traveling booksellers were common figures in europe in the middle ages

8/3/2019 Traveling Booksellers Were Common Figures in Europe in the Middle Ages

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Traveling booksellers were common figures in Europe in the Middle Ages (5th century to15th century), but in the early Middle Ages bookmaking was largely a monopoly of thescriptoria, or writing rooms, of monasteries. For some centuries books written in themonasteries were produced for the exclusive use of the monks or their pupils. Therefore, forcenturies the knowledge of reading and writing remained confined to the clerics. Later, under

the influence of certain princes who owed their early education to monastery schools, thelibraries of kings and nobles acquired manuscripts of the world's literature.

Later in the Middle Ages, bookselling was stimulated by the rise of universities, particularlythe University of Paris in France and the University of Bologna in Italy. The universitiessupervised the preparation of textbooks and literary works and also prescribed the rates atwhich the books were to be sold or leased. The booksellers, known as stationarii, usuallywere university officials or graduates. The stationarii of the University of Paris supplied notonly the university but nearly all the scholars of Europe. The stationarii at the universities ofOxford and Cambridge in England began their work some years later than those in Paris orBologna. Without the restrictions that hampered the freedom of the French and Italian

scribes, their business flourished.

B. Development of the Publishing Industry

Dissemination of information

The process of recording information by handwriting wasobviously laborious and required the dedication of the

likes of Egyptian scribes or monks in monasteries aroundthe world. It was only after mechanical means ofreproducing writing were invented that informationrecords could be duplicated more efficiently andeconomically.

The first practical method of reproducing writingmechanically wasblock printing; it was developed inChinaduring the T'ang dynasty (618907).Ideographictext and illustrations were engraved in wooden blocks,inked, and copied on paper. Used to produce books as well

as cards, charms, and calendars, block printing spread toKorea and Japan but apparently not to the Islamic orEuropean Christian civilizations. European woodcuts andmetal engravings date only to the 14th century.

Printing from movable type was also invented in China (inthe mid-11th century AD). There and in the bookmakingindustry ofKorea, where the method was applied moreextensively during the 15th century, the ideographic typewas made initially of baked clay and wood and later ofmetal. The large number of typefaces required for

pictographic text composition continued to handicap


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printing in the Orient until the present time.

The invention of character-oriented printing from movabletype (144050) is attributed to the German printerJohannes Gutenberg. Within 30 years of his invention, the

movable-type printing press was in use throughout Europe.Character-type pieces were metallic and apparently castfrom metallic molds; paper and vellum (calfskinparchment) were used to carry the impressions.Gutenberg's technique of assembling individual letters byhand was employed until 1886, when the German-bornAmerican printer Ottmar Mergenthaler developed theLinotype, a keyboard-driven device that cast lines of typeautomatically. Typesetting speed was further enhanced bytheMonotypetechnique, in which a perforated paperribbon, punched from a keyboard, was used to operate a

type-casting machine. Mechanical methods of typesettingprevailed until the 1960s. Since that time they have beenlargely supplanted by the electronic and optical printingtechniques described in the previous section.

Unlike the use of movable type for printing text, earlygraphicswere reproduced from wood relief engravings inwhich the nonprinting portions of the image were cutaway. Musical scores, on the other hand, were reproducedfrom etched stone plates. At the end of the 18th century,the German printer Aloys Senefelder developedlithography, a planographic technique of transferringimages from a specially prepared surface of stone. Inoffset lithographythe image is transferred from zinc oraluminum plates instead of stone, and inphotoengravingsuch plates are superimposed with film and then etched.

The first successful photographic process, thedaguerreotype, was developed during the 1830s. Theinvention ofphotography, aside from providing a newmedium for capturing still images and later video in analog

form, was significant for two other reasons. First, recordedinformation (textual and graphic) could be easilyreproduced from film, and, second, the image could beenlarged or reduced. Document reproduction from film tofilm has been relatively unimportant, because both printingand photocopying (see above) are cheaper. The ability toreduce images, however, has led to the development of themicroform, the most economical method of disseminatinganalog-form information.

Another technique of considerable commercial importance

for the duplication of paper-based information isphotocopying, or dry photography. Printing is most


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economical when large numbers of copies are required, butphotocopying provides a fast and efficient means ofduplicating records in small quantities for personal or localuse. Of the several technologies that are in use, the mostpopular process, xerography, is based on electrostatics.

While the volume of information issued in the form ofprinted matter continues unabated, theelectronicpublishingindustry has begun to disseminate informationin digital form. The digitalopticaldisc (see aboveRecording media) is developing as an increasingly popularmeans of issuing large bodies of archival informationforexample, legislation, court and hospital records,encyclopaedias and other reference works, referraldatabases, and libraries of computer software. Full-textdatabases, each containing digital page images of the

complete text of some 400 periodicals stored onCD-ROM,entered the market in 1990. The optical disc provides themass production technology for publication in machine-readable form. It offers the prospect of having largelibraries of information available in virtually every schooland at many professional workstations.

The coupling of computers and digitaltelecommunicationsis also changing the modes of information dissemination.High-speed digital satellite communications facilitateelectronic printing at remote sites; for example, the world'smajor newspapers and magazines transmit electronic pagecopies to different geographic locations for local printingand distribution. Updates of catalogs, computer software,and archival databases are distributed via e-mail, a methodof rapidly forwarding and storing bodies of digitalinformation between remote computers.

Indeed, a large-scale transformation is taking place inmodes of formal as well as informal communication. Formore than three centuries, formal communication in the

scientific community has relied on thescholarlyandprofessional periodical, widely distributed to tens ofthousands of libraries and to tens of millions of individualsubscribers. In 1992 a major international publisherannounced that its journals would gradually be availablefor computer storage in digital form; and in that same yearthe State University of New York at Buffalo beganbuilding a completely electronic, paperless library. Thescholarly article, rather than the journal, is likely tobecome the basic unit of formal communication inscientific disciplines; digital copies of such an article will

be transmitted electronically to subscribers or, more likely,on demand to individuals and organizations who learn of


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its existence through referral databases and new types ofalerting information services. The Internet already offersinstantaneous public access to vast resources ofnoncommercial information stored in computers aroundthe world.

Similarly, the traditional modes of informalcommunicationsvarious types of face-to-face encounterssuch as meetings, conferences, seminars, workshops, andclassroom lecturesare being supplemented and in somecases replaced by e-mail,electronic bulletin boards(atechnique of broadcasting newsworthy textual andmultimedia messages between computer users), andelectronic teleconferencing and distributed problem-solving (a method of linking remote persons in real timeby voice-and-image communication and special software

called groupware). These technologies are forgingvirtual societal networkscommunities

he invention of devices for representing language isinextricably related to issues of literacythat is, to issuesof who can use the script and what it can be used for.Competence with written language, in bothreadingandwriting, is known as literacy. High levels of literacy arerequired for using scripts for a wide range of somewhatspecialized functions. When a large number of individualsin a society are competent in using written language toserve these functions, the whole society may be referred toas a literate society.

Just as scripts have a history, so too does literacy. Thishistory closely reflects the increasing number of ways inwhich written materials have been used and the increasingnumber of readers who have been able to use them. Scripts

were elaborated to serve new purposes; more importantly,new kinds of writing systems permitted them to serve awider range of purposes by a larger number of individuals.

Although the uses of writing reflect a host of religious,political, and social factors and hence are not determinedsimply by orthography, two dimensions of the script areimportant in understanding the growth of literacy:learnability and expressive power. Learnability refers tothe ease with which the script can beacquired, andexpressive power refers to the script's resources for

unambiguously expressing the full range of meaningsavailable in the oral language. These two dimensions are


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inversely related to each other. Simple restricted scripts arereadily learned.Pictographicsigns such as those used inenvironmental writing and logographic scripts with a

limited set of characters are easiest to learn and, indeed,are acquired more or less automatically by children.

