Woodblock Printing

We briefly discussed the history of movable type in class today, but, in celebration of our new unit, I would like to dedicate my post to a different piece of the history of printing, known as woodblock printing.

Although the idea of movable type is relatively new, the idea of printing isn't. Some of the very first types of writing that we have found are stamps and seals that were designed to make an imprint on clay tablets. People used these all over the world from China to Mesopotamia. Stamps started out small, but larger brick-stamps were also developed for marking things. It is a natural transition from making stamps in clay to making stamps that work on fabric (paper came later). The earliest printing of this sort is from China before 220 AD, and was in the form of fabrics printed with designs, rather than words. The designs were carved onto wooden blocks and transferred onto the fabric. Later, the designs were passed onto paper and became a great art form all over the world, most especially in China and Japan, but also in Europe. (The following picture is from the 1800s, so it isn't ancient, but it shows woodblock pictures as an art form. And I like it.)
However, this isn't the only things they were used for. The first examples of printed words are from a few hundred years after the first printed fabrics, probably around the 7th century CE. In China, of course. By this time the Chinese had invented paper, so most words were printed on paper. The entire page to be printed was carved backwards into a block of wood, then inked and placed facing upward. The paper was placed on top of the stamp, and rubbed so that the ink would be transferred. The earliest dated book we have that is printed is from 868. It is called the Diamond Sutra, and it is Buddhist scripture. The following picture is a page from the Diamond Sutra.

Woodblock printing came later Europe than it did to Asia, but it did come. It was fairly common by 1300, but it mostly it took the form of artwork printed on cloth and paper. This being Europe, most of the artwork was religious. Once paper was invented, it was very popular to make small woodblock-printed religious images or tarot cards because it was cheaper than having someone paint them by hand.There were, however, some books printed from woodblocks that contained words as well as pictures. These are called block books. They were generally short--up to 50 leaves--with images and words interspersed in a way that sometimes reminds me somewhat of modern comic books. The subjects were generally religious (it being Europe), and they were meant for a popular audience, which means they were cheap and not intended to be high quality. The interesting thing about block books is that they date from the late 1400s, which was after Gutenberg invented movable type. People made block books because, especially for a small publisher, block books were easier and less labor-intensive to produce. Movable type is more versatile, but every time you want to print a new page, you have to set up all of the letters all over again. You also need to have the typeface and the press, and unless you print in rather large editions (which means you need to buy a lot of paper, which is expensive), it is not worth all the rearranging. All of that takes a lot of money in investment. If you were a small publisher and didn't have so much money to invest, doing cheap, popular woodblock books was much more economically feasible. The woodblocks themselves took work to get, but once you had them, you didn't need a press, because you could just rub the paper over the block; you didn't need to do any rearranging; and you could print in as small of editions as you wanted. Obviously, Gutenberg's press won out in the end, but for several decades, both methods were used.

It is interesting to me that the technology for printing could exist for so many thousands of years without making a huge impact, then all it took was one simple change in it (in this case, the movement from woodblocks to movable type) and all of a sudden it completely changed the world forever. The world can change very fast in response to something that at the time doesn't seem like such a huge thing. We saw this with the internet around twenty years ago. It makes me wonder what changes will come that quickly in the future.