Topic 3: The Printed Book; Brief History and Advantages and Disadvantages - 1st April

As books became more popular it was hard to meet the demand by hand production. This meant that an alternative method had to be found, which bought the introduction of printing.
The earliest known printed book was printed in China. Other methods of printing were evidently present in China before Europe e.g. small stamps for seals. However, there is also evidence of similar printing methods dating back to 2270 BC. This included clay tablets and amulets. No ink was used in these instances, the stamp was pushed into the soft material, but the same method was present.
It wasn't just the printing method that needed an update, but the printable material as well. Vellum, which was used in some early printed books, was too expensive for mass production. Paper making was a cheaper method and helped aid the growth of printing technology. Even ink had to be further developed in order to allow it to stick to metal type.

I was interested to find that the method of carving the woodblock for printing is actually called xylography. The woodblock print was created by carving away (along the wood grain) any parts of the woodblock that were not part of the text or image. The raised surface was inked and pressed firmly and evenly onto paper, material or in early printing vellum. The use of woodblock printing was not only for paper printing and had also been used to make patterns on textiles. The method was quite similar to using a stamp. When used for colour printing, different blocks had to be used for different colours. Block printing was even the standard method for producing wallpapers!
There were 3 different ways of printing with woodblocks:

• Stamping - hand pressing the block to paper
• Rubbing - block face up with paper on top which is then rubbed with a hard pad
• Press Printing - device to apply pressure through a rolling bed; originally a screw press and developed after into the steam powered rotary press

Jikji, a Korean Buddhist document, printed in 1377, is the world's oldest existing book that was printed with movable type. Movable type printing used 3 different materials during its development; ceramic (fragile) wood (grainy) and metal (durable).

The type was made by carving the letters in to wood, this was then pressed in to clay to form a mould. These moulds were then filled with the liquid metal. Once set they were filed and scraped of any imperfections and ready to be used for printing.To print with movable type, a metal frame was used to hold metal characters in place. When the frame was full it formed a full page of type. The metal characters could be changed to form different sentences and paragraphs for different pages or documents. Ink is applied and pressed to paper at high pressures.

Johannes Gutenberg is famously known as the first to invent a metal movable type printer in Europe, known as the printing press. However, as said above with Jikji, movable type printing had already began in Asian countries. 

There were some noticeable advantages and disadvantages with both wood block and movable type printing.

Wood Block:

Advantages

• Introduction of paper was a lot cheaper than vellum
• Great for mass production
• Cheaper than metals
• Could be combined with movable type

Disadvantages

• Can take a long time to carve, hours or even days
• Difficult to carve small details

Movable Type:

Advantages 

• Even better for quick mass production
• More durable than wood
• Higher quality and relatively low priced
• Mistakes could be fixed by changing the wrong characters - wood was permanent errors
• Text in frames could be altered or updated for changes made to documents

Disadvantages

• For the Chinese it was easier to keep woodblocks due to their numerous amounts of characters