Syllabariessuch as the Cree syllabary are reported to belearnable in a day, while the indigenous Liberian Vaisyllabary is learned in a few days. Consonantal scripts andalphabets are difficult to learn and usually require a fewyears of schooling. Full logographic systems such asChinese or mixed systems such as Japanese are difficult toacquire because they require the memorization ofthousands of distinctive characters. Once learned,however, they appear to function as well as alphabets.

But pictographic signs and logographic scripts with a

limited readily learnable set of graphs are restricted toexpressing a limited range of meanings. Syllabaries arehighly ambiguous and hence dependent on knowledge notonly of the script but also on the likely content of themessage. Syllabaries therefore serve a restricted set offunctions, primarily personal correspondence. They are oflimited use in expressing novel meanings that could beread in the same way by all readers of the script.Consonantal and alphabetic writing systems can expressessentially all the lexical and grammatical meanings in thelanguage (but not the intonation) and are thus highlysuitable for the expression of original meanings. Theyconstitute an ideal medium for technical, legal, literary,and scientific texts that must be read in the same way byreaders dispersed in both time and space. Some scholarshave held that the high degree of literacy in the West is aconsequence of the optimality of the alphabet in balancingthe two dimensions of learnability and expressive power.Such generalizations, however, ignore the fact that theoptimal balance may differ from language to language.

A consonantal writing system is almost as complete for

Hebrew as the alphabet is for Greek, but a consonantalwriting system would be hopelessly ambiguous for Greek.Similarly, a syllabary or an alphabet would be quiteuseless for Chinese, a language with a staggering degree ofhomophony. Logographic systems achieve a comparablelevel of explicitness by the addition of new characters, butthe ease of addition is traded off against the ease ofacquisition. Instead of attempting to determine whetherone system is better than another, it is perhaps morereasonable to assume that each script is optimal for thelanguage it represents and for the functions it has evolved

to serve.


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The ease of acquisition of a script is an important factor indetermining whether a script remains the possession of anelite or whether it can be democratizedthat is, turnedinto a possession of ordinary people. Syllabaries arereadily learned, but their residual ambiguity tends to

restrict their uses. Alphabets have been viewed by manyhistorians as decisive in the democratization of writing;alphabetic writing could become a possession of ordinarypeople and yet serve a full range of functions. However,democratization of a script appears to have more to dowith the availability of reading materials and of instructionin reading and the perceived relevance of literacy skills tothe readers. Even in a literate society, most readers learn toread only a narrow range of written materials; specializedmaterials, such as those pertaining to science orgovernment, remain the domain of elites who have

acquired additional education.

The second factor determining the social breadth of the useof writing is the range of functions that a script serves. Thefunctions served are directly related to the orthography.Early forms of writing served an extremely narrow rangeof functions and were wholly unsuitable for others. Whiletokens served for simple record keeping, and earlySumerian writing was useful for a range of administrativepurposes, a relatively complete script is required forwriting histories, edicts, treaties, and scientific and literaryworks that, to be useful, must be read in the same way byall readers. Considerable scholarly controversy surroundsthe question of the role of the invention of more completeor explicit scripts, such as the alphabet, in the evolution ofthese more specialized uses of language. If the alphabetwere decisive, one could look for the basis of many of theparticular features of Western culture in the invention ofan alphabetic orthography.

This question is far from resolved. Historically, the rise of

cities coincided with the development of a script suitablefor serving bureaucratic purposes. Later, the scientific andphilosophical tradition that originated in Classical Greeceand that prevails in the West to this day developed alongwith the alphabet. Many writers, including Eric Havelock,have maintained that the alphabet was a decisive factor inthe cultural development of the West. Canadiancommunications theorist Marshall McLuhan and Americanscholar Walter J. Ong have claimed that the rise of literacyand the decline of orality in the later Middle Ages were

fundamental to the cultural flowering known as the

Renaissance.


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It is perhaps characteristic of alphabet-based conceptionsof literacy to draw a strict distinction between reading andinterpreting. As interpretation came to be seen asinterpolation into or distortion of the text, the attempt wasmade to write texts in such a manner as to reduce the

possibility of variant interpretations. This resulted in theattempt to write texts with univocal meanings, texts thatmean neither more nor less than what they say. To achievethis required the formalization of grammatical structures,the conventionalization of meanings of terms, and theinvention of standard punctuation. Such textualdevelopments were especially important for thespecialized functions of science and philosophy. Thedistinction between meaning and interpretation fosteredthe idea that texts have a literal meaning, that knowledgecan be completely expressed by means of such literal

meanings, and that texts can be autonomous and objective.In the Western tradition, knowledge is treated as if it werean ideal text, as something that is regarded by mostlearners as given rather than created. These assumptionsabout meaning were important to both the literary and thescientific traditions that took form in western Europe in the17th century and that continue to this day.

The particular form of writing, whether logographic,syllabic, or alphabetic, is less important than the existenceof some form that is general enough to serve a full rangeof purposes. Literate societies, whether Chinese orSumerian, have always been esteemed by nonliteratesocieties, which have borrowed heavily from them. Thus,the Romans borrowed Greek literacy, and the Japanese andKoreans borrowed Chinese literacy. Once adopted andused for administrative, scientific, legal, and literarypurposes, literacy altered the society that it was part of in avariety of ways.

Writing allows exactly repeatable statements to be

circulated widely and preserved. It allows readers to scan atext back and forth and to study, compare, and interpret attheir leisure. It allows writers to deliberate over wordchoice and to construct lists, tables, recipes, and indexes. Itfosters an objectified sense of time, a linear conception ofspace. It separates the message from the author and fromthe context in which it was written, therebydecontextualizing, or universalizing the meaning of,

language. It allows the creation of new forms of verbalstructure, such as the syllogism, and of numericalstructures, such as the multiplication table. When writing

becomes a predominant institutional and archival form, ithas contributed to the replacement of myth by history and


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the replacement of magic by skepticism and science.Writing has permitted the development of extensivebureaucracy, accounting, and legal systems organized onthe basis of explicit rules and procedures. Writing hasreplaced face-to-face governance with written law and

depersonalized administrative procedures. And, on theother hand, it has turned writers from scribes into authorsand thereby contributed to the recognition of theimportance of the thoughts of individuals andconsequently to the development of individualism.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Hypnerotomachia PoliphiliTheHypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream), a work attributed to

Dominican monk Francesco de Colonna, was first published in Venice, Italy, in 1499by Aldus Manutius. Its text and its beautiful woodcut illustrations influencedRenaissance art and architecture. This illustration shows the books protagonist,Poliphilus, asleep under a tree.Encarta EncyclopediaThe Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY

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Modern publishing and bookselling in Europe began in the mid-15th century, when peoplebegan printing with movable type. The first professional printers often served as editors of

the works they produced and then sold them directly to readers; they employed agents atuniversities to sell their books there. Anton Koberger, who in 1470 became the first printer to


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establish a business in Nrnberg, had 16 shops, as well as book agents in almost every city inthe Christian world. German printers Peter Schffer and Johann Fust, a partner of JohannesGutenberg, offered their books at prices far below those charged for manuscripts.

The publisher with the greatest influence on the literature and civilization of this period was

Aldus Manutius of Venice, Italy. The high scholarly ideals and unselfish labors of Manutiusand his immediate successors, as well as the imagination, ingenuity, and persistence ofGutenberg and Fust, led to the distribution of Greek poetry and philosophy in Europe in thelate 15th century. In the organization of his printing and publishing business Manutiusovercame many obstacles, such as the necessity of training Italian typesetters to set Greektexts and the delivery of books from Venice to different points of the European continent.

