Printing; An Account of Its Invention and of William Caxton, the First English Printer (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877 edition. Excerpt: ... books in China;-while on the other hand, about the year A. D. 9oo they were known to a high officer and essayist Fung-taon to be in common use as schoolbooks in one portion ofthe country. "I think, " he adds, "we may therefore safely say that the printing of books for sale and use in place of manuscripts began about A. D. 86o, or a thousand years ago." The mode in which these blocks were produced wasexceedingly ingenious. First, a manuscript copy of the work to be printed was written on the thin paper still in universal use in China. It was then glued to the block, face downwards, and brushed over with oil to render it transparent. The engraver had thus before him a reversed tracing of the manuscript to be printed, and by cutting through the paper and hollowing out the unmarked spaces of the block, he at once obtained a page of type. Impressions from this were taken by means of a thin pigment resembling Indian ink. No printing press was used, but the block was placed with its lettered side uppermost and moistened with ink. The sheets to be printed were then laid lightly on the top, and a soft brush passed over them to fix the impression. It is said that a dexterous Chinese printer could in this way take many thousand impressions in a day. There is a striking similarity between these Chinese books and the block-books of Germany and Holland. The impressions are taken on one side of the paper only, and they are similarly bound, both the Chinese and the European books being so arranged by the binder as that the two printed pages shall lie face to face. In both countries it was customary to paste the blank sides of the leaves together, so as to make the printed matter continuous. The earliest European block-books also bear marks of having been...