In Europe, woodcut books appeared after the Crusades. Its emergence and flourishing was facilitated by the massive demand for paper money and playing cards, as well as printed icons and papal indulgences. One of the first secular woodcut books was the Calendar by Regiomontanus of Königsberg.
The woodcut technique was simple: an image (text) was cut out on a wooden board in a mirror order, paint was applied to the relief, a sheet of paper was placed, pressed and smoothed with a pad (matzo). Separate sheets of paper were glued together, first in the form of a tape (scroll), and later collected into a book. The print was placed first on one side of the sheet, and such publications are called anopistographic, and later on both sides (opistographic). Printers sometimes had to cut out individual letter image elements from the board in order to replace them with others.
One of the famous woodcut publications in Europe was the "Bible of the Poor", distributed in the Middle Ages. It consisted of large-format sheets depicting biblical scenes and characters and explanatory inscriptions. At first, woodcut books were widely distributed, but by the middle of the 16th century they disappeared from the book market.
From woodcut printing there is already one step to the invention of typesetting, the idea of which, as they say, has been in the air for more than a thousand years. Scholars agree that the credit for the invention of printing should go to Gutenberg.
A man named Hans Gensfleisch, or Johannes Gutenberg (1394/1399-1468), was born in the last years of the 14th century in the large German city of Mainz. We have no information about his training and education. The city was in a feudal feud with its overlord, the Bishop of Nassau, and young Gutenberg and his parents left for neighboring Strasbourg. There he was engaged in crafts: making jewelry and making mirrors. His first typographical experiments date back to 1440. Apparently, these were: the Latin grammar of Aelius Donatus, the astrological calendar, papal indulgences. Soon, however, he returned to his native Mainz and there began preparing to print the complete Bible in Latin.
In 1450-1455, Gutenberg is believed to have printed his first Bible, called the 42-line Bible because it had 42 lines of text typed and printed on each page in two columns. In total it has 1282 pages. Elements of the book's decoration were done by hand. Part of the edition was printed on paper, part on parchment.
Gutenberg's debt obligations led to the fact that the bookseller and moneylender I. Fust, without waiting for the completion of the work, sued him for non-payment of money and seized all his property, including the finished edition of the Bible. At this moment, Gutenberg enjoyed the support of the Bishop of Nassau, who, having won the feudal war, appreciated the merits of the master and gave him a court rank and a pension. However, the days of the tired and sick printer were numbered, and on February 3, 1468, Gutenberg passed away.
Gutenberg's students and apprentices spread the news of the great invention throughout Germany and then throughout Europe.
The essence of his invention was as follows:
) Gutenberg invented a method of making a printing plate by setting text in individual cast characters.
) He invented a hand-held typesetting device.
) Invented the printing press (press).
It is very likely that Gutenberg’s technique differed from modern technology, but in what way it is impossible to determine.
He created the first printing equipment, invented a new method of making type and made a type casting mold.
Stamps (punchons) were made from hard metal, carved in a mirror image. Then they were pressed into a soft and pliable copper plate: a matrix was obtained, which was filled with a metal alloy. The essence of this method of making letters was that they could be cast in any quantity.
In book production, this is of significant importance, considering that the average book page requires approximately two hundred letters. Equipment for the printing house no longer required a press, but a printing press and a typesetting cash desk (an inclined wooden box with cells). They contained letters and punctuation marks. Johannes Gutenberg built such a printing press.
In Europe it is primarily associated with the invention of paper in China. By the time book publishing arose, no less than two-thirds of the handwritten books created were on assorted paper of varying quality.
The earliest information about the technical details of book publishing dates back to the 2nd century. BC e. They are contained in the Phaistist disk found by archaeologists in Greece (on the island of Crete). It was made of clay. Stamped or embossed letters were placed on it. The stamping method was common in the East.
Printing methods existed at different times in different forms. In Chinese chronicles you can find information about a blacksmith whose name was Pi Shen. Between 1041 and 1048 he made type from clay. According to the same chronicles, the blacksmith also invented a typesetting cash register where letters were stored. However, the publications have not survived to this day.
Based on archival and museum evidence, historians suggest that printing in Europe could have begun in Egypt and Byzantium. The only difficulty is in confirming the theory, since there are no books published at that time.
