Articles

Many his­tor­i­ans con­sider print­ing a ma­jor achieve­ment in hu­man his­tory. It was she who made it pos­sible to make a re­volu­tion­ary break­through in the edu­ca­tion of people and greatly re­duce the labor in­tens­ity of mak­ing books.

The his­tory of book print­ing goes back to an­cient China. Back in the 2nd cen­tury AD. to cre­ate ex­act cop­ies of the texts of the clas­sic­al works of Con­fucian­ism, the Chinese began to use stone re­lief matrices. Wet sheets of pa­per were laid on them and then, with the help of a hard brush, they were pressed in­to the re­cesses of the stone mat­rix and wiped with a rag soaked in ink. So for the first time they began to re­ceive the world's first cop­ies of books identic­al to each oth­er without the use of heavy hand­writ­ten labor. This type of print­ing was later called "em­bossed". Un­for­tu­nately, this meth­od was not without draw­backs: stone matrices were dif­fi­cult to man­u­fac­ture and store, as they were large and weighed hun­dreds of kilo­grams. For ex­ample, to store stone matrices of just one work of Con­fucian­ism, an area of more than 5 hec­tares was re­quired. That is why this tech­no­logy spread in China ex­tremely slowly.

In the III cen­tury AD. Dur­ing the Han Dyn­asty, along with re­lief print­ing, the "chop seal" began to de­vel­op, which was based on many small seals (stamps) called "chops". They were made by carving cal­li­graph­ic signs on the sur­face of jade, sil­ver, gold or ivory. By their prin­ciple of op­er­a­tion, these seals are ab­so­lutely sim­il­ar to mod­ern rub­ber stamps that many of us en­counter in our daily lives. To form an im­print, the user pressed the chop print in­to the red ink and then pressed against the me­dia (eg, pa­per, cloth, and the like). The names of their own­ers or the names of state in­sti­tu­tions were carved on these seals, thanks to the im­pres­sions of these seals, the au­then­ti­city of the work was con­firmed, doc­u­ments were cer­ti­fied, col­lect­ors marked the ob­jects that were in their pos­ses­sion. The only dif­fer­ence was that the print had white char­ac­ters on a red back­ground. It wasn't un­til the 15th cen­tury that Chinese ar­tis­ans began mak­ing neg­at­ive chops, in which the sym­bols turned red on a white back­ground.

Un­til the 8th cen­tury, both types of print­ing, with the use of stone matrices and with the help of carved seals, pre­vailed in China and act­ively de­veloped.

In the 8th cen­tury, China began to ex­port print­ing tech­no­logy to Ja­pan and Korea. On the basis of re­lief print­ing, a new type of prin­ted graph­ics (xy­lo­graphy) began to de­vel­op in these coun­tries, which al­lows print­ing im­ages (en­grav­ings) with amaz­ing ac­cur­acy and el­eg­ance. Wood­cut tech­no­logy con­sists in ap­ply­ing (cut­ting) the de­sired im­age onto a wooden sur­face with a sharp knife. This blank (mas­ter lay­out) was an ana­logue of the stone im­pres­sions men­tioned above, but had a much smal­ler area and weight. To ob­tain a prin­ted im­age, paint was ap­plied to the mas­ter lay­out, and pa­per was ap­plied on top un­der pres­sure. After com­plete dry­ing, a fant­ast­ic­ally de­tailed en­grav­ing ap­peared on the pa­per. Tech­no­lo­gic­ally, wood­cuts turned out to be very simple and ef­fect­ive. Hav­ing ad­ap­ted, an ex­per­i­enced print­er could pro­duce more than 200 prints per hour, which was a co­lossal break­through for those times.

Ac­cord­ing to lit­er­ary sources, China is the birth­place of this type of graph­ics, but this is not known for cer­tain. One of the earli­est prin­ted books that have come down to us us­ing wood­cuts, the Dia­mond Sutra, dates from May 11, 868. It con­sists of sev­en sheets of pa­per glued to­geth­er in the form of a scroll about 5 m long and 30 cm high. Six sheets of text con­vey the rev­el­a­tions of the Buddha to his fol­low­er Sub­huti, the sev­enth is an in­tric­ate line en­grav­ing de­pict­ing the Buddha and his dis­ciples. It was prin­ted by Wang Jie for wide and free dis­tri­bu­tion at the re­quest of his par­ents.

In the X cen­tury, the de­vel­op­ment of wood­cuts led to the cre­ation of block print­ing, fo­cused on print­ing char­ac­ters and im­ages on vari­ous me­dia (fab­ric, thick pa­per, met­al, and oth­ers). This type of print­ing made it pos­sible to cre­ate pa­per and silk money, play­ing cards and much more. Of course, this all gave im­petus to the de­vel­op­ment of graph­ic design.

