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Introductory.—Letter-press Printing the “Divine and Noble” Art—why so termed.—Freedom of the Press—where first proclaimed.—Printing known in China from time immemorial.—Method of Chinese printing.—Bibliography and Palæotypography.

Printing is the art of producing copies of engraved writings or designs, by pressure, either upon the inked surfaces of characters raised in relief, or on metal plates, the upper surfaces of which are polished, and the sunk engravings charged with colour. The most important, if not the oldest branch of this art, is that of Typography, or Letter-press Printing. To this Art, as it was invented and perfected in Europe in the Fifteenth century, the epithets Divine and Noble have not untruly been applied.

It is Noble, not merely because it is one of those arts or professions, the practice of which was permitted to the nobility of the German Empire, but because it is the nurse and preserver of all other arts and sciences; and is unquestionably the most important as well as the most beneficial invention the world has ever seen. It is the disseminator of every other discovery; the commemorator of all other inventions: it hands down to posterity every important event; immortalizes the actions of the great and good; and requires, moreover, in all who would thoroughly excel in its practice, the highest attainable combination of mental alacrity, educated intelligence, and expert manual dexterity.

It is Divine, inasmuch as it is one of the grand instruments in the hands of Providence for the regeneration of fallen humanity. By it the mightiest movement the world has ever seen since the days when the Apostolic Twelve went about “turning it upside down,”—the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth century—was mainly effected. Without it the Word of God could not have been diffused, as it has been, is being, and will continue to be, to every nation and tribe and people and tongue throughout the world: while but for it England and the Anglo-Saxon race, who owe it so much for the stability and uniformity it gave to their language,[1] would never have attained their present proud pre-eminence amongst the nations of the earth.

Religion, Arts, Sciences, Commerce, and Civilization, have had the greatest scope, and been most fully developed, wherever the Press has been the least restricted. Its free action is as necessary to the well being of a State, as the free action of the lungs is to the well being of the human body. This is well illustrated in the history of unhappy Poland, where the Liberty of the Press was first proclaimed in the Sixteenth century. But the narrow-minded bigots who succeeded the monarch who proclaimed it, beheld in it a portent foreboding evil to themselves; and they not only speedily abrogated it, but followed up that step with measures destructive of the most cherished privileges of the Polish nation.[2] The result was fatal, as well to the country as to the kings who misruled it. Corrupted, crushed, enslaved—every vent for the expression of patriotic feeling choked up—and the voice of the people stifled by the stern gripe of the strong hand of the despot—the doom went forth, and the record against her was written as against Great Babylon of old—“Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”

The Freedom of the Press is the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon race—the hard-won palladium of all other rights; and yet, while there are few amongst that race who do not rightly appreciate the blessings flowing therefrom, the great majority are ignorant of the origin or the history of the Art, the privileges of which they so highly prize, and over which, with watchful jealousy, they guard against every thing that bears the semblance of encroachment. This ignorance is doubtless, in the main, owing to the expensive nature and technical character of many of the works in which such information has been published. These works, forming of themselves a distinct class of literature, are neither few in number, nor wanting in interest. Some of the more important are indeed hardly procurable; and in the far East, where works of the kind must be imported for individual use, writing upon special subjects of European lore is beset with difficulties from which authors in the mother country are happily relieved.[3] Acting however, on the maxim of Lord Bacon, “that every man is a debtor to his profession, from the which as men do, of course, seek to receive countenance and profit, so ought they, of duty, to endeavour themselves by way of amends to be a help thereunto,” I have spared no pains in this endeavour; and am not without hope of imparting to my readers some interesting particulars concerning the origin and history of the Noble Art

“That stamps, renews, and multiplies at will,

And cheaply circulates through distant climes

The fairest relics of the purest times,”—

thus creating “a moral atmosphere which is, as it were, the medium of intellectual life, on the quality of which, according as it may be salubrious or vicious, the health of the public mind depends.”[4]

