Print Culture and the Modern World

1 153 Print CultureIt is difficult for us to imagine a World without printed matter. Wefind evidence of Print everywhere around us in books, journals,newspapers, prints of famous paintings, and also in everyday thingslike theatre programmes, official circulars, calendars, diaries,advertisements, cinema posters at street corners. We read printedliterature, see printed images, follow the news through newspapers,and track public debates that appear in Print . We take for grantedthis World of Print and often forget that there was a time beforeprint. We may not realise that Print itself has a history which has, infact, shaped our contemporary World . What is this history? Whendid printed literature begin to circulate? How has it helped createthe Modern World ?In this chapter we will look at the development of Print , from itsbeginnings in East Asia to its expansion in europe and in India.

2 Wewill understand the impact of the spread of technology and considerhow social lives and cultures changed with the coming of Culture and the Modern WorldChapter VIIP rint Culture and the Modern WorldFig. 1 Book making before the age of Print , fromAkhlaq-i-Nasiri, is a royal workshop in the sixteenth century,much before printing began in India. You can seethe text being dictated, written and illustrated. Theart of writing and illustrating by hand wasimportant in the age before Print . Think aboutwhat happened to these forms of art with thecoming of printing and the Contemporary World1541 The First Printed BooksFig. 2 A page from the Diamond earliest kind of Print technology was developed in China, Japanand Korea. This was a system of hand printing.

3 From AD 594onwards, books in China were printed by rubbing paper alsoinvented there against the inked surface of woodblocks. As bothsides of the thin, porous sheet could not be printed, the traditionalChinese accordion book was folded and stitched at the skilled craftsmen could duplicate, with remarkable accuracy,the beauty of imperial state in China was, for a very long time, the majorproducer of printed material. China possessed a huge bureaucraticsystem which recruited its personnel through civil serviceexaminations. Textbooks for this examination were printed in vastnumbers under the sponsorship of the imperial state. From thesixteenth century, the number of examination candidates went upand that increased the volume of the seventeenth century, as urban Culture bloomed in China, theuses of Print diversified.

4 Print was no longer used just by scholar-officials. Merchants used Print in their everyday life, as they collectedtrade information. Reading increasingly became a leisure new readership preferred fictional narratives, poetry,autobiographies, anthologies of literary masterpieces, and romanticplays. Rich women began to read, and many women beganpublishing their poetry and plays. Wives of scholar-officials publishedtheir works and courtesans wrote about their new reading Culture was accompanied by a new printing techniques and mechanical presses were importedin the late nineteenth century as Western powers established theiroutposts in China. Shanghai became the hub of the new Print Culture ,catering to the Western-style schools. From hand printing there wasnow a gradual shift to mechanical Print in JapanBuddhist missionaries from China introduced hand-printingtechnology into Japan around AD 768-770.

5 The oldest Japanese book,printed in AD 868, is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, containing six sheetsof text and woodcut illustrations. Pictures were printed on textiles,New wordsCalligraphy The art of beautiful and stylisedwriting155 Print Cultureplaying cards and paper money. In medieval Japan, poets andprose writers were regularly published, and books were cheapand of visual material led to interesting publishing practices. Inthe late eighteenth century, in the flourishing urban circles at Edo(later to be known as Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintingsdepicted an elegant urban Culture , involving artists, courtesans, andteahouse gatherings. Libraries and bookstores were packed withhand-printed material of various types books on women, musicalinstruments, calculations, tea ceremony, flower arrangements, properetiquette, cooking and famous 1 Kitagawa Utamaro, born in Edo in 1753, was widely known forhis contributions to an art form called ukiyo ( pictures of the floatingworld ) or depiction of ordinary human experiences, especially urbanones.

6 These prints travelled to contemporary US and europe andinfluenced artists like Manet, Monet and Van Gogh. Publishers likeTsutaya Juzaburo identified subjects and commissioned artists whodrew the theme in outline. Then a skilled woodblock carver pastedthe drawing on a woodblock and carved a printing block toreproduce the painter s lines. In the process, the original drawingwould be destroyed and only prints would 3 An ukiyoprint by 4 A morning scene,ukiyo Print by ShunmanKubo, late man looks out of thewindow at the snowfall whilewomen prepare tea andperform other and the Contemporary World1562 Print Comes to EuropeFor centuries, silk and spices from China flowed into europe throughthe silk route. In the eleventh century, Chinese paper reached Europevia the same route.

7 Paper made possible the production ofmanuscripts, carefully written by scribes. Then, in 1295, Marco Polo,a great explorer, returned to Italy after many years of exploration inChina. As you read above, China already had the technology ofwoodblock printing. Marco Polo brought this knowledge back withhim. Now Italians began producing books with woodblocks, andsoon the technology spread to other parts of europe . Luxuryeditions were still handwritten on very expensive vellum, meant foraristocratic circles and rich monastic libraries which scoffed at printedbooks as cheap vulgarities. Merchants and students in the universitytowns bought the cheaper printed the demand for books increased, booksellers all over Europebegan exporting books to many different countries.

8 Book fairs wereheld at different places. Production of handwritten manuscripts wasalso organised in new ways to meet the expanded demand. Scribesor skilled handwriters were no longer solely employed by wealthyor influential patrons but increasingly by booksellers as well. Morethan 50 scribes often worked for one the production of handwritten manuscripts could not satisfythe ever-increasing demand for books. Copying was an expensive,laborious and time-consuming business. Manuscripts were fragile,awkward to handle, and could not be carried around or read circulation therefore remained limited. With the growingdemand for books, woodblock printing gradually became moreand more popular. By the early fifteenth century, woodblocks werebeing widely used in europe to Print textiles, playing cards, andreligious pictures with simple, brief was clearly a great need for even quicker and cheaperreproduction of texts.

9 This could only be with the invention of anew Print technology. The breakthrough occurred at Strasbourg,Germany, where Johann Gutenberg developed the first-knownprinting press in the wordsVellum A parchment made from the skinof animalsImagine that you are Marco Polo. Write a letterfrom China to describe the World of Print whichyou have seen CultureNew wordsPlaten In letterpress printing, platen is a board which ispressed onto the back of the paper to get the impression fromthe type. At one time it used to be a wooden board; later itwas made of Gutenberg and the Printing PressGutenberg was the son of a merchant and grew up on a largeagricultural estate. From his childhood he had seen wine and olivepresses. Subsequently, he learnt the art of polishing stones, became amaster goldsmith, and also acquired the expertise to create leadmoulds used for making trinkets.

10 Drawing on this knowledge,Gutenberg adapted existing technology to design his olive press provided the model for the printing press, and mouldswere used for casting the metal types for the letters of the 1448, Gutenberg perfected the system. The first book he printedwas the Bible. About 180 copies were printed and it took threeyears to produce them. By the standards of the time this was new technology did not entirely displace the existing art ofproducing books by fact, printed books at first closely resembled the writtenmanuscripts in appearance and layout. The metal letters imitated theornamental handwritten styles. Borders were illuminated by handwith foliage and other patterns, and illustrations were painted. In thebooks printed for the rich, space for decoration was kept blank onthe printed page.