The Game and Playe of the Chesse

The Game and Playe of the ChesseWilliam Caxton, the first printer to produce works in English, worked at early printingpresses in Bruges, Flanders (now Brugge, Belgium), and Cologne, Germany, beforeestablishing a printing press in London, England, in 1476. This illustration is from oneof the first books printed in the English language, The Game and Playe of the Chesse,Claxtons English version of a popular French work. This book was printed in about

1475 during Claxtons stay in Bruges.Encarta EncyclopediaGetty Images/Hulton Getty / Tony Stone Images

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Other outstanding publisher-booksellers of this period included William Caxton, who set up a

printing business in Westminster, England, in 1476 and was the first to introduce booksprinted in the English language. Caxton published many of his own translations of Latin,French, and Dutch works. German printer Johann Froben founded a publishing establishmentin Basel, Switzerland, that became noted for the artistic taste and scrupulous accuracy of thebooks it produced.

A publishing enterprise of minor commercial importance that enormously influenced publicopinion in Europe was instituted in the German town of Wittenberg in Saxony (Sachsen), in1517, at the instigation of German religious reformers Martin Luther and Melanchthon. Thepamphlets from this press, reprinted in other places by printers sympathetic to Luther,secured an extremely wide circulation.


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For a time during the 16th and 17th centuries, the principal bookselling centers were anumber of cities in the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands), but bythe 18th century publishing companies had been established in the major cities of Europe.Some of them lasted into the 21st century.

C.Book Trade in Colonial North America

Printing in the English colonies in North America dates from 1639, when Stephen Dayprinted the Freeman's Oath and anAlmanackat Cambridge, Massachusetts. The famous BayPsalm Book appeared the following year. Day's press turned out one title a year for the next21 years.

The Cambridge Press, as it was later called, was the principal press in the colonies until 1674,

when a press started in Boston, Massachusetts. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had a press by1685 and New York City had one by 1693. The first press to produce a book in Canada wasestablished in Qubec City in 1764. In many of these early presses, printers were bothpublishers and booksellers. Books were their first products, then newspapers, and latermagazines. All three were prepared in the printshop itself, and the front of the establishmentwas used to sell the works that came off the press, along with various household items.

This colonial pattern was repeated everywhere, as printing moved across the continent withthe tide of settlement. Presses were moved westward on wagons and on rafts and small boats.Wherever the printer settled, the shop was set up to print and sell its products. Often theseshops were family affairs, and many women became printers and worked alongside their

husbands, sometimes carrying on alone when they were widowed.

Before the American Revolution (1775-1783), printers and the books, pamphlets, andbroadsides they produced became important in the organization of the growing protest againstBritish rule. Printshops were the focal points of dissent, and the material that was printed bothinspired and consolidated

Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The earliest known journalistic effort was theActa Diurna (Daily Events) of ancient Rome.In the 1st century BC, statesman Julius Caesar ordered these handwritten news bulletinsposted each day in the Forum, a large public space. The first distributed news bulletinsappeared in China around 750 AD. In the mid-15th century, wider and faster dissemination ofnews was made possible by the development of movable metal type, largely credited toGerman printer Johannes Gutenberg. At first, newspapers consisted of one sheet and oftendealt with a single event. Gradually a more complex product evolved.

Germany, The Netherlands, and England produced newsletters and newsbooks of varyingsizes in the 16th and 17th centuries. Journals of opinion became popular in France beginning

late in the 17th century. By the early 18th century, politicians had begun to realize theenormous potential of newspapers in shaping public opinion. Consequently the journalism of


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the period was largely political in nature; journalism was regarded as an adjunct of politics,and each political faction had its own newspaper. During this period the great English

journalists flourished, among them Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, and SirRichard Steele. Also at this time the long struggle for freedom of the press began.

In the English colonies of North America, the first newspaper was Publick Occurrences BothForreign and Domestick, published in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1690; it was suppressed, andits editor, Benjamin Harris, was imprisoned after having produced the first issue. The trial ofpublisher John Peter Zenger in 1735 set a key precedent regarding freedom of the press inAmerica more than 50 years before the First Amendment to the United States Constitutionwould secure it. Zenger was acquitted of charges of criminal libel stemming from articles heprinted that were critical of the colonial authorities in New York, his defense being that hisreports were factual. Provisions for censorship of the press were, however, included in theAlien and Sedition Acts, passed in 1798. After provoking a great deal of opposition, theseacts were allowed to expire. See also Trial of John Peter Zenger.

Journalism in the 19th century became more powerful due to the mass production methodsarising from the Industrial Revolution and to the general literacy promoted by publiceducation. The large numbers of people who had learned how to read demanded readingmatter, and new printing machinery made it possible to produce this inexpensively and ingreat quantities. In the United States, for example, publishers Joseph Pulitzer, Edward WyllisScripps, and William Randolph Hearst established newspapers appealing to the growingpopulations of the big cities. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, news agenciesexploited the invention of the telegraph by using it for the rapid gathering and disseminationof world news via wire services. These services included Reuters, based in England; theAssociated Press and United Press (later United Press International), based in the UnitedStates; and the Canadian Press, in Canada.

At the same time, new popular magazines were made possible by new technologies,improved transportation, low postal rates, and the emergence of national brands of consumergoods that required national media in which to advertise. TheLadies' Home Journal, foundedby Cyrus H. K. Curtis in 1883, soon had a circulation of almost a milliona prodigiousfigure for that day. In 1897 Curtis bought for $1,000 the old Saturday Evening Post, whichrapidly achieved a circulation in the millions. Numerous other magazines appealing to thegeneral reader appeared in the 20th century, includingReader's Digest, Collier's, Life, and

Look.

Over time, some general magazines became unprofitable and ceased publication when theylost advertising to television and to more specialized magazines, such as Sports Illustratedand TV Guide. The newsmagazines Time, Newsweek,Macleans, and U.S. News & World

Reporthave continued to occupy an important place in journalism, as have The Ladies HomeJournal and other so-called women's service magazines.

In the early 20th century two new forms of news media appeared: newsreels and radio. Bythe 1920s, newsreels in the United States alone reached about 40 million people a week inabout 18,000 film theaters, but they were displaced by television in the 1950s. Radio newssurvived more successfully. Stations in the United States and Canada started to report currentevents in the 1920s, borrowing most of their information from local newspapers. They soon

developed their own newsgathering facilities.


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By World War II (1939-1945), radio had amassed a huge audience. American presidentFranklin Delano Roosevelt appealed to his nation through his fireside chats, and radio was

usually the first to bring reports on the war to the public. Popular radio reporters andcommentators were heard by millions of people. Television later attracted much of radiosaudience, but radio has retained a loyal following for music, news, and talk shows.

Television became commercially viable in the 1950s, and by the 1970s nearly everyhousehold that wanted a television had one. (In 2000 there were 835 televisions for every1,000 people in the United States and 710 per 1,000 in Canada.) Network evening newscasts,originally 15 minutes long, were extended to 30 minutes, and local news broadcasts in majorcities expanded to an hour or more. Network newscasters gradually became national figures.Since the introduction in 1951 of the first major documentary series, See It Now, featuringcommentator Edward R. Murrow, television documentaries and video newsmagazines suchas 60 Minutes have become important news sources. The Cable News Network (CNN),operating in a news-only format 24 hours a day, reached 77 million U.S. and Canadianhouseholds by 2000, and its CNN International broadcasts were relayed by satellite to more

than 200 other countries.

Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The history of publishing is characterized by a close interplay of technical innovation andsocial change, each promoting the other. Publishing as it is known today depends on a seriesof three major inventionswriting, paper, and printingand one crucial socialdevelopmentthe spread of literacy. Before the invention of writing, perhaps by theSumerians in the 4th millennium BC, information could be spread only by word of mouth,with all the accompanying limitations of place and time. Writing was originally regarded notas a means of disseminating information but as a way to fix religious formulations or tosecure codes of law, genealogies, and other socially important matters, which had previouslybeen committed to memory. Publishing could begin only after the monopoly of letters, oftenheld by a priestly caste, had been broken, probably in connection with the development of thevalue of writing in commerce. Scripts of various kinds came to be used throughout most ofthe ancient world for proclamations, correspondence, transactions, and records; but bookproduction was confined largely to religious centres of learning, as it would be again later inmedieval Europe. Only in Hellenistic Greece, in Rome, and in China, where there wereessentially nontheocratic societies, does there seem to have been any publishing in the

modern sensei.e., a copying industry supplying a lay readership.

The invention ofprintingtransformed the possibilities of the written word. Printing seems tohave been first invented inChinain the 6th century AD in the form of block printing. Anearlier version may have been developed at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, but, if so,it soon fell into disuse. The Chinese invented movable type in the 11th century AD but did notfully exploit it. Other Chinese inventions, including paper (AD 105), were passed on toEurope by theArabsbut not, it seems, printing. The reason may well lie in Arab insistence onhand copying of the Qurn (Arabic printing of the Qurn does not appear to have been

officially sanctioned until 1825). The invention of printing in Europe is usually attributed toJohannes Gutenbergin Germany about 144050, although block printing had been carried

out from about 1400. Gutenberg's achievement was not a single invention but a whole new


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craft involving movable metal type, ink, paper, and press. In less than 50 years it had beencarried through most of Europe, largely by German printers.

Printing in Europe is inseparable from theRenaissanceandReformation. It grew from theclimate and needs of the first, and it fought in the battles of the second. It has been at the

heart of the expanding intellectual movement of the past 500 years. Although printing wasthought of at first merely as a means of avoiding copying errors, its possibilities for mass-producing written matter soon became evident. In 1498, for instance, 18,000 letters ofindulgence were printed at Barcelona. The market for books was still small, but literacy hadspread beyond the clergy and had reached the emerging middle classes. The church, the state,universities, reformers, and radicals were all quick to use the press. Not surprisingly, everykind of attempt was made to control and regulate such a dangerous new mode ofcommunication.Freedom of the presswas pursued and attacked for the next three centuries;but by the end of the 18th century a large measure of freedom had been won in westernEurope and North America, and a wide range of printed matter was in circulation. Themechanization of printing in the 19th century and its further development in the 20th, which

went hand in hand with increasing literacy and rising standards of education, finally broughtthe printed word to its powerful position as a means of influencing minds and, hence,societies.

The functions peculiar to the publisheri.e., selecting, editing, and designing the material;arranging its production and distribution; and bearing the financial risk or the responsibilityfor the whole operationoften merged in the past with those of the author, the printer, or thebookseller. With increasing specialization, however, publishing became, certainly by the 19thcentury, an increasingly distinct occupation. Most modern Western publishers purchaseprinting services in the open market, solicit manuscripts from authors, and distribute theirwares to purchasers through shops, mail order, or direct sales.

Published matter falls into two main categories, periodical and nonperiodical; i.e.,publications that appear at more or less regular intervals and are members of a series andthose that appear on single occasions (except for reissues of essentially the same material).

Of the nonperiodical publications,booksconstitute by far the largest class; they are also, inone form or another, the oldest of all types of publication and go back to the earliestcivilizations. In giving permanence to man's thoughts and records of his achievements, theyanswer a deep human need. Not every published book is of lasting value; but a nation'sbooks, taken as a whole and winnowed out by the passing years, can be said to be its main

cultural storehouse. Conquerors or usurpers wishing to destroy a people's heritage have oftenburned its books, as did Shih Huang-ti in China in 213 BC, the Spaniards in Mexico in 1520,and the Nazis in the 1930s.

There is no wholly satisfactory definition of a book, as the word covers a variety ofpublications (for example, some publications that appear periodically, such as The World

Almanac and Book of Facts, may be considered books). For statistical purposes, however, theUnited Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization defines a book as a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers.

Periodical publications may be further divided into two main classes,newspapersand

magazines. Though the boundary between them is not sharpthere are magazines devoted tonews, and many newspapers have magazine featurestheir differences of format, tempo, and


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function are sufficiently marked: the newspaper (daily or weekly) usually has large, loosepages, a high degree of immediacy, and miscellaneous contents; whereas the magazine(weekly, monthly, or quarterly) has smaller pages, is usually fastened together and sometimesbound, and is less urgent in tone and more specialized in content. Both sprang up after theinvention of printing, but both have shown a phenomenal rate of growth to meet the demand

for quick information and regular entertainment. Newspapers have long been by far the mostwidely read published matter; the democratizing process of the 19th and 20th centuries wouldbe unthinkable without them. Magazines, close behind newspapers both historically and interms of readership, rapidly branched out from their learned origins into periodicals of

amusement. Today there is probably not a single interest, frivolous or serious, of man,

woman, or child, that is not catered to by a magazine.

There are, of course, many other types of publications besides books, newspapers, andmagazines. In many cases the same principles of publishing apply, and it is only the nature ofthe product and the technicalities of its manufacture that are different. There is, for instance,the important business of map and atlas publishing. Another important field is music

publishing, which produces a great variety of material, from complete symphonic scores tosheet music of the latest popular hit. A further range of activities might be grouped under theterm utility publishing; i.e., the issuing of calendars, diaries, timetables, ready reckoners,guide books, and all manner of informational or directional material, not to mention postcardsand greeting cards. A great deal of occasional publishing, of pamphlets and booklets, is doneby organizations to further particular aims or to spread particular views; e.g., by churches,religious gro

traditionally, a technique for applying under pressure a certain quantity of colouring agentonto a specified surface to form a body of text or an illustration. Certain modern processes forreproducing texts and illustrations, however, are no longer dependent on the mechanicalconcept of pressure or even on the material concept of colouring agent. Because theseprocesses represent an important development that may ultimately replace the otherprocesses, printing should probably now be defined as any of several techniques forreproducing texts and illustrations, in black and in colour, on a durable surface and in adesired number of identical copies. There is no reason why this broad definition should not beretained, for the whole history of printing is a progression away from those things thatoriginally characterized it: lead, ink, and the press.

It is also true that, after five centuries during which printing has maintained a quasi-monopoly of the transmission or storage of information, this role is being seriouslychallenged by new audiovisual and information media. Printing, by the very magnitude of itscontribution to the multiplication of knowledge, has helped engender radio, television, film,microfilm, tape recording, and other rival techniques. Nevertheless, its own field remainsimmense. Printing is used not merely for books and newspapers but also for textiles, plates,wallpaper, packaging, and billboards. It has even been used to manufacture miniatureelectronic circuits.

The invention of printing at the dawn of the age of the great discoveries was in part aresponse and in part a stimulus to the movement that, by transforming the economic, social,

and ideological relations of civilization, would usher in the modern world. The economicworld was marked by the high level of production and exchange attained by the Italian


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republics, as well as by the commercial upsurge of the Hanseatic League and the Flemishcities; social relations were marked by the decline of the landed aristocracy and the rise of theurban mercantile bourgeoisie; and the world of ideas reflected the aspirations of thisbourgeoisie for a political role that would allow it to fulfill its economic ambitions. Ideaswere affected by the religious crisis that would lead to the Protestant Reformation.

