Printing was first practised not by Yohannes Gutenberg or by any other European intellect, but in the Orient.
Printing from Woodblocks existed in China by the third century. Ad and movable types were in use there by the 11th century.
It is sometimes been suggested that Gutenberg and other European prototypes golfers learn their skills directly or indirectly from Oriental models.
However, the inspiration for the earliest European printers and indeed the precise technology they employ to make type and print remain uncertain.
Woodcuts were printed in Europe before the invention of a method of making movable type, which came about between around 1440 and 1450.
Within a decade or two, printers had developed a practical means of casting individual pieces of metal type,
using a steel punch cut by a skilled artisan, a copper matrix and a metal mould.
Although pieces of type or sorts cast by this method were theoretically identical to one another,
variations in the casting and printing processes mean that characters printed from two different sorts of the same letter whenever precisely the same.
Although they were usually very similar. The earliest types were black letter.
That is to say they were gothic in style and a copy of the Gothic manuscript.
Hans being practised in manuscript toria of the mid 15th century.
During the next 50 years or so. However, other type styles developed, what we now call Roman type was not a direct copy of any manuscript style,
but a princess confection in which the minuscule eyes were derived from Carolingian manuscript hands,
while the major skills were based on Roman capitals of the sort seen in classical inscriptions.
Italic types were also devised based initially on Chancery and similar styles of writing as printing developed and spread.
These different styles of type were used in different ways,
with Germanic countries continuing to use black letter and Italy and France generally adopting the Roman and italic phases.
Once a fund of type has been cast, it has to be arranged in two cases so that it can be easily composed into lines of text.
The earliest cases were large and contained many compartments with the different characters, then numerous variants, accents and so forth,
arranged in a more or less alphabetical sequence, as can be seen in this woodcut of 1499 showing death coming for a compositor.
In later centuries, a two case system developed which was more efficient.
It had the many skills, punctuation and spacing in the lowercase and the capitals, numerals and other less commonly used characters in the upper case.
And this is where the terms upper and lower case for many skills and major skills derives.
Once you have your type arranged into cases, you can start setting your text.
The compositor would hold a composing stick made of wood. This is a metal one,
but the principle is exactly the same and would start by picking up the first character and placing it into the composing stick upside down.
But he would work in the right order. So if he was setting the word the he would start with a capital T and then put in a lowercase H
and locate E like that and so on with spaces between the words until he reached the end of line.
The amount of spacing or in some cases the characters themselves will be adjusted until the line fitted the stick to perfection.
When the stick is full of lines of type, it is emptied into a wooden galley.
By this means pages are made up and when enough pages have been composed,
they are laid out in the correct sequence and orientation to make up a printing form.
This process of arranging the pages to produce a form is known as imposition.
Here is a simple octavo form. It consists of a wooden or iron chase into which eight pages are placed,
spaced and held in position by pieces of wood known as furniture and wooden wedges called coins.
In this form, the wooden wedges have been replaced with more modern metal ones, which expand with a key.
But the principle is much the same. This form is then placed onto the bed of a printing press and the first proof is taken.
The type is inked with leather, inking balls or dabbers. Rollers were not used until rubber was discovered in the 19th century.
The ink, which consists of a varnish traditionally made from linseed oil and a pigment black,
usually being generated by burning organic matter to produce carbon, was worked with the dabbers to give it a consistent texture and viscosity.
It was then applied to the type and the sheet of paper would be pinned or otherwise affixed to the timber.
Then this frame covered with paper or parchment known as the frisk, it was folded down over it.
Of course, at this date all paper would have been handmade paper, and it was necessary usually to dump the paper in order that it print.
Well, the sandwich containing the paper with the frisk and tip one on the outside was then folded down onto the type.
Then the carriage assembly was advanced onto the platen,
which is the part that does the printing by turning this crank called around and the printer would pull on the bar like this,
and the screw mechanism here would apply the pressure. A wooden press like this could only apply a fairly limited amount of pressure.
And so for printing a full size form like this, it had to be done in two operations in two halves.
So that's printing the second half.
Then the route is turned again to bring the carriage out from under the platen, the temple and frisk it, folded up,
frisk it, fold it away from the temple and the sheet of paper bearing the printed image is removed and placed into a pile.
Proofreading was usually done by a responsible member of printing house staff.
Often the owner or master printer of the office proofs was sometimes compared with a manuscript copy
by one person reading aloud the manuscript and another reading the proof and marking any mistakes.
Minor errors could be corrected with the form still on the press.
It was unusual for authors to correct their own proofs in early European printing houses.
Often they were only sent a proof copy of the book on completion and could then supply a list
of corrigendum to be printed at the end of the book or sometimes corrected in manuscript.
If such corrections were extensive or important, leaves of the book might have to be cancelled.
That is cut out and reprinted or printed corrections slips pasted over the erroneous texts.
If an author wished to have oversight of the printing,
it was usually necessary for him to lodge at or near the printing house in order to correct proofs as they came from the press.