The beginning of book printing in Europe is associated with many names. For example, in history there is information about a certain Prokop Waldfogel. He possessed 48 metal characters and other instruments. However, the books published by him have not survived.
Among other people in history, there are Jean Brito and the doctor Pamfilio Castadi. Several sources speak about the court printer Nicolas Janson, who published books in Venice and Paris.
The beginning of book printing in Europe is closely connected with a church minister from the Netherlands. His name was Laurens Janszon Koster. It is assumed that he learned the secret of printing from Eastern Armenian refugees. Closer to old age, Koster made movable letters for his grandchildren and printed several publications. These books have survived, but there is no information on them that Koster made them.
In many European cities, monuments have been erected to people who are, to one degree or another, associated with printing. However, their priority in the invention of printing technology has not been proven by history. The idea of the publication was more clearly realized in the mid-15th century.
According to many scientists, the credit for the invention of book publishing rightfully belongs to Gutenberg. The beginning of book printing in Europe is associated with this name. The date of his first typographical experiments is 1440. At this time in Strasbourg, he was engaged in the publication of Donatus's Latin grammar, an astrological calendar, and papal indulgences. After some time, returning to his hometown of Mainz, Guttenberg began working on publishing the complete Bible.
The 42-line Bible in Latin was published in 1453-1454. The pages of the book (1282 in total) contained 42 lines arranged in two columns. The decoration elements of the publication were made by hand.
After Gutenberg's death in 1468, his students continued printing. They spread the news about the publishing technology invented by the master throughout Germany and then Europe. Gutenberg created not only the first printing equipment, but also invented a method for making type and a type casting form. In addition, he came up with the idea of creating a special alloy composition for casting letters.
In Russia it began in the mid-16th century. The founder of the printing business was Ivan Fedorov. (dated) - “Apostle” - was published in 1564 by the Moscow Printing House. Fedorov and his assistant worked on its creation. By the 17th century, there were several printing houses in Russia. However, until the very end of the 18th century, printing technology did not undergo significant changes. I only changed the font - I introduced a civil one instead of the Old Church Slavonic letter.
The first printed books appeared in the Far East - in China and Korea. Woodcut forms were first used to print books there. Each time before printing, it was necessary to engrave a new form (VIII-IX centuries). Bi Sheng began to produce clay types, from which he typed text printing forms. In Korea, letters cast from bronze were used (XI-XIII centuries).
In Europe, these achievements of the peoples of the East, apparently, were not known. Woodblock printed products appeared there at the end of the 14th - beginning of the 15th centuries. Printing from woodcut forms was carried out without a printing press, and pressure was applied with the edge of the palm. Along with woodblock printing, the following printing processes were used in Europe: inkless embossing and textile printing. Sometimes typesetting forms were also used there, for example, for embossing ornaments typed using separate small stamps on binding covers. The processes of engraving on metal and casting processes also came into use, and the extraction of grapes for wine was carried out with special squeezing presses. All this formed the basis for the invention of printing.
There was also an objective need for the invention of printing, associated with the spread of trade, crafts, and the developing need for education. A cheap material for the production of books began to be produced - paper. In the 15th century, handwritten books on paper became available to wide circles of the wealthy population. Along with public ones, small private libraries appeared. The requirements for the quality of books have increased, and the question of unifying texts, the main reason for the distortion of which was manual correspondence, came to the fore. It was possible to combat such distortions only with the help of printing. Only printing made it possible to reproduce text in the form of hundreds and thousands of completely identical copies.
The invention of printing in Europe: background, prerequisites, essence of I. Gutenberg’s invention.
The first thing that contributed to the emergence of printing was paper, invented in China by Tsai Lun and brought to Europe. By the beginning of European book printing, at least two-thirds of handwritten books were already produced on paper, which was of different types and different qualities.
Manuscript production was expensive and slow. In Europe, woodcut books appeared after the Crusades. Its emergence and flourishing was facilitated by the massive demand for paper money, printed icons and papal indulgences, as well as playing cards (“Bible of the Poor”). Neither method was suitable for large books, but both of them can be considered as prerequisites for the invention of typographic printing.
