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Print Technology and Society

Gutenberg is rightly lauded for his resourcefulness, inventiveness, and skill, but the impact of printing was more a manifestation of social change than of a single technological innovation. Print technology fueled or accelerated social developments, but at the same time it was as a response to them. Moreover, print technology is a complex system of interactions rather than just a single machine — it involves technologies of paper-making, ink production, metal-casting, distribution, and so on. These technologies differed between East and West, in part because of the materials available, so movable-type printing differed as well.³

What is printing for? Printing is above all a duplicating process, and Gutenberg was the Xerox of his time.⁴ Printing does not directly produce knowledge, it facilitates the spread of existing knowledge. Therefore, the first requirement for the development of printing is a demand for texts and for duplication of documents. In Gutenberg’s Europe such demand was exploding, and printing responded to this existing market — demand for books was so great in the mid-fifteenth century that a single bookseller might employ 500 scribes; by the end of the century there were 150 printing presses in Venice alone, and nearly 15 million books had been printed. The happy result for many publishers was a dynamic in which increasing supply fed increasing demand.

But there is another, perhaps less evident, function of printing. This is standardization. To generalize, the duplicative function was given more weight in the West and the standardizing function more weight in East Asia. The reason for this lies in the different social contexts of printing in the two areas. In the West, early Renaissance printing had a subversive tinge—in the Italianate states where it first caught hold in a major way it was associated with capitalist enterprise that tended to undercut the authority of church and nobility by creating new sources of wealth and by extending publications beyond the inner circles of the traditional literate elite.⁵

Pages from the Selected Teachings of Buddhist Sages and Son Masters (Pulcho Chikchi Simch’e Yoyol), the earliest extant book printed with movable metal type, dated 1377, Hungdok-sa Temple, Korea (Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris; Koreana 7, no. 2, 20-21).

In East Asia, and especially in Korea, where printing with movable metal type was perfected, the situation was different. During the period when this process was regularly used, Korea was governed by the Goryeo dynasty, which had made Buddhism a state religion. In the face of a looming Mongol threat, Goryeo scriptoria were charged with making copies of the Buddhist canon (called the Tripitaka) in order to preserve the Buddhist dharma. (This was a large project — the first Korean woodblock printing of the Tripitaka, from about 1014, consisted of 5,058 chapters, and later editions substantially enlarged the total. This required more than 130,000 blocks, for which a special storehouse had to be built.) But copyists sometimes imposed, whether intentionally or accidentally, differences in rendering the texts. Since the documents represented Buddhist scriptural orthodoxy it was important for doctrinal reasons that they be standardized. Movable type may have been seen as contributing to such standardization by codifying the character set and enabling multiple documents to be produced from the same set of materials rather than being assigned to different carvers.

Scholars waiting for the results of the civil service exam to be posted. Handscroll attributed to Qiu Ling (active 1530–1552) (National Palace Museum, Taiwan).

The Chinese-style civil service examination system, which was exported to Korea at least by the time of the unification of its states in the seventh century, also contributed to a demand for standardization. A national institute for higher education was established, and private schools existed in various parts of the country to prepare students for the state-run exams. When a provincial school complained about the unreliability of texts, the government ordered copies of books made and delivered to the provincial capital.⁶ Thus in East Asia, both for reasons of state and reasons of religion, printing was not subversive but state-mandated, and its primary motivation was as much standardization as duplication.

The Mongol empire spread knowledge of printing. Chinese book production was described in detail by one of the most important chroniclers of the Mongol period, the Persian official Rashid al-Din, in his early fourteenth-century history. According to Rashid, “when any book was desired, a copy was made by a skillful calligrapher on tablets and carefully corrected by proof-readers whose names were inscribed on the back of the tablets. The letters were then cut out by expert engravers, and all pages of the books consecutively numbered. When completed, the tablets were placed in sealed bags to be kept by reliable persons, and if anyone wanted a copy of the book, he paid the charges fixed by the government. The tablets were then taken out of the bags and imposed on leaves of paper to obtain the printed sheets as desired. In this way, alterations could not be made and documents could be faithfully transmitted.”⁷ Rashid’s report confirms that control of texts was a primary motivation for Chinese printing. It also establishes beyond any doubt that detailed knowledge of woodblock printing was transmitted across the Mongol empire from East Asia to West Asia. It is likely that information about cast-type printing would have been similarly conveyed.

From a letter from the Il-khan Arghun to Philip the Fair of France, in Uighur script, dated 1289.

The Persian Ilkhanate (one of the four states of the Mongol empire) was at this time in regular contact not just with East Asia but also with Europe (in part because the Persian and the European states shared a common enemy in the Mamluk Sultanate), frequently exchanging emissaries and documents. Indeed, Rashid himself gives a full account of the arrival of the embassy with which Marco Polo reported returning from China.⁸ Rashid also demonstrated the Ilkhanate’s interest in Europe by writing a History of the Franks, which reveals a fair understanding of Western Europe, considering that “the Muslims regarded Europe as a remote and barbarous area, hardly worth the attention of a civilized man.”⁹

Popes (left) and emperors (right), from Rashid al-Din, History of the Franks, ca. 1307.

In the face of such evidence it seems more likely that news of Asian innovations in printing reached Europe, and the record of that news has been lost to us, than that no hint of these highly developed technologies traveled the well-worn routes of land and sea.

The Polos with Khubilai Khan, from an English ms. of ca. 1400.

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Notes

3 See Hanbutt-Benz for a discussion of some of the technical differences. [return]

4 Photocopying is a type of printing. The internet, on the other hand, inverts printing’s solution to the replication of documents. While printing creates many copies, each providing one view at a time, the internet enables one document to have multiple simultaneous views. Therefore it can be regarded as a profound technological development, comparable in magnitude to printing. [return]

5 According to Marshall McLuhan, “Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such” (255). The democratizing element of printing may seem inevitable from the perspective of the European tradition — to Helmutt Lehmann-Haupt, for example, “it seems quite understandable that printing … should have become associated with popular and democratic rather than aristocratic levels of cultural expression” (75). But this is not as strongly the case from the Asian perspective. [return]

6 Sohn (1959), 96–97. [return]

7 Tsien, 306–307. [return]

8 His account completely confirms Marco Polo’s—except that nowhere is Polo mentioned. [return]

9 Morgan, 193 [return]

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