Print Media

As an extension of stone carvings, calligraphy, and hand-painted illustrations, printing began as a means of disseminating cultural and religious artifacts to elite audiences, but it soon developed larger readerships as it both benefited from and fostered more widespread literacy. This entry traces the development of printing, from its initial role as the first consumer-oriented, mass-production process capable of creating identical copies using interchangeable parts to that of a facilitator and promoter of the Industrial Revolution, mass consumer culture, advertising, marketing, and the eventual enthronement of upper-middle-class personal lifestyle as the epitome of culture and taste.

Although many in the West think of Johannes Gutenberg as the inventor of the printing press, printing, even with movable type, has an older provenance in Asia. Around the time of Augustus Caesar, the Chinese had been taking paper rubbings of engravings of their classic texts on commemorative stone slabs or pillars. In the sixth and seventh centuries CE, they began reproducing images and spells on silk and later on paper, another Chinese invention. Somewhat later, the technique of printing booklets from carved wooden blocks was developed, reaching its height in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This technique, called xylography, was well suited to cultural artifacts of iconic significance and a script consisting of tens of thousands of characters. Still, the Chinese worked assiduously on the problem of printing with movable characters that could be used in more than one work. Further development moves to Korea, whose first king, T'aejo (1392–1398), published a series of xylographic books and whose successor, T'agong, decreed in 1403 the casting of movable characters in bronze and lead. The height of Korean typography was reached under King Sejong (1418–1450), who was responsible for the creation of a Korean alphabet, achieved in 1441, so as to spread the written word among the people.

While the Chinese developed their own system of movable types soon after this, they remained attached to xylographic books, and even in Korea, King Sejong's democratizing intentions went unrealized until the twentieth century. No large consumer market for books emerged before then in Asia, largely because of the aristocratic and conservative mind-set of reading and learning, fostered not only by the Confucian educational system but also by the difficulty of learning the Chinese script. In addition, King Sejong undermined his own efforts by prohibiting the sale of books printed in the palace, which left them in the hands of the social and administrative elites.