The first major role of theprintedbook was to spread literacy and then general knowledgeamong the new economic powers of society. In the beginning it was scorned by the princes. Itis significant that the contents of the first books were often devoted to literary and scientificworks as well as to religious texts, though printing was used to ensure the broaddissemination of religious material, first Catholic and, shortly, Protestant.

There is a material explanation for the fact that printing developed in Europe in the 15thcentury rather than in the Far East, even though the principle on which it is based had beenknown in the Orient long before. European writing was based on an alphabet composed of alimited number of abstract symbols. This simplifies the problems involved in developing

techniques for the use of movable type manufactured in series.Chinesehandwriting, with itsvast number of ideograms requiring some 80,000 symbols, lends itself only poorly to therequirements of atypography. Partly for this reason, the unquestionably advancedOrientalcivilization, of which the richness of their writing was evidence, underwent a slowing downof its evolution in comparison with the formerly more backward Western civilizations.

Printing participated in and gave impetus to the growth and accumulation of knowledge. Ineach succeeding era there were more people who were able to assimilate the knowledgehanded to them and to augment it with their own contribution. From Diderot's encyclopaediato the present profusion of publications printed throughout the world, there has been aconstant acceleration of change, a process highlighted by the Industrial Revolution at thebeginning of the 19th century and the scientific and technical revolution of the 20th.

At the same time, printing has facilitated the spread of ideas that have helped to shapealterations in social relations made possible by industrial development and economictransformations. By means of books, pamphlets, and the press, information of all kinds hasreached all levels of society in most countries.

In view of the contemporary competition over some of its traditional functions, it has beensuggested by some observers that printing is destined to disappear. On the other hand, thispoint of view has been condemned as unrealistic by those who argue that information in

printed form offers particular advantages different from those of other audio or visual media.Radio scripts and television pictures report facts immediately but only fleetingly, whileprinted texts and documents, though they require a longer time to be produced, arepermanently available and so permit reflection. Though films, microfilms, punch cards,punch tapes, tape recordings, holograms, and other devices preserve a large volume ofinformation in small space, the information on them is available to human senses onlythrough apparatus such as enlargers, readers, and amplifiers. Print, on the other hand, isdirectly accessible, a fact that may explain why the most common accessory to electroniccalculators is a mechanism to print out the results of their operations in plain language. Farfrom being fated to disappear, printing seems more likely to experience an evolution markedby its increasingly close association with these various other means by which information is

placed at the disposal of humankind.


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History of printing

Origins in China

By the end of the 2nd century AD, the Chinese apparently had discovered printing; certainlythey then had at their disposal the three elements necessary for printing: (1)paper, thetechniques for the manufacture of which they had known for several decades; (2)ink, whosebasic formula they had known for 25 centuries; and (3) surfaces bearing texts carved in relief.Some of the texts were classics of Buddhist thought inscribed on marble pillars, to whichpilgrims applied sheets of damp paper, daubing the surface with ink so that the parts thatstood out in relief showed up; some were religioussealsused to transfer pictures and texts ofprayers to paper. It was probably this use of seals that led in the 4th or 5th century to thedevelopment of ink of a good consistency for printing.

A substitute for these two kinds of surfaces, the marble pillars and the seals, that was morepractical with regard both to manageability and to size, appeared perhaps by the 6th centuryin the woodblock. First, the text was written in ink on a sheet of fine paper; then the writtenside of the sheet was applied to the smooth surface of a block of wood, coated with a ricepaste that retained the ink of the text; third, an engraver cut away the uninked areas so thatthe text stood out in relief and in reverse.

To make a print, the wood block was inked with a paintbrush, a sheet of paper spread on it,and the back of the sheet rubbed with a brush. Only one side of the sheet could be printed.

The oldest known printed works were made by this technique: in Japan about 764770,Buddhist incantations ordered by Empress Shtoku; in China in 868, the first known book,theDiamond Stra; and, beginning in 932, a collection of Chinese classics in 130 volumes, atthe initiative of Fong Tao, a Chinese minister.

Invention of movable type (11th century)

About 104148 a Chinese alchemist named Pi Sheng appears to have conceived of movabletype made of an amalgam of clay and glue hardened by baking. He composed texts by

placing the types side by side on an iron plate coated with a mixture of resin, wax, and paperash. Gently heating this plate and then letting the plate cool solidified the type. Once theimpression had been made, the type could be detached by reheating the plate. It would thusappear that Pi Sheng had found an overall solution to the many problems of typography: themanufacture, the assembling, and the recovery of indefinitely reusable type.

In about 1313 a magistrate namedWang Chenseems to have had a craftsman carve morethan 60,000 characters on movable wooden blocks so that a treatise on the history oftechnology could be published. To him is also attributed the invention of horizontalcompartmented cases that revolved about a vertical axis to permit easier handling of the type.But Wang Chen's innovation, like that of Pi Sheng, was not followed up in China.


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InKorea, on the contrary, typography, which had appeared by the first half of the 13thcentury, was extensively developed under the stimulus of King Htai Tjong, who, in 1403,ordered the first set of 100,000 pieces of type to be cast in bronze. Nine other fonts followedfrom then to 1516; two of them were made in 1420 and 1434, before Europe in its turndiscovered typography.

Transmission of paper to Europe (12th century)

Paper, the production of which was known only to the Chinese, followed the caravan routesof Central Asia to the markets at Samarkand, whence it was distributed as a commodityacross the entire Arab world.

The transmission of the techniques of papermaking appears to have followed the same route;Chinese taken prisoner at the Battle of Talas, near Samarkand, in 751 gave the secret to the

Arabs. Paper mills proliferated from the end of the 8th century to the 13th century, fromBaghdad and then on to Spain, then under Arab domination. Paper first penetrated Europe asa commodity from the 12th century onward through Italian ports that had active commercialrelations with the Arab world and also, doubtless, by the overland route from Spain to France.Papermaking techniques apparently were rediscovered by Europeans through an examinationof the material from which the imported commodity was made; possibly the secret wasbrought back in the mid-13th century by returning crusaders or merchants in the Easterntrade. Papermaking centres grew up in Italy after 1275 and in France and Germany in thecourse of the 14th century.

But knowledge of the typographic process does not seem to have succeeded, as papermakingtechniques had, in reaching Europe from China. It would seem that typography wasassimilated by theUighurswho lived on the borders of Mongolia and Turkistan, since a set ofUighur typefaces, carved on wooden cubes, has been found that date from the early 14thcentury. It would be surprising if the Uighurs, a nomadic people usually considered to havebeen the educators of other Turco-Mongolian peoples, had not spread the knowledge oftypography as far as Egypt. There it may have encountered an obstacle to its progress towardEurope, namely, that, even though the Islmic religion had accepted paper in order to record

the word of Allah, it may have refused to permit the word of Allah to be reproduced byartificial means.

The invention of printing

Thus, the essential elements of the printing process collected slowly in western Europe,where a favourable cultural and economic climate had formed.

Xylography

Xylography, the art of printing from wood carving, the existence and importance of which inChina was never suspected by Marco Polo, appeared in Europe no earlier than the last quarter


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of the 14th century, spontaneously and presumably as a result of the use of paper. It had beenobserved that paper was better suited than rough-surfaced parchment for making theimpressions from wood reliefs that manuscript copyists used to reproduce the outline ofornamental initial capital letters.

