Book culture, losing the letterpress and continuing to develop
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It is often said that movable type printing is developed on the basis of engraving and printing, and is an inevitable outcome of the development of engraving printing to a certain stage. This is true, but it is still not accurate. The reason is that the ideas and ideas of movable characters that were indispensable before the invention of movable type printing existed for more than two thousand years before the invention of movable type printing. Is it that when engraving is widely used to engrave books, people still don’t realize that they can write a single engraving, a single engraving? The key to the problem is that movable type printing has advantages over engraving, but it also has disadvantages, and its advantages are also conditional. For example, the aforementioned labor saving, material saving, time saving and space are premised on the production of tens of thousands of "live characters", and the production of these tens of thousands of "live characters" needs only once. The investment of greater cost is the unwilling or incapable of the ancient officials, private and workshops. Moreover, ancient books, in general, have fewer varieties, smaller heads, fewer prints, longer application time, and the type of printed and printed copies of the movable type are not as good as those of the engraving and printing. What's more, there are still some disadvantages such as the lack of font types and poor print quality in movable type printing. Therefore, the printing of movable type only develops to a certain extent in the social culture, specifically the book culture of the society, that is, the number of authors who have developed into books, the readers, the variety, the short time, the engraving and printing are unbearable and meet the needs of the development of the book business. When it comes to life, it will be practical. There is a very fashionable saying today, called "complementary advantages." It is precisely because of the different characteristics and advantages of engraving printing and traditional movable type printing that they have coexisted for nearly ten centuries for a long time. Objectively, it is the development and popularization of book culture, which has led to the invention of movable type printing and promoted the continuous development of movable type printing.
The further development of movable type printing is mainly reflected in the evolution of process technology, the expansion of application areas and the application of different materials such as mud, wood, tin, copper, lead, iron and porcelain.
(1) Evolution of process technology
As mentioned above, the movable type printing technique invented by Bi Sheng is a very mature process technology. The process theory of the four major processes of type production, typesetting, ink printing, and dismantling has reached a level that has not changed for nearly a thousand years. The evolution of the so-called process technology is just a few innovations in the production of movable characters, typesetting and layout. For example, the solid-fixing method adopted by Bisheng is to melt and cool and solidify through the mixture of rosin wax and paper ash, and fix the movable type in the frame; Xixiawen Buddhist Sutra "Auspicious Pass to the mouth and this continuation" adopts interline The method of spacers fixes the layout; in the Southern Song Dynasty, the tin type is to use the same rules to leave holes in the movable type. When typesetting, "the iron bars are used, the lines are made, the helmets are embedded, and the boundaries are printed." . Those who have changed a lot are the runners invented by Wang Hao in the early Yuan Dynasty. Regrettably, at that time, it was a pity that the opportunity to evolve from manual typesetting to the use of simple mechanical typesetting was not grasped. As for the movable type production technology, there are two methods of cutting and casting. Among them, the wood type is carved, mud, copper, tin and other movable words or engraved or cast. The lettering is complicated, the casting needs the model, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. In general, although the process technology has improved, it has not changed much.
(2) Expansion of print area
After the invention of movable type printing, the application area is expanding continuously, and existing documents and cultural relics provide a lot of evidence and express:
1 1041 to 1048, Bi Sheng printed books in wood type and mud type;
2 1103 years ago, in the present Zhejiang area, some people used the movable type printing to print out the "Buddha said that the Buddha Sutra";
3 Around 1150, Xixia, which is located in the western part of western China, printed the Xixia version of "Auspicious Passage and This Continuation" in wood type;
4 In 1193, Song Youyi’s Zhou must use the mud type to print his own "Yu Tang Miscellanies";
5 In 1211, the Xixia area printed Chinese almanacs in movable type;
6 Before 1279, some people used tin to make movable type for typographical printing.
The above listed documents and cultural relics prove that the two songs were printed in the Song Dynasty. To the western region of China, conditions have been created for the printing of Western languages and Europe.
(3) The application of movable materials of different materials such as copper, lead and porcelain followed the mud, wood and tin type in the Song Dynasty, and in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, there were two kinds of live type, lead type and porcelain type. The emergence and application of a variety of different materials shows that the movable printing process has made great progress in the production of movable characters. According to this, some people have raised the problem of the invention of metal movable type and even specific to copper type printing. This is obviously not suitable. The reason is that the movable type printing process invented by Bi Sheng includes four major processes: movable type production, typesetting, ink printing, and dismantling. The first process is the production of movable type. In the case of the four major processes, the use of different materials in the first process of "live type production" is also considered to be a great invention of movable type printing. Objectively, whether it is wood type, mud type, tin type, or copper type, lead type, porcelain type, in the movable type printing process, they are only living characters, and they are all members of the big family. If you change a type of movable type—such as a type that is made of copper—it is the invention of the copper type printing process, then the wood type, the wood type, the poplar type, the pear wood type, etc. Didn't the type of the word become an independent invention? I hope that there will be no more outspoken things on the issue of movable type printing, and that the problem will be complicated and vulgar.