The essence of the invention: The technical essence is that, having decomposed the letter into its component elements, he provided a method for producing each character, the ability to compose a printed form in any sequence, the ability to replace letters by size (height) and height (length). He created the first printing equipment, invented a new method of making type and made a type casting mold. Stamps (punchons) were made from hard metal, carved in a mirror image. Then they were pressed into a soft and pliable copper plate: a matrix was obtained, which was filled with a metal alloy. The alloy developed by Gutenberg included tin, lead, and antimony. The essence of this method of making letters was that they could be cast in any quantity. In book production, this is of significant importance, considering that the average book page requires approximately two hundred letters. Equipment for the printing house required not just a press, but a printing press and a typesetting cash desk (an inclined wooden box with cells). They contained letters and punctuation marks.
Advantages of book printing:
1) facilitating the production of a printing form, which is made up of pre-prepared technical elements and parts
2 possibility of repeated reuse
3) general simplification of the entire process of accumulation and transmission of information.
The life and work of Gutenberg. Causes and essence Gutenberg question (literature review).
Real name: Hans Gensfleisch (Gutenberg is his mother's surname). Born in Mainz at the end of the 14th century. Son of patrician Friele Gensfleisch.
The family had to leave for Strasbourg due to political strife between the patricians and the church. All children, following their father, were engaged in professions related to metal (mainly coinage). In 1434, Hans became a member of the jewelers' guild.
There is no information about Gutenberg's education. He could study at a parish or city lower school.
In 1440 the first books were a Latin grammar, papal indulgences, astrological calendars.
In 1444 leaves for Mainz. There he is developing a complete Bible in Latin (At that time they were afraid that errors would creep into the printed copies, that the monks-scribes. The printed Bible was even burned in Cologne).
1445 – the first printed poem in German, “The Book of the Sibylline” (in 1892, scraps from the pages of the book were found and identified)
1448 – astronomical calendar printed
1450g. – Gutenberg borrows money from the wealthy Mainz burgher I. Fust as collateral to improve his equipment.
1452 – Fust becomes a partner and contributes another 800 guilders (subsequently from Fust a claim for 2400 francs)
1450-1455 – the largest book – the 42-line Bible (text in 2 columns, 1282 pages, part on paper, part on parchment, hand illustrations)
At the end of 1456, when the Bible was almost printed, Fust filed a lawsuit and demanded the return of the money. Gutenberg lost the case. The printing house passed to Fust. Fust's companion (and later owner) was Gutenberg's student, Peter Schaeffer.
Gutenberg lost his monopoly on the machine he invented and did not work for many years.
In 1459-1462. gets to work (36-line Bible).
In 1465 the Archbishop of Mainz provided Gutenberg with financial support and a court rank
The main documents about Gutenberg have reached us only in extracts and fragments. The honor of his invention of printing has been repeatedly challenged, starting with Fust, by various printing companies, and then by historians of various countries, in particular. Dutch in favor of Laurence Coster (even before Gutenberg, who published the book “The Mirror of Human Salvation”), and this led to the emergence in science of the so-called “Gutenberg question.” The matter was aggravated by the fact that publications in which the name of the inventor would appear as the printer of this book , has not survived. However, a careful study of the materials showed that there is no reason to doubt that the invention belonged to Gutenberg. As for the publications he published, they can only be established by indirect data (from fonts, dated inscriptions), and in some cases remain controversial.
In the Gutenberg Question, a special place is occupied by the “Catholicon” - its features - the colophon (afterword, contains imprint, 1460).
I. Gutenberg invented printing in 1440. The following three aspects of this invention should be noted. 1) The letter casting process is the production of the same letters in sufficiently large quantities. 2) Typesetting process - the production of a text printing form made up of individual pre-cast letters. 3) Printing process - producing many identical prints by transferring ink under pressure from a printing plate to paper or other material. Within 50 years after the invention of I. Gutenberg, more than 1000 printing houses were created in different countries, which produced a total circulation of about 10 million copies of printed books.
An important fact is that the first Russian printing house was created by Ivan Fedorov in Moscow at the behest of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. In 1564, the first Russian, accurately dated book, “The Acts of the Holy Apostles,” was published. During his life, Ivan Fedorov and his assistants published 13 separate editions, including the first complete Slavic Bible (Ostrog Bible).
Incunabulum period of printing (Europe).
The second half of the 15th century - the spread of printing throughout Europe - Italy (1465), Switzerland (1468), France, Hungary, Poland (1470), England, Czechoslovakia (1476), Austria, Denmark, etc. Books published before December 31, 1500 are usually called incunabula, in Latin - “in the cradle,” that is, in the cradle of printing. By 1500, more than ten million copies of incunabula were published in Europe, including in the Slavic language. European books printed from 1501 to 1550 inclusive are usually called paleotypes, that is, ancient editions.
