Yet copying books by hand was still labour-consuming. Phaistos Discįollowing the invention of paper in the Han Dynasty, writing materials became more portable and economical than the bones, shells, bamboo slips, metal or stone tablets, silk, etc. As the portable face of ruling authority, coins were a compact form of standardized knowledge issued in large editions, an early mass medium that stabilized trade and civilization throughout the Mediterranean world of antiquity. Unlike the first typefaces used to print books in the 13th century, coin types were neither combined or printed with ink on paper, but "published" in metal-a more durable medium-and survived in substantial numbers. The designs of the artists who made the first coin punches were stylized with a degree of skill that could not be mistaken for common handiwork-salient and very specific types designed to be reproduced ad infinitum. Cylinder seals were a related form of early typography capable of printing small page designs in relief ( cameo) on wax or clay-a miniature forerunner of rotogravure printing used by wealthy individuals to seal and certify documents. Cylinder seals were also used to "sign" documents and mark objects as the owner's property.īy 650 BC the ancient Greeks were using larger diameter punches to imprint small page images onto coins and tokens. These metal punch types can be seen as precursors of the letter punches adapted in later millennia to printing with movable metal type. Bricks for buildings and bars or ingots of precious metal were imprinted with a distinctive stamped design the act of stamping the ingots certified them as currency by the power of the authority symbolized by the type image. The technique of imprinting multiple copies of symbols or glyphs with a master type punch made of hard metal first developed around 3000 BC in ancient Sumer. Movable type traces its origins to the punches used to make coins: the reverse face of a Tetradrachm Greek coin from Athens, 5th century BC, featuring numbers and the owl symbol of Athena. Today, practically all movable type printing ultimately derives from Gutenberg's movable type printing, which is often regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium. The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible (1455) established the superiority of movable type, and printing presses rapidly spread across Europe, leading up to the Renaissance, and later all around the world. The metal type pieces were more durable and the lettering was more uniform, leading to typography and fonts. Ĭompared to woodblock printing, movable type pagesetting was quicker and more durable for alphabetic scripts. Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin and antimony-the same components still used today. Neither movable type system was widely used, probably because of the enormous amount of labour involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets, or in the case of Korea, metal tablets.Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced what is generally regarded as an independent invention of movable type in Europe (see printing press), along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mould. This led to the printing of the Jikji in 1377-today the world's oldest extant movable metal print book. Metal movable type was most likely first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty (around 1230). The first known movable type system was invented in China by Bi Sheng (毕昇) out of wood in 1040. Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual letters or punctuation).
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