Printing

as usually understood, the production of reading matter or cuts on paper or other material by means of type and ink. The ancient Assyrians appear to have possessed the art of printing from tablets of burnt clay. As early certainly as the sixth century, the Chinese and Japanese printed passages from their religious books by means of movable wooden blocks. These they arranged as we do metal type. A few centuries later they used movable type of porcelain. The British Museum possesses books printed in Korea as early as 1337. The seal of Cicero's day, with which an impression was made in sealing wax, was, in its way, a kind of type. To go no farther back, William the Conqueror and other princes of his day had monograms engraved on blocks of wood with which to sign charters. They were used, no doubt, somewhat after the fashion of the rubber stamps now found in offices.

During the Middle Ages books were made by hand. Writing, copying, and illuminating were fine arts. Printing from wooden blocks on silk cloth, vellum, and paper seems to have made its appearance in Europe as early as the twelfth century. Entire books were produced in this way. Each page was engraved on a block of wood. Sometimes one part of the page was devoted to a picture and the rest to text. Whether picture or text, each page was practically a woodcut. Playing cards were produced likewise from a set of blocks. Books produced in this way were not uncommon in 1400. Block printing may be regarded as the immediate ancestor of the art of printing as now practiced.

The honor of inventing movable types is ascribed usually to Johann Gutenberg, who labored in secret at Strasburg and made his processes known in his native city of Mainz in 1456. Gutenberg's types were small blocks of wood. Peter Schoeffer, his assistant, is thought to have suggested metallic type cast in plaster molds. The various sizes of type were indicated formerly by names as great primer, English, pica, small pica, long primer, bourgeois, brevier, minion, nonpareil, agate, pearl, diamond, and brilliant. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, sizes were indicated more closely by numbers as follows:

The body of the text in this work is printed in ten point. Many of the quotations are printed in eight point.

The first printing presses were modifications merely of an old-fashioned wooden cheese press or cider press. The essential parts of the press were contained between two upright wooden beams. When ready for printing, the type, or form, as it is called, was placed, face upward, on a bed similar to that designed to receive cheese. It was then inked with a ball of soft leather. A sheet of paper was spread over the type. An upper surface, called a platen, was pressed down upon the paper by means of a wooden screw. When an impression had been made the screw was reversed, the sheet of paper removed, the type re-inked, and another sheet put in place. It is claimed that the printing done with these simple presses has not been surpassed for quality of workmanship.

The press used by Benjamin Franklin in London in 1725 possessed a device for rolling the bed in and out to facilitate the handling of the paper. A press of this sort is shown in the patent office at Washington. In 1816 George Clymer, a Philadelphia manufacturer, devised a system of quick acting levers to take the place of the tedious screw. London printers suggested toggle-joints, a device by means of which a great pressure can be applied quickly. From this time on the improvement of printing presses went on very rapidly. The number of patents both in this country and abroad reaches into the thousands. Two improvements are especially notable.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, a new press was produced in London. The form of type was placed, as before, on a flat bed and was covered by the sheet of paper, but the impression was produced by a rolling cylinder instead of by a flat platen. In 1845 Richard Hoe, a New York manufacturer of printing presses, conceived the plan of fastening the type to the outside of a large cylinder. He invented V-shaped rules, thick at one edge and thin at the other, by means of which the lines of type were spread farther at their outer end than at the inner, thus giving the body of type the curvature requisite to fit the form to the cylinder. The impression was produced as before by rollers. Paper was fed, in fact, between two cylinders, one smooth, the other bearing the type. Then came stereotyping. Without going into the details of the modern printing press, it may be said that any number of stereotyped forms may be taken from a single form of type, and that a number of presses may be set at work at the same time to bring out a large edition.

The paper used in large newspaper offices is manufactured in enormous rolls or webs which are fed through the press. The revolution of the cylinders draws the paper through. Both sides of the paper are printed at once. As the web emerges behind the press it is cut into sheets. The sheets are in turn folded neatly by an automatic machine and dropped, one by one, into a pile ready to be tied up into bundles for the mail bag or for the carrier. In the case of large newspapers requiring the union of several sheets, separate webs are sent through as many pairs of revolving cylinders mounted one above the other. The webs are brought together by the machine. Every clip of the automatic cutter cuts off a set of the sheets; small brushes running by machinery serve to paste the sheets together along the middle. They are folded and dropped into piles as before. Once the webs are in place and the machinery started, a press of the speedy type delivers from 50,000 to 75,000 papers an hour. Metropolitan daily papers find it necessary to use several such presses.

The first printing press in America was set up in the city of Mexico in 1535. About 1584 one was established at Lima, Peru. The first in the American colonies was established at Cambridge in 1639. The first press in Virginia, 1681, was silenced by a royal command to "allow no person to use a press on any occasion whatever."

According to the census of 1900 there were in the United States 22,312 printing and publishing establishments and seventy establishments engaged in manufacturing printing materials, this exclusive of paper. The total value of the work turned out from the printing presses and binderies of that year was returned at $347,054,430. The rapid growth of the American printing industry is shown by the following figures from the United States census report:

See Gutenberg; Aldus; Caxton; Elzevir; Book; Paper; Newspaper; Periodical; Typewriter; Ink; Lino-Type, etc.