At this time, printed illustrations appeared in the book. They began to use woodcut printing - wood engraving. Engraving of various techniques began to be used for printing headbands, initials, illustrations and other decorations of the book.
The owner of a printing house in Venice, Aldus Manutius (1450-1515), a noble and wealthy man, began producing books called aldines. In the printing house of Aldus Manutius, artists, imitating ancient examples, used a simple and beautiful antiqua font. An italic and slanted font began to be used, designed to highlight a particular thought in the text.
The first incunabula printed in Cyrillic for the Orthodox Slavs appeared in Krakow at the end of the 15th century. Their printer was the German Schweipolt Fiol. The first publications were liturgical books - "Octoechos" (1491) and "Book of Hours" (1491).
The design of the incunabula font resembled the handwriting of handwritten books (texture, Gothic minuscule). The typical formats for incunabula were in-folio (1/2 sheet) and in-quarto (1/4 sheet). The circulation was small, the traditional circulation was 275 copies. Incunabula were relatively inexpensive. One bishop in a letter to the pope reports that printed books are five times cheaper than handwritten ones. Already in the incunabulum period, the first printers sought to improve the book, its typesetting techniques, and its decoration. Also in Poland: Kaspar Straube (astronomical calendar), Flovrian Ungler (in Polish prayer book “Paradise of the Soul”). Polish books were also published abroad.
In Germany: Fust and Schaeffer (“Mainz Psalter”), Johann Mentellin (Bible in colloquial German), Albrecht Pfister (illustrated Zeiner Bible), Anton Koberger (branches; multi-format books: Bible, “Apocalypse”)
In England, only in the national language and very little church literature: William Caxton (enjoyed state support; historical literature - “The History of the Capture of Troy” and modern English writers - Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”)
Netherlands: Lorenz Coster (engraved editions, used wooden type “Mirror of Human Salvation”, “Apocalypse”, “Bible of the Poor”, “The Art of Dying”), Nicholas Ketellar, Pafraat (classics in Greek type), Jacobus de Breda (textbooks) .
France: state support, Jean Heinlen and Guillaume Fichet, in the interests of students, invited Goering, Fritzeburger and Kranz (Goering and Co.), Paquier Bonhomme; popular print books - 4 pages, drawings with captions
Hungary: Hess ("Chronicles of the Hungarians").
Czech Republic: Mikulas Bakalar (Czech literature).
Renaissance, great discoveries, scientific and technological revolution, capitalist industrial development - these world-historical processes required a wide variety of knowledge and information, which spread at an accelerating pace, more completely and more clearly.THE EMERGENCE OF BOOK PRINTING IN EUROPE
Like most scientific and technical inventions and discoveries, printing owes its emergence primarily to socio-historical reasons. Studying history, we see that any achievement in the field of science and technology - from the wheel to the space station - is determined by the urgent need for it that society experiences at a specific stage of its development. Ingenious inventors, thus, meaningfully or intuitively fulfill a certain social order.
For thousands of years, books, in their original forms (tablets, scrolls, codices), were written and copied by hand. At first glance, improving this process was for the time being impossible solely due to the insufficient development of technology. However, the first printing experiments were undertaken already in ancient times, mainly in the East (India, China, Tibet). Texts and symbols were then carved into wood; The original printing form thus became the board. But this method (woodcut) never became widespread.
It became quite widespread in Western Europe only in the 14th century and was subsequently supplanted by printing in the usual sense of the term.
Industrial production of books was not introduced until almost the middle of the second millennium, because society did not have such a need while reading remained the privilege of a narrow circle. Since ancient times, we have seen, on the one hand, respect for the book (Cicero said that a house without it is like a body without a soul), and on the other, limited “consumption” of it. The situation did not change much in the Middle Ages, during the era of feudalism. The nobility and the clergy, especially the latter, for a long time remained the only carriers and consumers of “book wisdom.”
It is certainly to the credit of the church that the monasteries became centers for the production and distribution of books not only of a narrowly religious nature, but also of a literary and historical nature, especially chronicles. But books were still few and expensive. The painstaking copying of one copy often took months, or even years. This led to the fact that the book became of great value and was treated accordingly (a positive fact), but at the same time made it inaccessible to the poor. Accordingly, there were very few literate people (although in Rus' this was always better than in Western Europe, where illiteracy distinguished even many feudal lords).
