: From Xylographs to Lead Molds; A.D. 1440-A.D. 1921 by Forster H C - Printing History; Electrotyping

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FROM XYLOGRAPHS TO LEAD MOLDS

AD 1440 AD 1921

FOREWORD

Printing has been called "the art preservative of all arts." The invention of individual movable cast-metal type, between A. D. 1440 and 1446, made printing a commercial possibility.

The subsequent rapid spread of the art, in the hands of students and craftsmen, may be said to have been the centrifugal force of the Renaissance and the Revival of Learning, which age, if it can be chronologically delimited, began A. D. 1453.

Printing divulged to the masses the ancient classics which had been locked up in monasteries and accessible only to clerics and the nobility. The common people began to read. Education became popularized.

This brochure is a brief history of the evolution from xylographs to the methods used today for duplicating a typographical printing surface in a solid piece.

INDIVIDUAL MOVABLE CAST-METAL TYPE

The art of writing, and that of printing from wooden blocks, and all the subsidiary arts of illuminating, decorating and binding manuscripts and books, had long passed out of the exclusive hands of the monasteries into the hands of students and artisans, before printing with individual movable cast-metal type was invented. This epoch making invention came into practical use between A. D. 1440 and 1446.

When, therefore, Johannes Koelhoff of Lubeck, Germany, printed the "Cologne Chronicle" in 1499, he used individual movable cast-metal type. Typographic printing had long before superseded Xylographic printing, that is, printing from a solid block of wood on which type of an entire page were cut individually by hand.

Between the invention of individual movable cast-metal type and the perfection by the Earl of Stanhope of his printing-press, , very few improvements had been made in the mechanics of printing. Everything we know today about the art has come into use since 1799, and if Koelhoff had come to life in 1799 and been permitted to resume his occupation of printer, he would have found himself practically familiar with the mechanical equipment of his craft as used in the establishment of the Stanhope Press in that last year of the eighteenth century.

Centuries before 1440 printing is believed to have been attempted in China; presumably about the beginning of the Christian era. It is said that in the year A. D. 175 the text of the Chinese classics was cut into tablets which were erected outside the national university at Peking, and that impressions--probably rubbings--were taken of them. Some of these fac-simile impressions are still in existence, it is asserted.

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