Woodblock Printing

For about a month now, my posts have been focused on the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia. The Sumerians are celebrated as having developed the first writing system. So, thankfully, this has given me a wealth of information to work with in our Written Knowledge unit.

            As we are transitioning to talking about printing, I felt a little bit uncomfortable as I suddenly lacked direction in my research. However, I decided to try and find out anything I could about printing in its earliest stages. I stumbled upon the process called “Woodblock Printing”. This method emerged in China in about the year 200 and was used widely in East Asia as a method for printing on textiles, and later, paper.

            A woodblock can best be described as a type of primitive stamp. The white parts, or what you don’t want to be printed, are cut away. This leaves a design at a higher level, which is subsequently inked and then pressed onto a cloth, or whatever material is chosen. However, sometimes instead of stamping, they would use a rubbing method. In this case, the block is placed face up on a table or similar surface. The cloth, or paper in later times, is then placed on top of the block and “the back of the block is rubbed with a "hard pad, a flat piece of wood, a burnisher, or a leather frotton” (source). The process was arduous. Each block had to be hand cut, and there was no “press” available for use at the time.

A more artistic wood block

(This video demonstrates the artistic use of woodblock printing, but the same techniques apply for the written word.)

            The woodblock printing technique is not far removed from the intricate clay cylinder seals I talked about in a previous post that were developed in early Mesopotamia. These cylinder seals were rolled onto clay tablets where they left an impress, often amazingly intricate. Small seals always preceded larger seals, and eventually the Chinese were using woodblock printing to print solid text. It has been found that the technique was being used in Asia several hundred years before it caught on in Europe.

            Techniques for setting movable print were being developed in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, culminating in Gutenberg’s printing press. However, for the Chinese, the woodblock technique was more desirable for a long time.

“Because Chinese has a character set running into the thousands, woodblock printing suits it better than movable type to the extent that characters only need to be created as they occur in the text. Although the Chinese had invented a form of movable type with baked clay in the 11th century, and metal movable type was invented in Korea in the 13th century,[7] woodblocks continued to be preferred owing to the formidable challenges of typesetting Chinese text with its 40,000 or more characters. Also, the objective of printing in the East may have been more focused on standardization of ritual text (such as the Buddhist canon Tripitaka, requiring 130,000 woodblocks), and the purity of validated woodblocks could be maintained for centuries.[8] When there was a need for the reproduction of a text, the original block could simply be brought out again, while moveable type necessitated error-prone composition of distinct "editions".”

This paragraph fascinated me as it brought into play some of the questions of standardization that Dr. Burton raised in his last lecture. The woodblock texts held more authority because they were “set in stone”, or more literally, wood. More advanced methods of printing would eventually replace the woodblock technique, but the accuracy and standardized nature of this process were advantages that kept the technique relevant.

Standardization is most important when dealing with divine religious texts. Since most, if not all religious texts claim to be the word of God or from a sphere greater than man, it would be important to preserve with absolute precision the original text. The evolution of the Bible as it was produced in various editions is a perfect example. Had the Bible been produced with woodblock printing (an excruciatingly painstaking and time intensive process), there could be very little ambiguity when discussing accuracy. However, the Bible had already been translated and written by hand many times before it was put into print.  Also, the text was only standardized for that printing press. As Dr. Burton discussed, different printers throughout various regions could be attempting to reproduce essentially the same information, but discrepancies could not be avoided until standardization measures were conscientiously put in place. Whether or not these discrepancies were intentional is fuel for an entirely different discussion.