For the time being, everyone put up with this situation - both the mob, who had nowhere and no time to acquire a taste for reading, and those in power who looked at the book as a treasure that only a select few should have. But by the 15th century AD. people of almost all classes began to realize that a book is not just entertainment or a collection of abstract wisdom, but an effective information weapon with which one can achieve certain goals. If Vladimir Monomakh in his time wrote “Instruction”, addressing primarily his sons, then influential personalities of later times wanted to “educate” entire nations. These individuals were divided into two “camps” - simply put, retrogrades and innovators, i.e. clergy and thinkers of the Renaissance. Both wanted to spread their ideas in order to win as many supporters as possible. This is how the “struggle for minds” began, which since then has not essentially stopped, but only changed. The book really became a “weapon”. But she was never just a conductor of certain philosophical and political ideas - she enlightened the reader, gave him new important information.
By the time of the birth of printing, more than enough of this information had “accumulated” in the world. That era was a time of great changes: the Renaissance in art, the Reformation in the church, great geographical discoveries, successes in science and technology - all this foreshadowed global changes in the social order. They came in the form of ousting feudalism from the historical arena - it was replaced by capitalism. Typography is considered one of the most important factors contributing to this process. The sheer abundance of information contained in printed, i.e. available books, destroyed the usual restrictive dogmas, primarily religious ones, and the feudal system rested mainly on them. It is not without reason that one of the clerics will later declare that the printing of books in itself dealt a blow to the church much more serious than all the heresies combined. But when the industrial production of books was just beginning, the feudal lords and clergy saw it as a threat, and, on the contrary, as a means for disseminating and establishing their conservative ideas.
At one time (14th century) such a means was the already mentioned woodcut, through which engravings of religious content were distributed among the illiterate common people. But bookmakers were looking for another, better way of printing.
In several Western European countries (Italy, France, Holland, Germany) and the Czech Republic, attempts were made to use movable type for the manufacture of printing forms. The idea was certainly correct. But no one succeeded in bringing it to life at the proper technical level until the German genius Johannes Gutenberg (born at the end of the 14th century, died in 1468). He developed a remarkable technology for printing books, which turned out to be the most productive, and was subsequently used for centuries. Unlike other craftsmen who did not go beyond producing one set of type, Gutenberg came to the conclusion that it was necessary to quickly cast any quantity of type. This process was thought out to the smallest detail. Initially, he engraved samples of letters, or punches, on steel, then with their help he stamped their in-depth images on a copper block, and then used the latter (matrices) to cast the actual letters. Thus, the printer was able to easily produce type in any required quantity. In addition, Gutenberg made a printing press, the main elements of which were a thaler - a table on which the printing form was laid - and a press that pressed a sheet of paper onto this form, previously coated with paint. By today's standards, the process was quite imperfect, but it still made it possible to produce books many times cheaper and faster than the labor of a scribe.
Practical book printing at Gutenberg's printing house began in the mid-40s of the 15th century. The first European printed publications appeared - textbooks, calendars and leaflets. But the printer’s true glory came from the luxurious edition of the Bible, which took four years of work.
The merit of Johann Gutenberg, therefore, lies in the development of the most productive technology for printing books at that time, which made it possible for the first time in history to transfer this process to an industrial basis.
After his death, the work of the pioneer printer was continued by numerous followers. Among them, Aldus Manutius (1447-1515), the founder of modern editing, one of the first publishers who began to place imprint data at the end of the book: place, year of publication and publishing brand, stands out especially. His publications, the so-called aldines, were distinguished by their emphatically high quality in all respects. By the beginning of the second half of our millennium, more than 10 million copies of printed books had already been published - a figure unthinkable under the dominance of the handwritten method. Subsequently, they received the name incunabula, which means “coming from the cradle (here: the cradle of printing).” Publications published before 1550 are called paleotypes, i.e. "ancient". A vigorous trade in the new product began.
