Category: 141 R

Instruction Manual: How To Woodblock Print Like The Chinese

Have you ever wondered how the Chinese used to print over 1000 years ago? Well with this instruction manual, you will not only learn how it was done but be able to recreate their great works today!

The manuscript is transcribed onto thin slightly waxed sheets of paper by a professional calligrapher. The wax prevents the ink from being as readily absorbed into the paper, allowing more ink to be absorbed onto another surface. The paper is placed ink side down onto a wooden block on which a thin layer of rice paste has been thinly spread. The back of the paper is rubbed with a flat palm-fiber brush so that the wet rice paste absorbs some of the ink and an impression of the inked area is left on the block. The engraver uses a set of sharp-edged tools to cut away the uninked areas of the woodblock, in essence, raising an inverse image of the original calligraphy above the background.

While carving, the knife is held like a dagger in the right hand and guided by the middle finger of the left hand, drawing towards the cutter. The vertical lines are cut first, then the block is rotated 90 degrees and the horizontal lines cut.

Four proof-readings are normally required. the corrected transcript, first sample print from the block and after any corrections have been made. A small correction to a block can be made by cutting a small notch and hammering in a wedge-shaped piece of wood. Larger errors require an inlay. After this, the block is washed to remove any refuse.

To print, the block is fixed firmly on a table. The printer takes a round horsehair inking brush and applies ink with a vertical motion. The paper is then laid on the block and rubbed with a long narrow pad to transfer the impression to the paper. The paper is peeled off and set to dry. Because of the rubbing process, printing is only done on one side of the paper, and the paper is thinner than in the west, but two pages are normally printed at once.

Sample copies were sometimes made in red or blue, but black ink was always used for production. It is said that a skilled printer could produce as many as 1500 or 2000 double sheets in a day. Blocks can be stored and reused when extra copies are needed. 15,000 prints can be taken from a block with a further 10,000 after touching up.

Citations:

• Carter, Thomas Frances. The Invention of Printing in China, and its spread Westward 2nd ed., revised by L. Carrington Goodrich. NY:Ronald Press, 1955. (1st ed, 1925)
• Fifty Wonders of Korea: Volume 1. Seoul: Samjung Munhwasa, 2007. 
• Lane, Richard. (1978). Images from the Floating World, The Japanese Print. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin (1985). Paper and Printing.
• Needham, Joseph Science and Civilization in China. vol. 5 part 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 201–217.
• Twitchett, Denis. Printing and Publishing in Medieval China. New York, Frederick C. Beil, 1983.

Survey #1

As one of the first and fundamental forms of communication, writing, and typography trace their roots even back to the Upper Paleolithic times when cave paintings used symbols as a form of language. However, as the formal history says, writing has been developed by Sumerians around 3,500 B.C. As each civilization advanced, so their need for communication became more complex. From Egyptian hieroglyphics with symbols and ideograms to Ancient Greeks who used the alphabet created by Phoenicians, taken over by Romans afterward.

As there were many different civilizations evolving in typography, I will focus on the beginning of Latin. Latin had the largest impact on the world, with some of the upper case typography created at the time, which is still used to this day!

Have you ever been reading a book or an article and stumbled upon a word that looked familiar, but you weren’t too sure what it actually meant? Well, there’s a good chance that it has a Latin root word.

Latin was the parent language of a number of European languages spoken today, the most prominent being Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Romanian. It’s no surprise that bits of Latin appear in these languages, even after the Western Latin speaking half of the Roman empire fell in 476 AD, Latin continued for over a millennium as the language of the Roman Catholic church, science, philosophy, medicine, the language of law and more.

Developed from the Etruscan alphabet at some time before 600 BC, it can be traced through Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician scripts to the North Semitic alphabet used in Syria and Palestine about 1100 BC.

The earliest inscription in the Latin alphabet appears on the Praeneste Fibula, a cloak pin dating from about the 7th century BC.

The very first examples of the Latin alphabet resemble the Etruscan alphabet. Nearly all the letters were adopted with the same phonetic values and shapes. The direction of writing was like Etruscan, either right-to-left, boustrophedon, or even left-to-right for about a hundred years during the 6th century BCE. Slowly the Latin alphabet became increasingly standardized. Writing direction settled on left-to-right toward the 5th or 4th century BCE, and letter shapes became more or less the same in Latium. By Rome’s Republican period, the Latin alphabet has evolved to the modern form.

“A View of Latin Typography in Relationship to the World by Peter Biľak.” Typotheque, https://www.typotheque.com/articles/a_view_of_latin_typography.

Ancient Scripts: Latin, http://www.ancientscripts.com/latin.html.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Latin Alphabet.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/topic/Latin-alphabet.

“The History of Typography and Its Journey Through Art.” Widewalls, https://www.widewalls.ch/typography-history-art/.