Book Printing
The early history of printing
• Printing is known to have been
first developed in the 7th
century in Korea and
China,where printing from
wooden blocks was developed.
• The Diamond Sutra dated 868 is
one of the most famous of these
early printed works, combines
words and pictures.
• By the 14th century the
technique of printing from
metal type had been developed
in Korea.
The Diamond Sutra
Before printing manual copying was the most
widespread technique of producing books
Codex:
• separate pages normally bound
together and given a cover
• Roman invention
• replaced the scroll
• the first form of book in all
Eurasian cultures
• named for their most famous
resting-place
Dante codex after restoration
Printing in Europe
• The techniques of printing in Europe were developed by anonymus
craftsmen.
• The development of printing took a dramatic step forward thanks to the
technological advances made by Johan Gutenberg, a Goldsmith working
in Mainz, Germany, in the middle of the 15th century.
• His revolutionary idea was to use metal to cast each letter individually,
so that a number of individual pieces would be fitted together to make
up a word, sentence, a paragraph and eventually an entire text or book.
• Instead of moveble types made of clay, wood or bronze (used in East
Asia) with a water-based ink Guttenberg used types made of alloy of
lead, tin, and antimony and applied oil-based ink
An edition of the Bible in Latin, known as the Gutenberg
Bible (or sometimes as the 42-line Bible,as each page is
made up of 42 lines of type) was made at his workshop in
Mainz between 1453 and 1455.
The spread of print
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By 1471 printing had spread to other
cities in what is now Germany, to
Switzerland, Italy,Spain and France.
By 1480 it had spread to many other
cities in Germany, Switzerland, Italy,
Spain, and France, but also to Hungary,
Poland, the Czech Republic, Holland,
Belgium, and England (London,
Oxford, St Albans, and Westminster).
By 1500 printing had spread to almost
every part of Europe, including
Portugal, Denmark, Austria, and
Sweden, and to a large number of other
cities and towns in the countries that
already had printing established.
Printing in England
William Caxton
• Caxton's date of birth is
unknown, but records
place it in the range 1415
to 1424.
• He was born in Kent and
went to London at the
age of 16.
• In Bruges he began to
translate a roman epic,
the Recounting of the
History of Troy. This is
the first book printed in
English.
• In 1476 he had
established a printing
press in the ground of
Westminster Abbey.
• The first full book printed
in England was Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales,
printed in 1477.
• In the same year,he also
produced the first dated
book to come out of
England: Dictes or
Sayengis of the
Pholosophres.
• Another key early work
was The Golden Legend.
• He remained as a printer
until his death in 1491.
After Caxton….
• Wynkyn de Worde, a workman and chief assistant remained at
Westminster after his master's death and finished the Canterbury Tales
and Hilton's Seale of Perfection, which had been begun by Caxton.
• Richard Pynson, like Wynkyn de Worde, was a workman or 'servant' of
Caxton, and afterwards set up a press of his own at Temple Bar.
• Two years before the city of London had attained to the dignity of a
printing-press, typography began to be practised at Oxford, but by
whom is not known, though very possibly by Theodore Rood of
Cologne.
• Cambridge was more than forty years later than Oxford in providing
herself with a printing press.
• In the same year that London began to print appeared the first books
from the press at the Abbey of St. Albans in 1479.
Printing in Scotland
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Printing did not arrive in Scotland until 1508,
when Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar
set up a press in Southgait Street (now part of
the Cowgate) in Edinburgh, having been
granted a licence to do so by King James IV
the previous year.
Myllar, who had previously been a bookseller,
trained as a printer in France. His business
partner, Edinburgh merchant Walter
Chepman, provided the funding to set up the
press, the purpose of which was primarily to
print books for government and church use.
The earliest items printed by Chepman and
Myllar to have survived are vernacular poetic
texts, now known as the 'Chepman and Myllar
Prints,' which include Blind Harry's Wallace
and poems by Robert Henryson, John Lydgate
and William Dunbar.
These publications have survived only as
fragments, and may have been originally
printed as separate items or possibly as test
pieces. As in other countries vernacular
literature was not commonly printed during
this period. The rarity of the 'Chepman and
Myllar Prints' probably indicates that very few
were printed.
The press of Chepman and Myllar closed in
1510 and there was little printing in Scotland
for the next 20 years .
Printing In Ireland
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The first typographical work known to
have been produced in Ireland is the
Book of Common Prayer-the First
Prayer-Book of Edward Vl which was
printed in Dublin in 155 I by Humfrey
Powell.
Powell was a printer in Holbom Conduit
in 1548, and in I551 went to Dublin and
set up as King's Printer.
The first Gaelic type was exhibited to
the world in a tiny volume of fifty-four
pages printed in Dublin in 1571, and
entitled Irish Alphabet and Catechism.
This was compiled by John O'Kearney,
and contained the elements of the Irish
language, the Catechism, some prayers,
and Archbishop Parker's articles of the
Christian rule.
Impact of printing
• Comparable to the development of writing and the
invention of the alphabet or the Internet
• Handwritten manuscripts continued to be produced
• Authorship became more meaningful and profitable
• The same information fell on the same pages
• The process of reading changed from oral readings to
silent, private readings
• Latin (language of most published works) is replaced
by the vernacular language of each area
• Printing helped to unify and standardize the spelling
and syntax of these vernaculars
The industrial revolution
• Non-manpowered machine using steam invented by
Friedrich Koenig & Thomas
Bensley→1100
impressions/hour
• They sold two of their models
to The Times in London in 1814
↓
• Making newspapers available to
a mass audience
• Koenig & Bauer AG is still one
of the world's largest
manufacturers of printing
presses today
Commemoration
• In 1997, Time–Life magazine
picked Gutenberg's invention
as the most important of the
second millennium.
• In 1999, the A&E Network
ranked Gutenberg on their
"People of the Millennium"
countdown
• Sculpture commemorating
Gutenberg as the inventor of
modern printing in Germany