715 



PRINTING. 



PRINTING. 



746 



in form ; but, what is alone of importance, all the impressions are 

 exact copies of one another, and also bear a certain and perfectly 

 assignable relation to the stamp or type. 



Even on a theoretical view of the subject, printing by means of 

 merely a variegated surface or stamp, or, in other words, the repro- 

 duction, in soft substances, of cameos and intaglios, would seem to be 

 the simpler and more obvious of the two kinds of printing we have 

 mentioned. This may be said to be printing by pressure alone. In 

 the other kind of printing, by the transference of colour, there ia 

 required the introduction, in addition to the type and its recipient, of 

 a third element or agent, namely, the colour to be transferred. And 

 this was an addition very little likely ever to be made until the idea 

 of multiplying copies of coloured marks had itself occurred, that is, 

 until the very object had been thought of which this was the only 

 means of accomplishing, and which was the only object this process 

 was suited to accomplish. Having a seal or cut stamp in his hand, the 

 making an impression with that upon wax or any other soft substance 

 was extremely natural for a person wishing on any occasion to leave 

 his mark or sign ; it was the same thing, in fact, with notching a piece 

 of wood or stone with a knife or other sharp instrument, with this 

 difference only, that the knife makes its marks by excision, or alto- 

 gether removing and abstracting part of the substance operated upon ; 

 the stamp, by extrusion, or merely pushing it aside. Or still more 

 nearly it resembles the rudest and readiest of all ways of making a 

 mark, namely, by dealing a blow. But it ia a mode of making a mark 

 only ; that is ita sole purpose and object. There is no thought, so 

 long as this kind of printing exclusively is used, of multiplying copies 

 of the same mark ; that is an idea far removed from the first and most 

 natural employment of a dry stamp or seal, and not perhaps more 

 likely to be suggested by such stamping or sealing (although capable 

 of being so realised) than by some other things by the mere common 

 process, for instance, of copying by imitation. If a transcriber had 

 ever had before him a written page, with the ink not yet dry, which 

 he was laboriously reproducing with his pen, the slowness of his pro- 

 cedure, especially if he were pursued by an active and growing 

 demand on the part of the public for books, might have led him to the 

 thought of the possibility of performing the whole task in a manner 

 at once, by merely impressing the wet writing upon the blank paper, 

 and then re-transferring it from the reversed copy thus made to 

 another sheet, in order to recover the original position of the characters. 

 And if by any means the reversed copy could be kept moist, or ita 

 moisture repeatedly renewed, here was a method of procuring in the 

 same easy manner an indefinite number of copies. The mechanical 

 facilities were (till to be invented, but this was the elementary idea of 

 what we have been regarding as the second kind of printing ; which, 

 it thus appears to us, would probably not be suggested by the first 

 kind at all, but rather by the desire of effecting an object (namely, 

 the multiplying of copies) altogether different from that (namely, the 

 mere making of a mark) which wag the primary purpose of a dry 

 stamp or seal, and only presenting itelf at a much later and more 

 advanced stage in the progress of civilisation. 



These considerations may help to account for the historic fact that 

 the use of engraved seals for impressing soft substances preceded by 

 no many centuries the invention of the art of printing by the trans- 

 ference of a pigment, or, in other words, by means of coloured stamps 

 or types. Nevertheless the principle of an engraved or uneven sur- 

 face might still for a particular purpose be called in to the aid of the 

 process of pigment-printing, although it had nothing to do with the 

 suggesting of that process. Suppose the writing which is to be trans- 

 ferred by such mode of printing to be traced in visible black characters 

 upon a smooth surface of wood or metal, how is the pigment to be 

 most conveniently renewed every tune it gets dry or faint ! With an 

 even surface it is evident that this could only be done by the tedious 

 method of retracing every line of the writing with a pen or brush, a 

 method which besides its consumption of time, making printing, in 

 fact, as slow as writing would probably be found to be inefficient, as 

 leaving the page dry or half dry in one part before it could be 

 inked over in another. But by either cutting hollows for the ink, 

 or causing the characters to stand out in relief, the great advantage 

 is gained of being able to spread the pigment by a few sweeps of the 

 brush along every line which it ought to colour, without leaving any 

 of it upon the intervening parts of the wood or metal : in the case 

 of hollow lines being cut (as in copperplate-printing), the ink that 

 is spread in the first instance over the whole surface is easily wiped 

 away from the rest without being taken out of the hollows. 



At this point, then, we may be said to have at last obtained the art of 

 printing in a practical shape. The art was now invented. This is 

 precisely the art of printing as it has been known in China since the 

 middle of the 10th century, when it is said to have been discovered by 

 a minister of state named Foong-taon, and as it is still practised there. 

 The page of writing to be multiplied is pasted down upon the smooth 

 surface of a prepared block, commonly of pear-tree, on which it leaves 

 an impression of the characters in an inverted form, and then the block 

 thus marked is made ready to be printed from, by cuting away 

 all the blank parts of the face of the wood, and the lines forming 

 the characters are thus left in relief, so as alone to receive the ink 

 every time the brush is applied. 