Improvements in this area are associated with the name of the German typographer and entrepreneur Johann Mentelin (1420-1478), owner of a book warehouse in Strasbourg. For the first time, he began to print the entire planned circulation of a particular book, after which the scattered set could be used again. This made it possible to speed up the publishing process and increase the range of books produced. Another German, Anton Kobergen (1440-1553), originally from Nuremberg, put the book trade on a grand scale: he opened a network of bookstores with a varied and rich assortment, and began to maintain a staff of small traders, or booksellers, selling books in crowded places . Other entrepreneurs followed Koberger's example, and in the 16th century we observe intense competition between publishing and trading firms.
Gradually, small and medium-sized enterprises (as in other areas) were absorbed by large monopolies. The firms of Henri Etienne and Christophe Plantin in France and Lodewijk Elsevier in Holland concentrated the book business in their own hands. Having mastered Europe, they began to look for access to other markets - other continents, where the colonies of developed countries of the Old World were located. Thus, figuratively speaking, the book began to conquer the world.
The great invention and the subsequent process of replacing handwritten books with printed publications could not, of course, leave Eastern Europe and the Russian state aside. The first experiments in Slavic (Cyrillic) printing are associated with the name of a resident of Krakow, Schweipolt Feol. Despite the fact that the publisher himself was of “German origin,” he (in 1491) published four books in Cyrillic for Orthodox worship. This was quite a courageous act in a Catholic country; It was the Inquisition that apparently stopped the further publication of Church Slavonic literature.
But the beginning of mass production of East Slavic books is the merit of the Belarusian enlightener Francis Skaryna (c.1490-1552). Originally from Polotsk, he settled in Prague, a city that was at that time the center of Slavic culture, where he founded a printing house. The first book he published, “The Psalter” (1517), marked the beginning of a thematic series entitled “The Russian Bible.” Subsequently, Skaryna continued his work in Lithuania, in its capital Vilna, where he published such liturgical books as “The Small Travel Book” and “The Apostle” (1523-1525). Addressing his publications to “ordinary Russian people,” the printer had in mind, first of all, his fellow Belarusians who were under Polish-Lithuanian oppression, but it is natural that his books entered into church use in the Moscow state.
In Moscow itself, book printing began around the second half of the 50s of the 16th century. The first books - three "Gospels", two "Triodi" and two "Psalms" - are dated by historians to the period between 1555 and 1564. However, these publications are essentially anonymous: they do not have any information that allows the identity of the publisher to be identified. It is only clear that their appearance is again due to socio-historical reasons. First of all, the growth of the Moscow state led to the opening of new Orthodox churches in the annexed lands, requiring holy books. The Church Council of 1551 demanded the replacement of handwritten liturgical books, “completely spoiled by the prescribers,” i.e. containing many errors - verified, high-quality publications. Only industrial book production was ideal for solving all these problems.
Thus, as in Western Europe, the emergence of Slavic and Muscovite book printing is closely connected with the church, with its requests and attitudes. (Only later, when it proved impossible to bring all printing houses under church control, did the clergy discover that their power was being undermined by the flow of “free-thinking” literature.) Since the publisher of the above-mentioned seven books has not been identified, the “official” Russian pioneer printer is generally considered to be Deacon Ivan Fedorov, who (together with his assistant) printed “Apostle”. This was done in a printing house built at the behest of Ivan the Terrible. Work on the publication took almost a year (April 19, 1563 – March 1, 1564). The result was an excellent book, not inferior in quality of printing and beauty of design to the best European examples.
So, the introduction of printing in Rus' occurred about a century later than in Western Europe. This is due to historical factors that slowed down cultural and technical progress in the country, namely: the Tatar-Mongol yoke, the protracted era of feudal fragmentation, etc. Nevertheless, having emerged once, Russian book printing began to play as significant a role in the life of our state as the industrial production of books had in the advanced powers of the West. Both there and here we observe the initial strictly church orientation of published literature, and then a turn to enlightenment, to science, and later to “secular” poetry and fiction.
Thus, by the end of the 16th century, book printing had become established in all developed European countries, including Russia, and the significance of this fact can hardly be overestimated. As academician M. Tikhomirov noted, “the appearance of the first printed book in the language of one or another people means the beginning of a new era in its cultural life.” We owe this “new era” the emergence of great fiction, the spread of scientific knowledge, and positive changes in public life. All this became possible because the book and the ideas, information, and talent contained in it became public property thanks to the most important invention - printing.
