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The very first Printed Book – The

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" communication, " printing # 11. May 2014 $ 0 % Harald Sack

The frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra from Tang Dynasty China, the world’s earliest dated printed book, AD 868
(British Museum)

On May 11 , 868 , the earliest dated printed book was issued, a Chinese copy of the so-
called Diamond Sutra , one of the most important textbooks of Buddhism , originally written
in the 1st c. AD . You might think the it was Johannes Gutenberg who invented modern
printing. But, he didn’t. Sure, printing with metal movable types including a printing press and
a suitable ink, but mostover a way to produce movable types in sufficient quality and sufficient
number with few effort, this was Gutenberg’s most notable invention. Printing itself existed
long before Gutenberg . Especially, if you think of woodcuts or so-called woodblock printing. FOLLOW US

Why Woodblock Prints Thrived in China

( ) '
The earliest woodblock printed fragments to survive are from China and are of silk printed
with flowers in three colors from the Han Dynasty (before AD 220 ). It is clear that
woodblock printing developed in Asia several centuries before Europe . The Chinese were
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the first to use the process to print solid text, and equally that, much later, in Europe the
printing of images on cloth developed into the printing of images on paper (woodcuts). It is SciHi
also now established that the use in Europe of the same process to print substantial amounts @SciHiBlog
of text together with images in block-books only came after the development of movable On November 5, 1494, German Meistersinger
type in the 1450s . Because Chinese has a character set running into the thousands, (master singer), poet, playwright, and
shoemaker Hans Sachs was born. His work is
woodblock printing suits it better than movable type to the extent that characters only need to
considered the most important testimony of the
be created as they occur in the text. Although the Chinese had invented a form of movable bourgeois imperial town culture of the 16th
type with baked clay in the 11th century , and metal movable type was invented in Korea in century.scihi.org/meistersinger-…
the 13th century , woodblocks continued to be preferred owing to the formidable challenges
of typesetting Chinese text with its 40,000 or more characters.
The Meistersinger of Nur…
On November 5, 1494, Ge…
The Oldest Woodblock Print scihi.org

The oldest existing print done with wood-blocks is the Mugujeonggwang great Dharani sutra Nov 5, 2020
that is dated between AD 704 and 751 . It was found at Bulguksa , South Korea in 1966 .
But, the print we focus today is a wood block printed copy in the British Library which, SciHi
although not the earliest example of block printing, is the earliest example which bears an @SciHiBlog

actual date. The book displays a great maturity of design and layout and speaks of a On 4 November 1869, the very first issue of the
prominent interdisciplinary scientific journal
considerable ancestry for woodblock printing. The extant copy has the form of a scroll, about 5
‘Nature‘ was published. scihi.org/scientific-
meters long. The archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein purchased it in 1907 in the walled-up jou…
Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in northwest China from a monk guarding the caves –
known as the “ Caves of the Thousand Buddhas “.[4] The colophon, at the inner end, reads:
The World's most import…
Nature is widely regarded …
Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his scihi.org
two parents on the 15th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [11 May
868]. Nov 5, 2020

SciHi
500 Years before Gutenberg @SciHiBlog
On November 3, 1500, Italian goldsmith,
This is more than 500 years before the Gutenberg Bible was first printed. How did the sculptor, draftsman, soldier, musician, and artist
Benvenuto Cellini was born. Cellini was one of
technique come to Europe and the Western world? Block-books, where both text and images
the most important artists of Mannerism.
are cut on a single block for a whole page, appeared in Europe in the mid-15th century. As scihi.org/benvenuto-cell…
they were almost always undated and without statement of printer or place of printing,
determining their dates of printing has been an extremely difficult task. The technique of
woodblock printing is found through East and Central Asia , and in the Byzantine world for Benvenuto Cellini - Mast…
Italian goldsmith, sculptor, …
cloth, and by AD 1000 examples of woodblock printing on paper appeared in Islamic
Egypt . Printing onto cloth had already spread much earlier, and was common in Europe by Embed View on Twitter

1300 . Around the 13th century the Chinese technique of blockprinting was transmitted to
Europe , soon after paper became available in Europe .[5]

An Important Cultural Tradition FURTHER PROJECTS

The print in woodcut, later joined by engraving, quickly became an important cultural tradition
for popular religious works, as well as playing cards. Although many had believed that refer:
(European) block books preceded Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the first part of
the 1450s , it now is accepted that most of the surviving block books were printed in the
1460s or later, and that the earliest surviving examples may date to about 1451 . They seem
to have functioned as a cheap popular alternative to the typeset book, which was still very
expensive at this stage. Block books continued to be printed sporadically up through the end
of the 15th century and were then more and more replaced by their movable type
alternatives that have become less expensive.

ARCHIVES
BTW, in the Diamond Sutra can be found the dedication: “for universal free distribution“, so it is
also the first creative work with an explicit public domain dedication
2020
November (6)
Conserving the Diamond Sutra October (31)
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August (31)
July (30)
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January (31)
2019
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References and Further Reading: 2015
2014
[1] Digitized copy of the Diamond Sutra of the British Library 2013
[2] More digitized Block-Books at Wikisource 2012
[3] The Gutenberg Bible and the Printing Revolution, SciHi Blog
[4] Marc Aurel Stein and the Dunhuang Caves, SciHi Blog
[5] Ulman Stromer and the First Paper Mill North of the Alpes, SciHi Blog
[6] Diamond Sutra at Wikidata Casa, 3 quartos,
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