Woodblock printing

Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text or images used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China sometime between the mid-6th and late 9th centuries. Japanese woodblock prints are known as ukiyo-e.

The technology

The three necessary components for woodblock printing are the printing block, or woodcut, which carries the design; ink, which had been widely used even in early China; and paper, itself also first developed in China, around the 3rd or 2nd century B.C.. The art of carving the woodcut is called xylography. It has been noted by many that woodblock printing is a particularly appropriate technique for a writing system like Chinese, because of the strong incentive to avoid hand-copying every character in a given text.

Related Topics:
Woodcut - Xylography

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Although the Chinese also invented a form of moveable type with woodblocks around the 11th century, woodblock was usually done with a single block carved for each page of a given text. When there was a need for the reproduction of a text, the original block could simply be brought out again, while moveable type necessitated the composition of distinct "editions". This difference between East Asian woodblock printing and the Western printing press had major implications for the development of book culture and book markets in East Asia and Europe.

Related Topics:
Moveable type - Printing press

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