Printing from surfaces of wood, engraved in relief, is an art which appears to have been known in China from time immemorial. Its origin there is hidden in the obscurity of bye-gone ages: it may have been practised by the Chinese from the very commencement of their empire;[5] or the idea may have been derived at a later period from blotting-paper impressions of writings, or from tracings or rubbings of inscriptions, which travellers from ‘the flowery land’ may have taken, in foreign countries, on sheets of paper, such as are known to have been manufactured in China from times of a very remote antiquity, and which are to this day better adapted for such purposes than any papers elsewhere made. Such rubbings, forming a kind of papier-mâché castings,[6] would naturally suggest, not only the idea of stereo-blocks, whereon writings in reversed characters could be engraved in relief, but also the mode of printing, which, to the present day, prevails throughout the Chinese empire. With the fact before us, that the Chinese were, up to a certain period in their history, far ahead of all other nations, not even excepting the Egyptians, in the development of inventions which could only be the product of an advanced state of civilization, it is not unreasonable to conclude, (especially in the absence of positive information to help us in our researches), that the art of printing from blocks originated in China in the manner above stated. Whether such were the case or not, Du Halde, in order to establish its great antiquity, cites the following proverb, quoted by an old author as written by the Emperor Van Vong, who flourished 1120 years before Christ—“As the stone Me (a word signifying ink in the Chinese language) which is used to blacken the engraved characters, can never become white, so a heart blackened with vices, will always retain its blackness.” This quotation, however, not being very conclusive on the subject, he fixes the invention at fifty years before the Christian era.

Father Couplet, Klaproth, and others, ascribe it to a much later date. “Under the reign of Mint-song,” writes Klaproth, “in the second of the years Tchang-hing (932) the ministers Fong-tao and Li-yu proposed to the Academy Koue-tseu-kien to review the nine king or canonical books, and to have them engraved upon blocks of wood, that they might be printed and sold. The emperor adopted the advice; but it was only in the second of the years Kouan-chun (952) that the engraving of the blocks was completed. They were then distributed and circulated in all the cantons of the empire.”

But that the art was known and practised by the Chinese at a period still more remote, we learn from the 39th volume of the Chinese Encyclopædia, where we are informed, that on the eighth day of the twelfth month of the thirteenth year of the reign of Wen-ti, founder of the Souï dynasty (593) it was ordered by a decree to collect the worn out drawings and inedited texts, and to engrave them on wood and publish them. This fact is confirmed by various Chinese writings; and this, continues the work quoted, was the commencement of printing upon wooden blocks. Under the Thang dynasty, from 618 to 907, it grew much into use; made still greater progress during the five lesser dynasties, from 907 to 960; and reached its perfection and greatest development between 960 and 1278. But as block-printing was only for the first time imperially ordered in the year 593, it is very probable that the art was known long before that date. Had it then been a new invention, something surely would have been said about its origin and author.

The following particulars relative to Chinese printing are given by Du Halde.

“The work intended to be printed is transcribed by a careful writer upon thin transparent paper: the engraver glues each of these written sheets, with its face downwards, upon a smooth tablet of pear or apple tree, or some other hard wood; and then with gravers and other instruments, he cuts the wood away in all those parts upon which he finds nothing traced [as in the fac-simile[7] in the margin]; thus leaving the reversed characters ready for printing. … When once the blocks are engraved, the paper is cut, and the ink is ready, one man with his brush can, without fatigue, print ten thousand sheets in a day. The block to be printed must be placed level, and firmly fixed. The man must have two brushes; one of them of a stiffer kind, which he can hold in his hand, and use at either end. He dips this into the ink, and rubs the block with it; taking care not to wet it too much, nor to leave it too dry. … The second brush is used to rub over the paper with a small degree of pressure, that it may take the impression: this it does easily, for not being sized with alum, it receives the ink the instant it comes in contact with it. It is only necessary that the brush should be passed over every part of the sheet with a greater or smaller degree of pressure, and repeated in proportion as the printer finds there is more or less ink upon the block.”