The apo­gee of the Chinese con­tri­bu­tion to print­ing was the cre­ation in the 11th cen­tury by a simple black­smith Bi Shen of type­set­ting print­ing. He reasoned that each hiero­glyph­ic sym­bol should be placed on a sep­ar­ate clay form in the form of a cube (let­ter). The total num­ber of such cubes must cor­res­pond to the num­ber of ex­ist­ing hiero­glyphs. This will uni­fy the print­ing pro­cess and col­lect any text. The print­ing tech­no­logy was very ori­gin­al. Burnt clay cubes with hiero­glyphs were placed on a met­al sur­face. They were at­tached to it with res­in and wax. After their in­stall­a­tion, the met­al sur­face was heated, and a wooden board was placed on top, this made it pos­sible to align all the cubes in height. Next, the page lay­out was cooled, and it was com­pletely ready for use, it was only ne­ces­sary to ap­ply paint to the cubes and trans­fer it to the car­ri­er. After print­ing was com­pleted, the sur­face was heated again and the cubes were re­moved. This ap­proach saved a lot of print­ing time and was sub­sequently used in Europe.

It is sur­pris­ing that such a prin­ciple of type­set­ting was in­ven­ted in China, where at that time there were more than 40 thou­sand hiero­glyphs. Tak­ing in­to ac­count ad­di­tion­al char­ac­ters (spaces, lines, etc.), about 50 thou­sand clay let­ters were re­quired for print­ing, and, con­sequently, the la­bor­i­ous­ness of their pro­duc­tion was simply co­lossal. That is why this tech­no­logy could not be widely spread in China, un­like in Europe, where the al­pha­bet con­sisted of only a few dozen char­ac­ters.

A large back­log in the field of ty­po­graphy, which was made by East­ern cul­ture, gradu­ally began to spread throughout the world and in the 15th cen­tury came to Europe, where it de­veloped rap­idly. In the me­di­ev­al peri­od, Europe simply needed print­ing. The reas­ons are simple: the de­mand for edu­ca­tion grew rap­idly, and after it the de­mand for books. At the same time, as noted in the last art­icle, the books were very ex­pens­ive. For ex­ample, it took an av­er­age of 5 months to cre­ate a simple 200 page book. scribe's work and 25 sheep­skins needed for parch­ment. At the same time, its cost was com­par­able to the cost of a small farm or vine­yard. This led to the fact that in 1424 there were only 122 manuscript books in the Cam­bridge Uni­versity Lib­rary, while the num­ber of stu­dents stead­ily in­creased. That is why in Europe they sought to re­duce the cost of book pro­duc­tion.

The first tri­al works in Europe us­ing wood­cuts in­cluded play­ing cards and re­li­gious prints, which were in­ten­ded to be used as an af­ford­able al­tern­at­ive to costly paint­ings. In ad­di­tion, small re­li­gious books con­sist­ing of sev­er­al pages began to be pro­duced for the edu­ca­tion of il­lit­er­ate people. They prin­ted en­grav­ings on re­li­gious themes, mainly re­lated to the Apo­ca­lypse and the pre­par­a­tion of man for death. It is note­worthy that they were very sim­il­ar in design to mod­ern com­ics, and in fact they were the first ex­ample of prin­ted pro­pa­ganda, as they en­cour­aged people to give up their sav­ings and be­queath their prop­erty to the church.

For the middle and pros­per­ous class, books were made sep­ar­ately, their volume, as a rule, did not ex­ceed 50 sheets. In terms of design, they still used manu­al labor: wood­cut prints were painted by hand, met­al tin­sel, wooden in­serts, in­lay with colored quartz crys­tals and flock­ing (ap­ply­ing tex­tile fibers to book ele­ments) were used as book dec­or­a­tion ele­ments.

With the ad­vent of cheap (com­pared to parch­ment) pa­per in Europe, all book pub­lish­ers sought to mech­an­ize the pro­cess. “Ar­ti­fi­cial writ­ing”, as print­ing was then called, began to be prac­ticed in Ger­many, the Neth­er­lands, France and Italy. The ex­act birth­place of prin­ted books has not yet been de­term­ined. In the Neth­er­lands, it is be­lieved that print­ing was in­ven­ted by Laurens Jans­zo­on Cost­er, al­though there is no sci­entif­ic evid­ence for this, and this claim is based on or­al tra­di­tion. In France, a cer­tain Pro­copi­us Wald­foghel is con­sidered the dis­cover­er, who was en­gaged in the pro­duc­tion of steel let­ters of the al­pha­bet and taught “the secrets of ar­ti­fi­cial writ­ing” for money.