There is evidence that Erasmus spent eight months of his life dwelling with
a printer in order to be on hand to correct the proofs of one of his books.
Once the proofs have been corrected, the printing proper can begin.
This process normally involved two men, a beta and a pula.
The beta worked the ink to keep it viscous and applied it to the tape while the puller placed the damp paper on the press,
made the impression and then removed the printed sheet.
The beat his hands will become ink while the pulleys were clean, thus preserving the paper from ink fingerprints.
The printed sheets were placed on top of each other to form a pile.
A beta and pull of working together were expected to work a token, that is to say, a number of sheets, often 250 to be printed in each hour.
At that rate, each sheet had to be printed in about 14 seconds.
Foster rates were sometimes required, although there would be a concomitant drop in quality.
And it should be remembered that printing was a business in which time was money
and the process would be carried on as quickly as possible to maximise profits.
Printing house workers usually worked a 12 hour day at a six day week.
However, compared with artisans working in most other professions, printers were relatively well paid and well respected.
The beater and puller would often print a set number of tokens, then swap roles in order to vary the work.
Once the appropriate number of sheets have been printed, and that might be anything from 100 to several thousand copies,
the form was removed from the press and handed back to the compositor.
He would clean and deconstruct it,
removing the type which he would distribute back into the cases so that it could be reused if further sheets were to be printed.
He would often keep the furniture beside the chase, plus any elements which might need to be repeated,
such as headlines and direction lines, and use these to make up the next form.
Once the main text had been set.
Meanwhile, another form will be put on to the press and the other side of the sheet printed, thus completing or perfecting the sheet.
This was usually done on the same press on the same day,
so that the pile of paper did not have time to dry out too much between printing one side and the other.
If the sheet had to be redeemed during printing,
it would expand and aligning or registering the pages on the two sides of the sheet would become more difficult.
Sometimes the other side of the sheet will be printed on a second press, which could be run in parallel with the first.
It was usual for printing houses to possess more than one press and even the smallest commonly had two or three.
A large printing office might be equipped with a dozen or more presses at any one time.
They would usually be more than one job on hand so that as many of the presses
as possible could be kept busy and generating income for the master printer.
After a sheet have been perfected, it will be hung up to dry on a washing line, which was often strung up above the presses.
Once dry, the sheets would be sorted and stored against the day the book would be completed.
A short book or pamphlet might just be a single sheet, but most books have more than one sheet.
And if we imagine, say, an octavo edition of the New Testament,
that might have had as many as 50 sheets because most printing offices only had a limited supply of type.
They would set proof, correct print and distribute each sheet separately before setting the next one.
And so it would be quite a long process to set a book. If you imagine an edition of a thousand copies of this imaginary New Testament,
it would take about 800 man hours to hand compose the text and about 400 man hours to print the pages.
Of course, this is if one person was working on it. If a single compositor was working on the book, it would be about nine and a half weeks work.
But of course, most presses had more than one compositor.
So that what is amazing really is not so much how slow printing was as how quick it was our imaginary New Testament.
A thousand copies could have been printed by an efficient printing house in little more than a month.
Once the entire book was printed and any corrections have been made.
Following the reading of the edition by its author, the sheets were passed to the vendor or publisher.
In the early decades, many printers were also booksellers who sold the books they printed.
But division between printers who made books? Publishers who funded the books.
And booksellers who sold books in shops developed quickly as printing spread across Europe.
So far we have considered only texts, but a great many books were illustrated and some such as blog books,
consisted wholly or largely of images rather than words.
For much of the 15th century, the only way of making a printed picture was to use a hand cut relief block.
In Europe, as in the Orient, woodcuts existed before movable type and represented a simpler technology, at least in the process of making them.
Woodcut is made by cutting from a plank of wood, all the planks of the design,
and leaving standing proud all the lines and areas which the designer wants to print.
A similar method of making a relief surface was to cut the image into a block of soft metal like type of metal rather than in wood.
Cuts made in wood and metal have the great advantage that they can be printed in exactly the same way as type and can be combined with type in a form.
From around 1470, engraved and later etched illustrations began to be used in books.
These were made and printed by a quite different process and used a different sort of press so that,
including what are called intaglio prints in books, was a great deal more expensive than using woodcuts.
However, Intaglio prints were often used where a particular fineness of detail was required as,
for example, in anatomical and other scientific books and in maps for three centuries and more.
These were the only two methods of illustrating books from relief blocks cutting wood or metal,
or from intaglio plates produced by some form or combination of etching and engraving.
In the latter part of the 18th century,
wood engraving and lithography we invented and iron printing presses were introduced in the early 19th century.
By around 1840, the production of books and other reading matter was an industrial process.
What is known as the hand press period lasted between the 15th and the latter part of the 18th centuries.
Throughout these three and a half centuries,
the methods of producing type and illustrative printing surfaces of using them to print books and ephemera of all kinds remained essentially,
as we demonstrated here.