Movable type

Commentary

Movable type

‘Europe reckons the date of the invention of printing from the time when typography was invented, and considers block printing as merely an important step in preparation.  The Far East reckons the invention of printing from the time when block printing began, and considers movable type as rather an unimportant later addition. This distinction lies in the difference between ideograph and alphabet. The writing of the languages of Europe is based on an alphabet: for them the invention of typography is the invention of printing. The writing of the languages of the Far East is based on some forty thousand separate symbols: for them, until the large wholesale printing of recent years, movable type have seldom been practical or economical.  For any land, the invention of printing is the invention of that form of printing which transforms the education and culture of the nation.  China invented movable type, Korea and Japan made great use of them …. But the printing on which the renaissance of the Sung era was based, the printing which both in quality and quantity has always been pre-eminent in the Far East, is the printing from wooden blocks. The invention of xylography, or block printing, it the truly significant form of the invention for China.’*
 
* Thomas Francis Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward, rev. edn. By L. Carrington Goodrich (New York, 1955), p. 31.

Images. As these images illustrate, printing with movable type in Asia did, however, enjoy two significant advantages.  The first is that essentially the same characters were used in Korea and Japan as well as China: these photographs are of a Korean printing matrix (at the University of California, Riverside) rather than a Chinese one. The second is that Chinese characters are all designed to fit neatly within a square (Image 1).  As a consequence, a page of text can be easily assembled (Image 2), with the insertion of spacers to separate the columns (Image 3). In this case, the result is a book, similar to a European codex, with square sheets (Image 4) printed on both sides (Image 5).

Further resources. Today, the tradition of wooden movable-type printing in China is listed by UNESCO amongst intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. The video below provides an introduction to this art.

Credit: Howard Hotson (May 2019)