Jo­hannes Gens­fleisch zur Laden zum Guten­berg, a Ger­man ty­po­graph­er from Mainz, is cur­rently of­fi­cially re­cog­nized as the founder of book print­ing in Europe. There is reas­on to be­lieve that Guten­berg and Wald­fo­gel are the same per­son. In any case, the fact that it was Guten­berg who began us­ing mov­able type for print­ing around 1439 is un­deni­able. His in­ven­tion con­sisted of steel char­ac­ters, which he typed by hand in­to rows, columns and pages, and then with a spe­cial press made their im­pres­sion on pa­per. As you can see, the tech­no­logy is very sim­il­ar to Bi Shen's tech­no­logy used back in the 11th cen­tury.

Due to the high costs of de­vel­op­ing book pro­duc­tion tech­no­logy, Guten­berg was con­stantly in need of money. The main cred­it­or was Jo­hannes Fust, who later played a sad role in the fate of Guten­berg.

The first step was for Guten­berg to choose the font he would use when print­ing. He chose the clas­sic square tex­ture font (a type of Goth­ic writ­ing) as it was most com­monly used by Ger­man scribes of the time. His main goal was to achieve the iden­tity of prin­ted char­ac­ters with the hand-writ­ten char­ac­ters of cal­li­graph­ers. In the man­u­fac­ture of let­ters, Guten­berg im­proved this font-tex­ture, try­ing to get closer to the hand­writ­ten prac­tice of scribes, he cre­ated vari­ations in the pat­tern for the same let­ter. The Guten­berg font had 150-300 dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, in­stead of a min­im­um of 60-70 char­ac­ters.

Guten­berg ex­per­i­mented a lot and gained ex­per­i­ence in the field of print­ing. Ini­tially, he wanted to com­pletely aban­don the manu­al labor of scribes and il­lus­trat­ors. On the same page, he had to se­quen­tially print first black text, then col­or, and at the end en­grav­ings and or­na­ments us­ing wood­cuts. In prac­tice, he real­ized that such an ap­proach was un­ac­cept­able due to the high labor in­tens­ity, and de­cided to come to grips with only print­ing let­ters. The work was ex­tremely dif­fi­cult, but Guten­berg achieved his suc­cess. One of his best prin­ted works is a book called by his­tor­i­ans the 42 Line Bible or the Guten­berg Bible. In it, he em­bod­ied all his tech­no­lo­gic­al achieve­ments. Many mod­ern ty­po­graph­ers and de­sign­ers are sur­prised by the iden­tity of a prin­ted and hand­writ­ten book. This book is a two-volume book with a total of 1282 pages. On the first 9 pages there were 40 lines each, on the tenth page there were already 41 lines, and on the sub­sequent pages - already 42 lines each. It is dif­fi­cult to say wheth­er this was ori­gin­ally in­ten­ded, or wheth­er Gut­n­berg later de­cided to save money and in­crease the num­ber of lines per page. For dec­or­a­tion, he left empty spaces, which were drawn up by scribes. The cir­cu­la­tion was 210 cop­ies, 180 of which were prin­ted on pa­per, and 30 on parch­ment.

Un­for­tu­nately, for Gut­ten­berg, the whole story did not end well. In 1455, the Guten­berg Bible was al­most fin­ished, but Fust sud­denly sued Guten­berg for the re­turn of all the debt. Due to the lack of money, the court takes the side of Fust and ar­rests the print­ing house. Sub­sequently, the en­ter­pris­ing Fust quickly con­cludes a con­tract with Guten­berg's as­sist­ant Peter Schöffer (Peter Schöffer) and in 1457 com­pletes work on the Guten­berg Bible and the Psal­ter.

Things were go­ing up­hill and Fust and Schöffer later pub­lished a Lat­in Bible, works of Cicero, prin­ted leaf­lets and pamph­lets. In par­al­lel, Fust traveled around Europe (mainly to France) and sold prin­ted books, caus­ing genu­ine in­terest among loc­al res­id­ents (many of them saw in Fust the ma­gi­cian-sci­ent­ist Faust, the prot­ag­on­ist of the clas­sic­al Ger­man le­gend), and en­tre­pren­eurs - the de­sire to cap­it­al­ize on new tech­no­logy.

