters called the Banū Sāsān, or Ghurabā', who mass printed amulets and talismans carrying Qur'anic verses and magical symbols.

  Keeping the mechanical process secret let these printers feign handwritten authenticity for illiterate buyers. Over 70 of their printed pieces survive, though no print block does. Some talismans reached striking technical complexity, composed of minuscule text only 0.1 cm high. The same technology served official purposes too: stamping Fatimid tax receipts, marking the Emirate of Granada's commercial goods, printing Almohad state decrees, Ilkhanid paper money, and elaborate Hajj certificates.

  After 1436 or 1444, block printing vanishes from the Islamic world without explanation. One possible thread leads outward rather than ending: Egyptian Romani Ghurabā' migrating to Central Europe at the start of the fifteenth century may have helped carry block printing into Europe.

• 4. Block Books In Europe

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  Block printing first reached Europe as a way of printing on cloth, where it was common by 1300. Images printed on cloth for religious purposes could be large and elaborate. When paper became relatively easy to obtain, around 1400, the technique transferred very quickly to small woodcut religious images and playing cards on paper, produced in very large numbers from about 1425 onward.

  Around the mid-fifteenth century, block-books emerged, woodcut books carrying both text and images, usually carved into the same block. They served as a cheaper alternative to manuscripts and to books printed with movable type. All were short, heavily illustrated works, the bestsellers of their day, repeated in many versions; the Ars moriendi and the Biblia pauperum were the most common. Scholars still debate whether block-books arrived before movable type or, in the majority view, after it, with estimated dates falling somewhere between about 1440 and 1460.

• 5. Casting The Letters

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  Around 1040, the first known movable type system was created in China by Bi Sheng, formed out of porcelain. Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable pieces of type cast from matrices struck by letterpunches, and it allowed far more flexible processes than hand copying or block printing. Bi Sheng's clay type broke easily, but by 1298 Wang Zhen had carved a more durable type from wood. Wang Zhen also built a complex system of revolving tables and number-association with written Chinese characters to make typesetting more efficient. Even so, woodblock printing remained the main method there, since it proved cheaper and more efficient for printing Chinese with its thousands of characters.

  Copper movable type printing originated in China at the start of the twelfth century, used in large-scale printing of paper money issued by the Northern Song dynasty. The technology then spread to Korea during the Goryeo dynasty. Around 1230, Koreans invented a metal movable type using bronze. The Jikji, published in 1377, is the earliest known metal printed book.

  Type-casting in Korea was adapted from the method of casting coins. The character was cut in beech wood, pressed into soft clay to form a mould, then bronze was poured in and the finished type polished. This Eastern metal movable type spread to Europe between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The French scholar Henri-Jean Martin described the Korean form as extremely similar to Gutenberg's. The historians Frances Gies and Joseph Gies claimed that the Asian priority of inventing movable type is now firmly established, and that the Chinese-Korean technique, or a report of it, traveling westward is almost certain.

• 6. Gutenberg's Machine

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  Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the first movable-type printing system in Europe. He advanced the casting of type based on a matrix and hand mould, adapted the screw-press, used an oil-based ink, and developed a softer, more absorbent paper. Gutenberg was the first to cast his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin, antimony, copper, and bismuth, the same components still used today.

  Gutenberg started work on his press around 1436, in partnership with Andreas Dritzehen, whom he had previously instructed in gem-cutting, and with Andreas Heilmann, the owner of a paper mill. Compared with woodblock printing, page-setting and printing with a press proved faster and more durable. The metal type-pieces were sturdier and the lettering more uniform, which fed developments in typography and font design. The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 established the superiority of movable type for Western languages, and the press spread rapidly across Europe.

  Not everyone ranked the invention the same way. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes assigned ingenious printing a significant yet lowly place in a hierarchy of linguistic invention. Centuries later, in 1997, Time Life magazine ranked Gutenberg's innovations in movable type as the most important invention of the second millennium.

• 7. Steam And Speed

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  In 1843, in the United States, Richard M. Hoe invented the steam-powered rotary printing press, which ultimately allowed millions of copies of a page in a single day. The rotary press uses impressions curved around a cylinder to print on long continuous rolls of paper or other substrates. Mass production flourished after the shift to rolled paper, since continuous feed let the presses run much faster.

  Hoe's original design operated at up to 2,000 revolutions per hour, each revolution depositing 4 page images, giving a throughput of 8,000 pages per hour. By 1891, The New York World and the Philadelphia Item were running presses producing either 90,000 4-page sheets per hour or 48,000 8-page sheets. William Bullock later significantly improved rotary drum printing.

  The pace had climbed by orders of magnitude over the centuries. A Gutenberg-style press around 1600 managed about 200 impressions per hour, and a Stanhope press around 1800 about 480. Koenig presses pushed the figure from 800 in 1812 to 2,400 by 1818. From that lineage came technologies still used today: sheetfed offset, rotogravure, and flexographic printing.

• 8. Reading Remade

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  It is estimated that after Gutenberg's press, European book output rose from a few million to around one billion copies within less than four centuries. That flood changed who could read, and what reading meant. Samuel Hartlib, exiled in Britain and eager for social and cultural reform, wrote in 1641 that the art of printing would so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their own rights and liberties, would not be governed by way of oppression.

  The stakes of printing the wrong material could be lethal. Joshua Meyrowitz cited William Carter, who in 1584 printed a pro-Catholic pamphlet in Protestant-dominated England; the consequence of his action was hanging. In the Muslim world, printing in Arabic scripts was strongly opposed throughout the early modern period, partly because of the high renown of traditional calligraphy. In 1515, Sultan Selim I issued a decree making the practice of printing punishable by death. Ibrahim Muteferrika established the first Arabic-character press in the Ottoman Empire, which ran until 1742 and produced seventeen works, all on non-religious, utilitarian matters.

  Elizabeth Eisenstein identifies two long-term effects of printing: it created a sustained and uniform reference for knowledge, and it allowed comparisons of incompatible views. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke describe five kinds of reading that developed alongside print, among them critical reading, dangerous reading, and private reading, the last tied to the rise of individualism as solitary reading replaced reading aloud to a group. Print also reshaped the work of cities. Printers emerged as artisans for whom literacy was essential, the labour-intensive scribe declined, proof-correcting arose as a new occupation, and booksellers and librarians multiplied. By 2005, a different revolution was underway: digital printing accounted for roughly 9 percent of the 45 trillion pages printed annually around the world.