In such a language as the Chinese, which is without an alphabet, or 



at least in which the elementary characters have not been reduced to 

 the same limited and commodious number as in most other languages, 

 by making them represent sounds instead of ideas or things, this, or the 

 lithographic process, are the only kinds of printing that are generally 

 applicable. The subsequent improvements or extensions of the principle 

 are all dependent upon the common alphabetic mode of writing. 



Even in Europe, however, although the mode of writing was alpha- 

 betic, it was the Chinese mode of printing that was first practised. 

 Some have even supposed that the knowledge of the art was originally 

 obtained from the Chinese ; and indeed, besides what other less direct 

 communication there may have been, Marco Polo, who returned from 

 China about the end of the 13th century, had seen and described at 

 least one application of the invention in that country, the fabrication 

 of a species of paper-money by stamping it with a seal covered with 

 cinnabar (vermilion). But, as far as we can trace, it was not till fully 

 a century after this that even this simplest kind of printing began to 

 be practised in Europe. It appears to have been first applied to the 

 fabrication of playing-cards and manuals of popular devotion, the 

 latter for the most part consisting, like the cards, of merely a single 

 page, though in some instances assuming the form of little books of 

 several pages. It is believed that about the year 1400, or soon after, 

 both these articles, which had previously been manufactured by hand, 

 and each copy of course by a separate operation, began to be multi- 

 plied, like the Chinese paper-money, from engraved blocks or stamps. 

 There is no record of this innovation, but the fact is inferred from the 

 perfect similarity of several copies of the same page, which could only 

 have been produced by their having all been impressions from a common 

 original. The playing-cards thus fabricated are merely pictures ; but 

 many of the devotional manuals, besides pictures, which in these also 

 fill the greater part of each page, present short texts from Scripture, 

 and other examples of engraved letters and words. It is evident, how- 

 ever, that the essence of the new art is as much in the pictures as in 

 the legends, which are only pictures of another kind. 



The sera of these block prints and books, as they are called, may be 

 stated to be the first half of the 15th century : one in Lord Spencer's 

 collection bears the date of 1423, and there is reason to believe that 

 other specimens were executed almost as late as 1450. Of the block- 

 books of any considerable magnitude the two most remarkable are, that 

 generally styled, though probably not correctly, the ' Biblia Pauperum,' 

 a small folio of forty leaves, each containing a picture, with a text of 

 scripture or some other illustrative sentence under it, the first edition 

 of which (for there were several), is supposed to have been produced 

 between 1430 and 1450, and of this an early edition is in the King's 

 Library of the British Museum ; and the ' Speculum Huinaiue Salva- 

 tionis,' consisting of sixty-three leaves of the same small folio size, 

 containing in all fifty-eicht pictures, with two lines of Latin rhymu 

 under each. With regard to this last in particular, however, there haa 

 been a great deal of disputation, some denying altogether its claim to 

 be reckoned a specimen of block-printing, in so far as the legends are 

 concerned ; but it is now generally admitted that at least some of the 

 legends have every appearance of having been printed from the same 

 block with the picture, although in other cases they seem to have been 

 subsequently inserted from moveable types. A minute examination of 

 the cuts, undertaken by Mr. Ottley, has proved that the Latin edition 

 with moveable types was undoubtedly the earliest, and dates probably 

 about 1470. The edition in which twenty of the subjects have tho 

 inscriptions cut on the wood, while the others are from raoveable types, 

 is apparently a copy (" laid down," as engravers style it) of the original 

 Latin edition. Another block-book that was frequently printed, ami 

 which is noticeable as consisting wholly of text, without pictures, was 

 the email Latin Grammar of Donatus, the common school-book of those 

 days. These block-books are, like the Chinese books at this day, 

 printed only on one side of the leaf, and may have been produced in 

 Germany. 



At this point, as we have already observed, printing would have 

 stopped, if the art of alphabetic writing had remained undiscovered. 

 At most, the art could not have been carried beyond what has been 

 called logography, or the printing with types, each containing a whole 

 word, a method which is in partial use in China, and has even in recent 

 times been attempted among ourselves, but which is manifestly of very 

 limited application. Logography, indeed, is merely a modification of 

 block-printing ; the principle is the same whether the block or type 

 contain a whole word, a whole line, a whole sentence, or a whole page. 



It is not unlikely, however, that the partial employment of logo- 

 graphy in the infancy of European printing may have been what 

 suggested alphabetic printing. There is good evidence that some 

 words of common occurrence were early cut out on separate stamps or 

 types ; and although this may have been done only after the invention 

 of alphabetic printing, to save the trouble of composition (or setting up 

 the words from the letters), it is possible that the same thing may also 

 have been done while only block-printing was known, with the view of 

 saving the repeated cutting out of the same words. If so, the per- 

 ception, thus awakened and turned to account, of the fact that two 

 different pages often contained some words in common, would be apt, 

 it may be thought, to conduct to the reflection that all words and all 

 pages that could be printed were composed out of the same twenty- 

 four letters, and that therefore if a sufficient number of types consist- 

 ing each of a single letter could be provided, the same types that had 