The number of copies which, according to Du Halde, a Chinese workman can print in a day, is greatly exaggerated. About four thousand, or four hundred an hour, is the utmost that the most expert workman would be able to throw off.

To the above account it may be added, that the blocks, each containing two pages, are frequently engraved on both sides; that the sheets printed are small, and impressed on one side only; and that each sheet when dry is folded back, so as to present the appearance of a leaf impressed on both sides.

The history of printing in China, and the productions of the Chinese press, are subjects which Oriental bibliographers have more or less touched upon. Interesting as they are, there will probably be no occasion to allude to them in these pages more than once again.

But the history of books in Europe, the productions of the early printers in the various countries to which they carried their art, is one to which our subject is most closely allied; and European bibliography is a study to which many men of great ability have devoted themselves during the last three centuries, in Germany, Holland, England, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, and other countries. To their labours all later writers on the subject are under manifold obligations.[8] But in attributing various undated books to one or other of the earliest established presses, guess-work, and the bias of national prejudice, have largely prevailed amongst even the most painstaking of European bibliographers. This unscientific method, long felt to be a reproach to learning and literature, has of late years been attempted to be remedied by a more close and critical examination of the Incunabula, or books printed in the Fifteenth century. “The method of arranging these early books under the countries, towns, and presses at which they were produced,” says Mr. Henry Bradshaw, the Librarian of the University of Cambridge, “is the only one which can really advance our knowledge of the subject. This is comparatively easy with dated books, though there is no safeguard against the misleading nature of an erroneous date. But the study is of little use unless the bibliographer will be content to make such an accurate and methodical study of the types used and habits of printing observable at different presses, as to enable him to observe and be guided by these characteristics in settling the date of a book which bears no date on the surface. We do not want the opinion or dictum of any bibliographer, however experienced; we desire that the types and habits of each printer should be made a special subject of study, and those points brought forward which shew changes or advance from year to year, or where practicable, from month to month. When this is done, we have to say of any dateless or falsely dated book, that it contains such and such characteristics, and we therefore place it at such a point of time, the time we name being merely another expression for the characteristics we notice in the book. In fact each press must be looked upon as a genus, and each book as a species, and our business is to trace the more or less close connection of the different members of the family, according to the characters which they present to our observation.”

The study thus defined is designated Palæotypography; and concerning it Mr. Bradshaw further says, “except Mr. Blades’s monograph of Caxton’s press,[9] the Hague Catalogus[10] and Monumens Typographiques[11] are the only books existing in any literature, so far as I know, which render the study of palæotypography in any way possible upon a proper basis. Germany, Italy, France, and Spain, are at present perfectly impracticable fields of work, and are, I fear, likely to remain so for some time to come.”[12]

Respecting Mr. Bradshaw’s own labours in this field of investigation, Mr. Frederick Müller of Amsterdam, an enthusiastic bibliographer of rare power, bears the following testimony:[13]—“Hardly anybody in England takes an interest in foreign bibliography—the only exception being that excellent bibliographer, Henry Bradshaw, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, who is examining with great enthusiasm the Incunabula Typographica, and who has lately arrived at most surprising and important results in this department. … I do not know which most to admire—the acumen of the conjectures about the places where some of the works were printed, or the clearness with which the writer treats several very difficult subjects. … This method of ascribing a work solely from the appearance of the types used, he carries to the utmost point of application. … Mr. Bradshaw is the first who turns to advantage the excellent lessons of the French and German bibliographers, and through him a new light will probably arise in English bibliography.”

To the researches of Mr. Bradshaw and Mr. Blades, and to the labours of Mr. Ottley[14] and Mr. Humphreys,[15] in their last published works, I am greatly indebted. The interesting information they have accumulated I have freely made use of in the preparation of this volume, although I differ considerably from some of the conclusions which one or other of them has arrived at.