The advent of printing played a decisive role here. In addition to creating a material base for the consolidation and rapid dissemination of sciences, new information, emerging crafts and industries, book printing contributed to the formation and improvement of national and international literatures, literacy in general, writing, and this in turn - the entire system of education and human upbringing.
The advantages of book printing compared to all previously existing methods of transmitting linguistic and speech information are, firstly, the significant facilitation of the production of a printed form, which is made up of pre-prepared technical elements and parts, secondly, the possibility of their repeated reuse, thirdly, in the general simplification and facilitation of the entire process of accumulation and transmission of information.
The first thing that contributed to the emergence of printing was paper, invented in China and brought to Europe. In the 12th-13th centuries, so-called “paper mills” appeared in Spain. The paper pulp was prepared from rags ground in stone millstones. By the beginning of European book printing, at least two-thirds of handwritten books were already produced on paper, which was of different types and different qualities.
The advent of paper is also associated with the introduction of such a concept as filigree, that is, a “watermark”. This is a standard image visible to light, which was applied to a sheet of paper. The first European book with filigree appeared in 1282 in Bologna (Italy).
The earliest information about the technical elements of book printing is contained in the Phaistos Disc, found by archaeologists on the island. Crete (Greece). It dates back to the 2nd millennium BC. The disk was made of clay, with unknown signs (letters) printed or stamped on it.
The principle of stamping was known in the cuneiform cultures of the Ancient East (Sumer, Babylon). To obtain impressions, roller seals were rolled on wet clay and then fired. The principle of printing and imprint is also embodied in the minting of coins. The first minted coins appeared in the 7th century AD. Much experience was gained in the manufacture of printed fabrics, when a design was cut out on a wooden board and a colorful print was made from it.
From more recent times, information reaches us that in different regions, in different forms, there was a method of printing. Chinese chroniclers tell about a certain blacksmith named Bi Shen (or Pi Shen), who back in 1041-1048. made letters from clay. He sculpted clay blocks, pressed hieroglyphs onto them with a stick, then fired them on fire to secure them. The same chronicles testify to the invention by Bi Shen of a typesetting cash register in which block letters were stored. With their help it was possible to obtain several thousand prints. Everything is logical, but the books printed by Bi Shen have not reached us. Similar information about the beginning of book printing is available in Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Bronze letters made in the 15th century in Korea have survived.
Historians, relying on museum and archival evidence, express the opinion that the first experiments in printing could have taken place in Byzantium and Egypt. The difficulty is the lack of books themselves.
In Ancient China, with a complex system of ideographic writing, there has long been a simple way of transmitting information: hieroglyphic signs were carved on stone steles, and then from time to time they were smeared with paint, impressions were made, and these impressions (of imperial decrees, various messages, instructions) were sent to provinces and cities . When, over time, hieroglyphs began to be carved on wooden boards, the prints began to be called woodcuts (from the Greek “xylo” - wood, “grapho” - writing). The oldest woodblock book in history was made in China, although the earliest woodblock production is known in Japan. In 770, by order of Empress Setoku, a million spells were imprinted in this way and embedded in miniature pagodas.
The first woodcut book is called The Diamond Sutra. It was made in 868 AD, and was first discovered in 1900 in the “Cave of a Thousand Buddhas” in Donghuan (Western China). The book contains a message that it was cut out by master Wang Chi and printed “for the sake of commemorating his deceased parents.”
In Europe, woodcut books appeared after the Crusades. Its emergence and flourishing was facilitated by the massive demand for paper money and playing cards, as well as printed icons and papal indulgences. One of the first secular woodcut books was the Calendar by Regiomontanus of Königsberg.
The woodcut technique was simple: an image (text) was cut out on a wooden board in a mirror order, paint was applied to the relief, a sheet of paper was placed, pressed and smoothed with a pad (matzo). Separate sheets of paper were glued together, first in the form of a tape (scroll), and later collected into a book. The print was placed first on one side of the sheet, and such publications are called anopistographic, and later on both sides (opistographic). Printers sometimes had to cut out individual letter image elements from the board in order to replace them with others.
One of the famous woodcut publications in Europe was the “Bible of the Poor,” distributed in the Middle Ages. It consisted of large-format sheets depicting biblical scenes and characters and explanatory inscriptions. At first, woodcut books were widely distributed, but by the middle of the 16th century they disappeared from the book market.
