Part 4: Reserach -The history of printing

The woodblock printing is technique which originated from China and was later widespread throughout the East Asia. It is considered as beginning of world print culture. This technique was used for printing images, text or patterns on textile, and after a while, they began to print on paper too.

Neat hand copy script on thin transparent paper was stuck on thick smooth wooden block which is then carefully carved and coated with ink. This technique was revolutionary and marked the beginning of the printing era although it has apparent drawbacks. First of all, it required so much work and material, it wasn’t easy to store all those blocks and it was very difficult to correct mistakes. However it was enabled to create a hundreds of copy which was very valuable at that time.

Movable type, as a system of printing, emerged in China as a more practical technique comparing to woodblock print and was shortly after adopted in Korea where was made the first extant movable metal print book Jikji in 1337. Just as with woodblock print technique, this appeared as something expensive and difficult because it required a lot of effort to create metal tablets and to store them. It also wasn’t practical because of Chinese language system which has so much characters.

Speaking of Europe and its alphabet, situation was less complicated and movable type system was more convenient. The fact that alphabet has a limited numbers of characters eased this process so the first movable type in Europe was invented around 1450 by Johannes Guttenberg, a German blacksmith, goldsmith printer and publisher. This system was based on matrix and hand mould where he used the same components that are still in use today. This technique was proved to be more durable that woodblock printing and letters was more uniform which was a base for creating fonts. After the introduction of movable type printing by Gutenberg and William Caxton, this technique was widespread across the Europe to Italy where everything got a new sense through the period of Renaissance. These new Roman typeface made a base for modern fonts.