Iron­ic­ally, the rap­id spread of print­ing was fa­cil­it­ated by the bloody con­flict. The Ger­man nobles were in­volved in a power struggle that es­cal­ated in­to a full-scale war. Lead­ing a sig­ni­fic­ant army, Ad­olf II of Nas­sau (Ad­olf von Nas­sau-Wies­baden-Id­stein) in 1462 col­lapsed and sacked the city of Mainz, which was then the epi­cen­ter of print­ing in Europe. Loot­ing and loot­ing led to the fact that many print­ers and their stu­dents fled to oth­er cit­ies and coun­tries, tak­ing with them some of the equip­ment and know­ledge.

Print­ers who fled from Ger­many began to settle in oth­er cit­ies of Europe in or­der to con­tin­ue their prof­it­able busi­ness. They were es­pe­cially amazed by the Itali­an mas­ters, who made a great con­tri­bu­tion both to art in gen­er­al and to graph­ic design in par­tic­u­lar. Of all the places in Italy, Venice was the most suit­able for print­ing. It was there that the Ger­man print­ers set up their print­ing houses and es­tab­lished a mono­poly on the print­ing of books, which fell only in 1470. This was taken ad­vant­age of by the young French print­er Nic­olas Jen­son, who was at that time in Venice and opened his print­ing house.

Jen­son's per­son­al­ity is very in­ter­est­ing. He was con­sidered one of the fore­most de­sign­ers of typefaces, and he stud­ied ty­po­graphy in Mainz, Ger­many. Dur­ing his pro­lif­ic life, Jen­son de­veloped vari­ous vari­ations of Ro­man, Greek and Goth­ic fonts that looked ex­tremely or­gan­ic in the text. When cre­at­ing his fonts, he care­fully chose let­ter spa­cing (kern­ing) and the shape of the let­ters to cre­ate an even tone and har­mony throughout the page. Among more than 150 pub­lished books, from the point of view of type design, “Pre­par­a­tion for the Gos­pel” (De Prae­par­a­tio Evan­gel­ica) by Eu­se­bi­us of Caesarea is valu­able.

To identi­fy their books, many print­ers began to de­vel­op their own trade­marks. At first they used tex­tu­al and geo­met­ric sym­bols, and then moved on to her­aldry.

An­oth­er Ger­man pub­lish­er who worked in Venice is Er­hard Rat­dolt. He was able to print in full in 1476 the col­or book "Cal­en­dari­um", without the in­volve­ment of scribes and il­lus­trat­ors. It was the first book to have a fully prin­ted title page, con­tain­ing dia­grams of sol­ar and lun­ar ec­lipses us­ing black and yel­low, and red ink to high­light the de­sired pas­sage of text. Rat­dolt was in­ter­ested in math­em­at­ics and as­tro­nomy, so it is not sur­pris­ing that the books he pub­lished are mostly sci­entif­ic. His main mas­ter­piece in terms of graph­ic design is Eu­c­lid's Ele­ments, prin­ted in 1482. For its time, it was re­volu­tion­ary: the use of vari­ous col­ors in print­ing, the clar­ity of dec­or­a­tions, or­na­ments, geo­met­ric shapes and pat­terns - these are the few things that make de­sign­ers be sur­prised today.

Among the Itali­an print­ers, the print­er Aldo Manuzio, who also worked in Venice, stands out. His main mas­ter­piece was pub­lished in 1499 the nov­el by an un­known au­thor Po­l­i­phili Hyp­n­er­o­tom­a­chia. In this book, Ma­nu­ti­us was able to achieve an el­eg­ant har­mony of ty­po­graphy and il­lus­tra­tion. The com­mu­nic­at­ive co­her­ence of il­lus­tra­tions with text and the ex­cep­tion­al in­teg­ra­tion of im­ages and ty­po­graphy testi­fy to the fact that when cre­at­ing it, every­one (print­er, type de­sign­er, as well as il­lus­trat­or) worked in close co­oper­a­tion with each oth­er. By his or­der, unique ty­po­graph­ic fonts "Be­mbo", "Po­l­i­philus" were de­veloped, which can still be found today.

In gen­er­al, by the end of the 15th cen­tury, print­ing had cap­tured most of Europe. For ex­ample, by 1500, about 140 cit­ies in Europe already had their own print­ing houses, most of them were in Ger­many, Italy and France. For the first time, the num­ber of books began to ex­ceed the de­mand for them, Europe was in­und­ated with re­li­gious books, as well as the works of an­cient Greek and Ro­man philo­soph­ers. New types of prin­ted products ap­peared: pock­et books, posters, leaf­lets, bro­chures and the like. In terms of graph­ic design, the greatest con­tri­bu­tion was un­doubtedly made by Itali­an book print­ers. Flor­al dec­or­a­tions (flowers, vines, etc.) in­her­ent in the Renais­sance era were used as dec­or­a­tions for the pages of books. Com­pared to hand­writ­ten books, the design of prin­ted pages shows more re­straint, con­cise­ness and min­im­al­ism. For the first time in print, pa­gin­a­tion, curs­ive fonts, pat­terned cap­it­al let­ters com­posed ac­cord­ing to strict math­em­at­ic­al laws, cast met­al dec­or­a­tions, as well as in­nov­at­ive ap­proaches to the lay­out of il­lus­tra­tions and fonts began to be used.