The process was extended to the making of religious pictures. These at first appeared aloneand later were accompanied by a brief text. Asengraversbecame more skillful, the textfinally became more important than the illustration, and in the first half of the 15th centurysmall, genuine books of several pages, religious works or compendiums of Latin grammar byAelius Donatus and called donats, were published by a method identical to that of theChinese. Given the Western alphabet, it would seem reasonable that the next step taken mighthave been to carve blocks of writing that, instead of texts, would simply contain a largenumber of letters of the alphabet; such blocks could then be cut up into type, usable andreusable.

It is possible that experiments were in fact made along these lines, perhaps in 1423 or 1437

by aDutchmanfrom Haarlem, Laurens Janszoon, known asCoster. The encouraging resultsobtained with large type demonstrated the validity of the idea of typographic composition.

But the results were disappointing with regard to type destined for use for text of the usualsize. The letters of the roman alphabet were smaller than Chinese ideograms, and cuttingthem from wood was a delicate operation. Moreover, type made in this way was fragile, andit wore out at least as quickly as blocks carved with a whole text. Further, since the letterswere individually carved, no two copies of the same letter were identical any more than whenthe text was engraved directly on a wood block. The process, thus, represented no advance inease of production, durability, or quality.

Metallographic printing (1430?)

Metallographic impression is more likely to turn out to be the direct ancestor of typography,although the record is far from clear. Several medieval craft guilds, notably the metalfounders, the die-cutters, and goldsmiths and silversmiths, were familiar with the techniqueof using dies. Masters of this technique apparently realized that it could be applied to aprocess that would enable texts to be set in relief more quickly than by carving wood blocks,probably in three steps: (1) a set ofdies, each bearing a letter of the alphabet, was engraved in

brass or bronze; (2) using these dies, the text was struck letter by letter to form a mold on thesurface of a matrix of clay or of a soft metal such aslead;(3) lead was then poured over thesurface to form a small plate that, once hardened, would bear the text in relief.

The theoretical advantages of this process were that only one engraving per letter, that of thedie, was required to make the letter as often as desired, and any two examples of the sameletter would be identical, since they came from a single die; sinking thematrixand castingthe lead were rapid operations; the lead had better durability than wood; and by castingseveral plates from the same matrix the number of copies printed could be rapidly increased.

Metallographic printing appears to have been practiced in Holland around 1430 and next in

the Rhineland. Gutenberg used it in Strassburg (now Strasbourg, France) between 1434 and1439.


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But the experiments were not followed up because of problems created by the cast plates. Itwas difficult to strike each letter die with the same force and to keep a regular alignment, and,worse, each strike tended to deform the adjacent letter. It may well be that the major value ofmetallographic printing was that it associated the idea of the die, the matrix, and cast lead.

The invention of typographyGutenberg (1450?)

This association of die, matrix, and lead in the production of durable typefaces in largenumbers and with each letter strictly identical, was one of the two necessary elements in theinvention of typographic printing in Europe. The second necessary element was the conceptof theprinting pressitself, an idea that had never been conceived in the Far East.

Johannes Gutenbergis generally credited with the simultaneous discovery of both theseelements, though there is some uncertainty about it, and disputes arose early to cloud the

honour.

It is true that his signature does not appear on any printed work. If masterpieces such as theForty-two-Line Bible of 1455 rather than the imperfect products of a nascent typographysuch as the donatsof 1445 or the Astronomic Calendar of 144748 are attributed to him,this is because of deduction and historical and technical cross-checking. The basicassumption is that, since Gutenberg was by profession a silversmith, he would have retainedthe role of designer in an association set up at Mainz, Germany, with the businessmanJohannFustand Fust's future son-in-law the calligrapherPeter Schffer. The assumption is basedsolely on the interpretation of obscure aspects of a lawsuit that Gutenberg lost against hisassociates in 1455.

Apart from chronicles, all published after his death, that attributed the invention of printing tohim, probably the most convincing argument in favour of Gutenberg comes from his chiefdetractor, Johann Schffer, the son of Peter Schffer and grandson of Johann Fust. ThoughSchffer claimed from 1509 on that the invention was solely his father's and grandfather's,the fact is that in 1505 he had written in a preface to an edition of Livy that the admirable art

of typography was invented by the ingenious Johan Gutenberg at Mainz in 1450. It isassumed that he had inherited this certainty from his father, and it is hard to see how a newelement could have persuaded him to the contrary after 1505, since Johann Fust died in 1466and Peter Schffer in 1502.

The first pieces of type appear to have been made in the following steps: a letter die wascarved in a soft metal such as brass or bronze; lead was poured around the die to form amatrix and a mold into which an alloy, which was to form thetypeitself, was poured.

Spectroscopic analyses of early type pieces reveal that the alloy used was a mix of lead,tin,andantimonythe same components used today: tin, because lead alone would haveoxidized rapidly and in casting would have deteriorated the lead mold matrices; antimony,because lead and tin alone would have lacked durability.

It was probably Peter Schffer who, around 1475, thought of replacing the soft-metal dies

with steel dies, in order to produce copper letter matrices that would be reliably identical.


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Until the middle of the 19th century, type generally continued to be made by craftsmen in thisway.

The typographer's work was from the beginning characterized by four operations: (1) takingthe type pieces letter by letter from a typecase; (2) arranging them side by side in a

composing stick, a strip of wood with corners, held in the hand; (3)justifyingthe line; thatis to say, spacing the letters in each line out to a uniform length by using little blank pieces oflead between words; and (4), after printing, distributing the type, letter by letter, back in thecompartments of the typecase.

The Gutenberg press

Documents of the period, including those relating to a 1439 lawsuit in connection withGutenberg's activities at Strassburg, leave scarcely any doubt that the press has been used

since the beginning of printing.

Perhaps the printing press was first just a simple adaptation of the binding press, with a fixed,level lower surface (the bed) and a movable, level upper surface (the platen), movedvertically by means of a small bar on a worm screw. The composed type, after being lockedby ligatures or screwed tight into a right metal frame (the form), was inked, covered with asheet of paper to be printed, and then the whole pressed in the vise formed by the twosurfaces.

This process was superior to the brushing technique used in wood-block printing in Europeand China because it was possible to obtain a sharp impression and to print both sides of asheet. Nevertheless, there were deficiencies: it was difficult to pass the leather pad used forinking between the platen and the form; and, since several turns of the screw were necessaryto exert the required pressure, the bar had to be removed and replaced several times to raisethe platen sufficiently to insert the sheet of paper.

It is generally thought that the printing press acquired its principal functional characteristicsvery early, probably before 1470. The first of these may have been the mobile bed, either onrunners or on a sliding mechanism, that permitted the form to be withdrawn and inked aftereach sheet was printed.

Next, the single thread of the worm screw was replaced with three or four parallel threadswith a sharply inclined pitch so that the platen could be raised by a slight movement of thebar. This resulted in a decrease in the pressure exerted by the platen, which was corrected bybreaking up the printing operation so that the form was pushed under the press by themovable bed so that first one half and then the other half of the form was utilized. This wasthe principle of printing in two turns, which would remain in use for three centuries.

Improvements after Gutenberg

Several of the many improvements in the screw printing press over the next 350 years wereof significance. About 1550 the wooden screw was replaced by iron. Twenty years later,


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innovators added a double-hinged chase consisting of a frisket, a piece of parchment cut outto expose only the actual text itself and so to prevent ink spotting the nonprinted areas of thepaper, and a tympan, a layer of a soft, thick fabric to improve the regularity of the pressuredespite irregularities in the height of the type.

About 1620Willem Janszoon Blaeuin Amsterdam added a counterweight to the pressure barin order to make the platen rise automatically; this was the so-calledDutch press, a copy ofwhich was to be the first press introduced into North America, by Stephen Daye atCambridge, Massachusetts in 1639.

