Printing: From the Far East to the Printing Press

Jul 27, 20123 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Jul 27, 2012

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Illustrations have been hand drawn for many centuries. But as the demand for the distribution of illustration and text increased, people developed printing techniques, and over time this would turn into what we now know as the printing press, the mass production of illustration and text.

Let us take a look at the Far East first, in particular China and Japan where print has been traditionally used as early as the 7th century. The Chinese have been using woodblock printing since the Tang Dynasty (7th Century). This method of printing quickly spread to other East Asian countries, including Japan. The earliest complete survival of a dated printed book is the Diamond Sutra (Buddhist text). This of course ties into one of the most famous Chinese inventions, paper!

"It was the Chinese who really discovered the means of communication that was to dominate until our age."

A. Hyatt Mayor

Wood block printing was used in the production of books such as Buddhist sutras but still it wasn't anything to the scale of modern print. Later this technique is to develop into the invention that is moveable print. With woodblock printing seen in Japan they also used this technique to print sutras. And by 11th century, sometime after China had the moveable print, the Japanese were producing their own print and was restricted only to Buddhist sutras because of cost. By around 1590 the Japanese also had moveable print, and print was becoming more and more popular with artists. In the next couple of centuries print became multi-purpose there and colour was being introduced.

Woodblock prints that have been influenced in the Far East spread and dominated until about halfway through the 19th century where lithography started to take over in the Western world. But the more modern printing press as we knew it started around the 14th century by Johannes Gutenberg with wooden presses.

This was of course invented because of a greater demand for newspapers. It was clear by the end of the 18th century that such presses won't be able to meet demands. So by 1803, Earl Stanhope introduced the iron framed hand press, which later became a mechanised process in factories, leading to the printing press as we know it today with metal type. These metal types came with a standardisation unit of measurement which graphic designers are still familiar with today, the em.