At the be­gin­ning of the 16th cen­tury, the era of the Itali­an Renais­sance began to fade after the sack of Rome by the French. In 1515, after the as­cen­sion to the French throne of Fran­cis I, a new era in graph­ic design be­gins - the French Renais­sance. Many book print­ers from Italy began to move to France, tak­ing with them not only know­ledge and ex­per­i­ence, but also books. The French were amazed at the qual­ity and el­eg­ance of Vene­tian books.

Among French print­ers dur­ing this peri­od, two artists and type de­sign­ers, Geof­froy Tory and Claude Gara­mond, stand out. They worked to­geth­er on the design of many books, and their in­nov­at­ive con­tri­bu­tion to graph­ic design is so great that book print­ers used their designs un­til the 18th cen­tury.

Tory had a lot of know­ledge and was very fond of book design. One of his dis­cov­er­ies was the design of cap­it­al let­ters in books: he placed them in a square and care­fully se­lec­ted flor­al designs for them. They greatly en­livened the design of the pages of many books.

Tory's suc­cesses really began to be re­cog­nized after the pub­lic­a­tion in 1525 of a series of books "Book of Hours in the Name of the Most Holy Theo­tokos." In them, he fully re­vealed his tal­ent as an en­graver. The or­na­ments, frames and il­lus­tra­tions he cre­ated are har­mo­ni­ously woven in­to the text. Due to the use of thin lines, they are per­ceived very eas­ily and el­eg­antly.

In 1529, Tory pub­lished his own three-volume Champ Fleury, in which he veiledly shared his ex­per­i­ence and told the ba­sic laws in the field of book design and the cre­ation of types. In this three-volume book, he dis­cusses the his­tory of Lat­in let­ters, com­par­ing them with the pro­por­tions of the hu­man body, and also gives in­struc­tions for the cor­rect geo­met­ric con­struc­tion of French, Lat­in, Greek, and Hebrew let­ters.

For his great con­tri­bu­tion to print­ing, King Fran­cis I in 1530 called him "the print­er of the King of France."

Claude Gara­mond was an ex­cel­lent type de­sign­er and worked with Tory in his print­ing house un­til 1530. For his books he per­fec­ted Ro­man types. Sub­sequently, he cre­ated sev­er­al it­al­ics for Greek fonts. Gara­mond's artist­ic tal­ent is as great as his col­leagues Tory. In 1546, Jacques Kerv­er used his fonts for a French-lan­guage re­print of Po­l­i­phili Hyp­n­er­o­tom­a­chia. Gara­mond's type design was so beau­ti­ful from an aes­thet­ic point of view that for two hun­dred years (from 1550 to the mid-1750s) most ty­po­graph­ers used his types, only slightly re­fin­ing and chan­ging their forms.

In 1562, the con­flict between the French au­thor­it­ies and the church ended in a mas­sacre. In fact, the out­break of war put an end to the golden age of French ty­po­graphy. Many French Prot­est­ant print­ers fled to Switzer­land, Eng­land and the Neth­er­lands (es­pe­cially to the cit­ies of An­t­werp and Am­s­ter­dam) to es­cape re­li­gious strife, cen­sor­ship and harsh laws.

By the end of the 16th cen­tury, the tech­no­logy of wood­cuts had changed a little: cop­per en­grav­ings began to come in­to use in­stead of wood en­grav­ings. This al­lowed for more ac­cur­ate il­lus­tra­tions in books. The design of fonts and or­na­ments de­veloped rap­idly. Books be­came a mass phe­nomen­on, and the clergy ceased to be a mono­poly in the field of edu­ca­tion.

The 17th cen­tury was quieter for graph­ic design. In this cen­tury, the spread of print­ing throughout the world comes to the fore, for ex­ample, the first print­ing presses ap­pear in Amer­ica. Ob­vi­ously, the fonts, il­lus­tra­tions, or­na­ments, and design laws de­veloped earli­er for ty­po­graph­ic products com­pletely sat­is­fied the ma­jor­ity of book print­ers, so ad­di­tion­al in­nov­a­tions dur­ing this peri­od were un­ne­ces­sary.