From woodcut printing there is already one step to the invention of typesetting, the idea of which, as they say, has been in the air for more than a thousand years. Back in the 4th century, one of the Christian writers - Blessed Jerome - in his essay “On the Education of a Young Woman,” advises, when teaching a child to read and write, to make relief cubes with letters and combine words from them. What is this if not an idea for a set? Many have claimed her authorship. In the French city of Avignon in 1444-1446, as historical sources say, there lived a certain Prokop Waldfogel, a Czech by birth, who mastered the “art of artificial writing.” He had 48 metal characters and other instruments, but no trace or title remained of his books.
Among other contenders for the invention of printing, we find the name of Jean Brito from Bruges (Flanders) and the doctor from Feltre - Pamfilio Castaldi. But several sources report about the works of the court printer of the French king Nicolas Jeanson (Jenson), who printed in Paris and Venice. Gutenberg allegedly added only various characters to his invention.
The most likely name in this sense is the name of the legendary printer from Haarlem (Netherlands), a church minister (clericist), whose name was Laurens (Laurenty) Janszon Koster. He allegedly learned the secret of printing from Armenian refugees from the East. Then, in his old age, on the advice of Jerome, he cut out movable letters for his grandchildren and, finally, printed several books. The books, however, survived, but without any evidence that Koster did this.
In each of the mentioned European cities there is a monument to the first printer. But the priority of these people in the invention of printing has not been proven. Obviously, they are all just contemporaries who worked on the great idea of printing, which was realized in the middle of the 15th century in the cities of Strasbourg and then Mainz.
Scholars agree that the credit for the invention of printing should go to Gutenberg.
A man named Hans Gensfleisch, or Johannes Gutenberg (1394/1399-1468), was born in the last years of the 14th century in the large German city of Mainz. We have no information about his training and education. The city was in a feudal feud with its overlord, the Bishop of Nassau, and young Gutenberg and his parents left for neighboring Strasbourg. There he was engaged in crafts: making jewelry and making mirrors. His first typographical experiments date back to 1440. Apparently, these were: the Latin grammar of Aelius Donatus, the astrological calendar, papal indulgences. Soon, however, he returned to his native Mainz and there began preparing to print the complete Bible in Latin.
In 1450-1455, Gutenberg is believed to have printed his first Bible, called the 42-line Bible because it had 42 lines of text typed and printed on each page in two columns. In total it has 1282 pages. Elements of the book's decoration were done by hand. Part of the edition was printed on paper, part on parchment.
Gutenberg's debt obligations led to the fact that the bookseller and moneylender I. Fust, without waiting for the completion of the work, sued him for non-payment of money and seized all his property, including the finished edition of the Bible. At this moment, Gutenberg enjoyed the support of the Bishop of Nassau, who, having won the feudal war, appreciated the merits of the master and gave him a court rank and a pension. However, the days of the tired and sick printer were numbered, and on February 3, 1468, Gutenberg passed away.
Gutenberg's students and apprentices spread the news of the great invention throughout Germany and then throughout Europe. What did Johannes Gutenberg invent? The idea of a set of letters (letters), as we know, was already known among ancient writers. A printing press, or rather a press, as a mechanism that transmits pressure through a screw from a handle, is nothing more than a pressure press used in winemaking or in the production of printed fabric. It was also used in the production of woodcuts. Finally, Gutenberg’s technology for making matrices and casting type is very reminiscent of the mirror production technology of that time. Gutenberg combined the inventions that existed before him, putting into practice the great idea of printing books, and showed the world the first, and immediately perfect, examples of publications.
He created the first printing equipment, invented a new method of making type and made a type casting mold.
Stamps (punchons) were made from hard metal, carved in a mirror image. Then they were pressed into a soft and pliable copper plate: a matrix was obtained, which was filled with a metal alloy. The alloy developed by Gutenberg included tin, lead, and antimony. The essence of this method of making letters was that they could be cast in any quantity. In book production, this is of significant importance, considering that the average book page requires approximately two hundred letters. Equipment for the printing house no longer required a press, but a printing press and a typesetting cash desk (an inclined wooden box with cells). They contained letters and punctuation marks. Johannes Gutenberg built such a printing press. G.H. aptly spoke about Gutenberg’s invention. Lichtenberg: “Lead has changed the world more than gold, and more so the lead in type than the lead in bullets.”
You look at the article (abstract): “ The beginning of book printing in Europe"from discipline" History of the book»
Loading...