About 1790 an English scientist and inventor,William Nicholson, devised a method of inkingusing a cylinder covered with leather (later with a composition of gelatin, glue, andmolasses), the first introduction of rotary movement into the printing process.

The metal press (1795)

The first all-metal press was constructed in England in about 1795. Some years later amechanic in the United States built a metal press in which the action of the screw wasreplaced by that of a series of metal joints. This was the Columbian, which was followed

by the Washington of Samuel Rust, the apogee of the screw press inherited fromGutenberg; its printing capacity was about 250 copies an hour.

Stereotypyand stereography (late 18th century)

An increasing demand for printed matter stimulated the search for greater speed and volume.The concepts of stereotypy and stereography were explored. Stereotypy, used with notablesuccess around 1790 in Paris, consisted in making an impression on text blocks of type inclay or soft metal in order to make lead molds of the whole. The stereotyped plates thusobtained made it economically possible to print the same text on several presses at the sametime. The plates left the pieces of type in the form immediately available for further use andthus increased the rate at which they could be recycled.

A variation of stereotypy was the application, after 1848, of galvanoplastic metallization, in

which process plates of thin metal lined with a base of lead alloy were made by electrolyticdeposition of a coat of copper on a wax mold of the typeform.

Stereography aimed at bypassing the composition of the type in making the mold. Attemptsto perfect the old metallographic method of preparing a clay matrix by stamping with diesbrought no better results. In 1797 a variation was tried in which sets of copper matrices ofeach letter were made in large numbers. The matrices were then assembled according to thewording of the text, so that they covered the whole surface of the bottom of a mold in whichthe lead plate was then cast. Once the cast had been made, the matrices were available forfurther use.


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Koenig's mechanical press (early 19th century)

The prospect of usingsteam powerin printing prompted research into means by which thedifferent operations of the printing process could be joined together in a single cycle.

Friedrich Koenig's mechanical platen press, 1811.In 1803, in Germany,Friedrich Koenigenvisaged a press in which the raising and lowering of the

platen, the to-and-fro movement of the bed, and the inking of the form by a series of rollers were

controlled by a system of gear wheels. Early trials in London in 1811 were unsuccessful.

Presses with a mechanized platen produced satisfactory results after the perfection, in theUnited States, of the Liberty (1857), in which the action of a pedal caused the platen to be

held against the bed by the arms of a clamp.

Though Nicholson very early took out patents for a printing process using acylinderto whichthe composed type pieces were attached, he was never able to develop the necessarytechnology involved.

The cylinder was in fact the most logical geometric form to use in a cyclical process. It wasalso the one capable of providing the greatest output. Given an equal amount of energy, thepressure exerted by a platen had to be spread over the whole of the surface to be printed,whereas the pressure exerted by a cylinder could be concentrated on the strip of surfaceactually in contact with the cylinder at any one instant.

A limited demonstration of the efficiency of the cylinder had been made as early as 1784 on a

French press for books for the blind.


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The first stop-cylinder printing machine, 1811, built by Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer.In 1811 Koenig and an associate, Andreas Bauer, in another approach to the rotary principle,

designed a cylinder as a platen bearing the sheet of paper and pressing it against the typeform

placed on a flatbed that moved to and fro. The rotation of the cylinder was linked to the forward

movement of the bed but was disengaged when the bed moved back to go under the inking rollers.

In 1814 the first stop-cylinder press of this kind to be driven by a steam engine was put intoservice at theTimesof London. It had two cylinders, which revolved one after the otheraccording to the to-and-fro motion of the bed so as to double the number of copies printed; aspeed of 1,100 sheets per hour was achieved.

In 1818 Koenig and Bauer designed a double press in which a sheet of paper printed on oneside under one of the cylinders passed to the other cylinder, to be printed on the other side.This was called a perfecting machine. In 1824 William Church added grippers to the cylinder

to pick up, hold, and then automatically release the sheet of paper.

The to-and-fro movement of the bed that was retained in these early cylinder pressesconstituted an element of discontinuity; to make the cycle completely continuous, not onlywould the platen have to be cylindrical but the typeform also. In 1844Richard Hoein theUnited States patented his type revolving press, the first rotary to be based on this principle. Itconsisted of a cylinder of large diameter, bearing columns of type bracketed together on itsouter surface; pressure was provided by several small cylinders, each of which was fed sheetsof paper by hand. This system gave speeds of more than 8,000 copies per hour; its onlydrawback was its fragility; faulty locking up of the forms caused the type to fall out of thecylinder.

This defect was remedied by applying stereotypy to the production; that is, forming curvedplates by making an impression of the typeform on strong pasteboard, the flong, or mat,which was fixed against the inside surface of a rounded mold, which was injected with leadalloy. In France, from 1849 onward, experiments were conducted with this process; it wasregularly used in London by the Times from 1856 onward and after 1858 was in general use.

But feeding the press with paper still remained outside the mechanized cycle. Mechanizationof this step was accomplished by the use of a continuous roll of paper supplied on reelsinstead of sheets. Techniques for producing paper in a continuous roll had been known sincethe beginning of the century. The first roll-fed rotary press was made by William Bullock of

the United States in 1865. It included a device for cutting the paper after printing andproduced 12,000 completenewspapersper hour. Automatic folding devices, the first ofwhich were designed by Bullock and Hoe, were incorporated into rotaries after 1870.

Later, numerous other types of curved stereotype plates were used on rotary presses. Theseincluded electrotype plates that are curved before being backed; rubber or plastic plates madeby molding or by a photomechanical process; and metal wraparound plates made byphotoengraving or electronic engraving.


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Attempts to mechanize composition (mid-19th century)

Unlike the mechanization of the printing process, mechanization of the composition processwas difficult to achieve in the 19th century. The invention of a compression mold in 1806opened prospects for the mechanization of the production of type. In 1822 William Church of

Boston patented atypesetting machineconsisting of a keyboard on which each key released apiece of type of the corresponding letter stored in channels in a magazine. The pieces of typethus obtained had to be assembled by hand and the line justified. Church had avoided theproblem of distribution and shown an intuition as to its solution by annexing to the magazinea device for constantly casting new pieces oftype.

Numerous machines based on the same principle and with the further addition of amechanism that placed the type pieces selected the right way round appeared in the course ofthe next 50 years. On one of these the more than 10,000 pages of the ninth edition of

Encyclopdia Britannica were composed. These machines produced type at the rate of 5,000to 12,000 pieces per hour, as opposed to about 1,500 by hand composition. But in all of them

the type was simply delivered in a continuous row, which had to be divided into lines andjustified.

These machines were completed by the introduction of a mechanical distributor, which was asort of reverse compositor: pieces of type from lines that had been used passed before theoperator, who pressed the corresponding key on his keyboard for the appropriate channel inthe magazine to be opened up. The speed of mechanized distribution did not exceed 5,000pieces of type per hour and was, thus, no faster than hand distribution.

Mechanization of letterpress composition faced two difficulties: first, justification, which

required intelligent estimation of the size of spaces to be provided between words; and,second, the time taken during which the pieces of type were used for printing, which delaykept composition and distribution from being integrated into one cycle.

Typecasting compositors (1880s)

Finally, in the 1880s in the United States, German-bornOttmar Mergenthalerinvented theLinotype, a typecasting compositor that cast a solid one-piece line, orslug, from movablematrices of each letter. Each of the matrices was individually notched so that it could return

only to its proper slot in the magazine after use. Justification was carried out by insertingwedged spacebands between groups of matrices immediately after making up the words of agiven line. Here the matrices rather than type pieces went through the four basic operations ofletterpress composition; cast lead was used for printing. The Linotype can produce theequivalent of 5,000 to 7,000 pieces of type per hour.

In 1885, also in the United States,Tolbert Lanstoninvented theMonotype, which castsindividual pieces of type for a line and justifies each line by a system of counting in units thewidth of the spaces taken up by the pieces of type. The matrices are indefinitely reusable, andthe pieces of type, which are used only for the impressions, are returned to the caster. Thecontemporary Monotype typecaster is controlled by a ribbon of paper perforated on a

separate keyboard. It can produce 10,000 to 12,000 pieces of type per hour.


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In 1911 the American Washington I. Ludlow perfected a typecasting machine for the largedisplay type that bears his name. The matrices are assembled by hand in a composing stick,which is then inserted above the opening of a mold; the matrices are also distributed by hand.

19th-century innovations

In the course of the 19th century several important innovations laid the foundation for anumber of printing techniques that were not directly related to Gutenberg's invention.

Reproduction ofillustrations

The first process for reproducing illustrations was xylography, using woodcuts that printed inrelief and that therefore could be combined with letterpress, the picture blocks and the piecesof type for texts being locked into the same form. As early as the second half of the 15thcentury, xylography faced competition from engraving on metal that printed byintaglio;themetal plate (copper, sometimes brass, zinc, and even steel after 1806), engraved with a tool(burin) or etched with acid, was inked and carefully wiped so that ink remained only in theincisions and was transferred to paper under pressure in a cylinder press derived from therolling mill. Since the intaglio method of printing was not compatible with woodcut printing,sheets of text and of illustrations for the same book had to be printed separately.

Presses for printing curved intaglio-engraved plates were perfected during the 19th century

with mechanized inking with the use of rollers and wiping with the use of revolving clothbands or rotating disks covered with calico. Their printing capacity was limited.

As early as the end of the 18th century, however, intaglio printing had inspired a method forcontinuous printing of textiles by passing them under an engraved and inked cylinder fromwhich excess ink had been removed by a scraper. In France in 1860 this technique wasapplied to printing paper for school-book covers. A solid copper cylinder was engraved notwith continuous lines but with a multiplicity of tiny cavities in such a way that they retainedthe ink uniformly despite gravity, centrifugal force, and the action of the scraper. The processwas suitable only for simple graphics.

Lithography:Senefelder (1796)

A third printing process that had undergone significant development was lithography, neitherrelief nor intaglio printing but based on the principle that water and grease will not mix. In1796Aloys Senefelderof Prague investigated the properties of a stone with a calciumcarbonate base and a fine, homogeneous, porous surface. A design drawn on its surface withgreasy ink, wetted with water and then brushed with ordinary ink, retained the ink only on thedesign. This could consequently be reproduced on a sheet of paper pressed against the stone.Senefelder also established that a design drawn on such a stone and printed on paper could be

transferred to another stone in as many identical copies as desired, side by side, which made


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it possible to obtain several copies at a time by printing a single large sheet. He furtherestablished that a metal such as zinc had the same properties.

Senefelder envisaged a press in which the stone, secured to an undercarriage, was inked,covered with the sheet of paper with a sheet of pasteboard above it, and submitted to

pressure. By 1850 the first mechanized lithographic press with a cylinder, flannel-coveredrollers for wetting, and rollers for inking was perfected.

The fact that it was possible to replace the stone by a zinc plate that could be curved made itpossible to build rotary presses (the first in 1868) in which the paper passed between theplate-bearing cylinder and the impression cylinder.

Photosensitivity: Niepce (1820s)

While searching for a means of automatically inscribing an image on a lithographic stone,then on a tin plate, in order toengraveit in intaglio,Joseph-Nicephore Niepcein the 1820sestablished that certain chemical compounds are sensitive to light. This marked the origins ofphotogravureand led to both the invention of photography (between 1829 and 1838) and theuse of photographic processes for the printed reproduction of photographs.

In 1852William Henry Fox Talbot, a British scientist and inventor, placed a piece of blackcloth (tulle) between the object he wanted to reproduce (the leaf of a tree) and thephotosensitive coating spread on a steel plate and obtained a picture that retained the finemesh of the tulle. Consequently, etching with acid resulted not in an extensive and uniformerosion of an area but in tiny juxtaposed pits all over the photosensitive coating and varyingin depth according to the degree of exposure. Talbot simultaneously had invented the screenand also had opened the way for a new development in intaglio printing: rotogravure.

The screen was perfected in the 1880s by substituting for the cloth two sheets of glass withuniform parallel lines that crossed perpendicularly. The screen made possible letterpress andlithographic reproduction of the full range of tones of a photographic document by using theeffect of the diffusion of light through the mesh of its grid and converting the differentintensity of tones into the different thicknesses of the printing surface.

Gravureandrotogravure(1890s)

The circular mechanization of intaglio engraving, meanwhile, came up against two associateddifficulties: the need to engrave an infinite number of tiny cells and the need to engrave themdirectly onto a cylinder. There were problems, because the rubbing of the squeegee to removeexcess ink excluded the use of a curved plate that would not have provided a uniform surfacein the area in which it was attached, and it was not possible to get photosensitive solutions toadhere to a cylinder.

In 186264 J.W. Swanof Britain inventedcarbon tissue, paper coated with gelatin that can be

rendered photosensitive and exposed to light before being applied to a metal surface of anyshape.


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In 1878 a Czech,Karl Kli(also spelled Klietsch), thought of copying a grid screen directlyonto carbon tissue, which could be used to transfer the cells necessary for intaglio printing toa cylinder at the same time as the image to be reproduced. In 1895 Kli, with Englishcolleagues, founded theRembrandtIntaglio Printing Company, which publishedreproductions of pictures, on paper, by rotogravure. They kept their process a secret.

In a parallel way, patents for a slightly different process, in which the image to be reproducedwas screened before making the impression on the carbon tissue, were taken out in Germanyand the United States. But a workman from the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Companyemigrated to the United States in 1903 and there revealed Kli's secret, and rotogravure,

using his method, became widespread.

The 20th century

Beginning with the invention of the offset technique, the 20th century saw the steadydevelopment of innovations in the direction of mass production, speed, and economy.

Discovery ofoffset(early 20th century)

At the same time, lithography was undergoing a new evolution. After the first mechanicalpresses had been perfected, this process had developed along two lines: (1) printing on thinsheets of metal (for example, tinplate for packaging canned foods) using a transfer process

(1878) in which the impression cylinder carrying the metal sheet to be printed did not comein contact with the stone but did with an intermediary cylinder covered with rubber, theblanket, which transferred the image from the stone to the metal; and (2) printing on paper,which was done only comparatively infrequently in the last years of the 19th century, oncylinder or rotary presses.

In 1904 at Nutley, New Jersey, an American printer,Ira W. Rubel, discovered that an imageaccidentally transferred from the plate cylinder of his rotary to the rubber blanket of theimpression cylinder during a paper-feed stoppage could itself be used for printing and in factproduced a superior impression. Rubel and an associate constructed a three-cylinder press,the first offset press, the term since used to describe this increasingly popular printing device.

Dry offset(1920)

A few years later a problem arose in connection with printing the background of checks witha water-soluble ink to prevent forgeries. It was proposed that the lithographic plate of theplate cylinder be replaced with a stereotype plate or with a letterpress wraparound plate. Thisprocess, which combines the relief of letterpress, which does not require wetting, with thetransfer of offset, is known as dry offset, or letterset. Its area of application is not limited tocheck backgrounds but is used in all areas of conventional printing.


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Since 1950 another process has been developed, particularly in the United States. It combinesrotogravure with the transfer of offset for printing wallpapers, plastic floor coverings, paperplates, and other products.