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| Detail of Elder Subhuti from the Diamond Sutra, Cave 17, Dunhuang, ink on paper, British Library. |
Something I found personally interesting this week was the method of woodblock printing to create books. The earliest existing example of the printed book that we know of is the Diamond Sutra (left), printed in China in 868AD. The method used to create this work, woodblock printing, didn’t arrive in Europe until the medieval era, when it was used to create devotional images of saints, and printed playing cards, as well as being used to transfer printed images and patterns to textiles. Eventually, woodblock printing was used to create books. This involved the carving of integrated images and text into a single woodblock to create a double page spread. The block was then inked, and damp paper was placed across it before being rubbed, or placed in a press, to transfer the image to the paper. The use of water based ink meant that the alternate side of the page could not be used for printing without damaging the side already printed by rubbing. To solve this problem, the blank backs of pages were glued together, resulting in uninterrupted printed pages.
Given that woodblock printing was incredibly time consuming, Marianne Hansen suggests that the reason for its use for almost three decades (compared with the contemporary method of printing with moveable type) is a financial one:
“… blockbook printing does not require the publisher to own either type fonts or press. In addition, one can conveniently print in small editions, without incurring the labor cost of setting the type. This reduces tremendously the financial risk of printing at a time when the cost of paper was a major factor in the economics of publishing.”
One of the best known examples of a block book is the Biblia Pauperum (“Poor Man’s Bible”). This was not actually intended for purchase by the poor, rather it was used by the clergy to preach to poor people, and the semi-literate (Wood, 2011). It was not even really a bible: it presented related scenes from the Old and New Testaments via text and illustration. An example of a page from the Biblia Pauperum can be seen below.
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| Page from the Biblia pauperum, the Netherlands, c. 1460-1470, Provenance: Tongerlo collection |
Block books seem to bridge the gap between illuminated manuscripts and later printed books made with moveable type. They retain the sense of the ‘handmade’ in the way that the type is not perfectly aligned or realized, and in the way that the illustrations still seem very much like hand-drawn cartoons. Although block books were eventually replaced by books created with moveable type, woodblock illustrations (both black and white, and coloured), have continued to be used to the present day. In particular, there are several notable Asian examples, such as Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa (below).
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| Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, c. 1829-32, colour woodcut, 25.7cm x 37.8cm, Washington, Library of Congress. |
Sources: "Expositions & Collections: Block Book”, Koninklijke Bibliotheek: National library of the Netherlands. Accessed March, 2011: http://www.kb.nl/galerie/100hoogtepunten/015-en.html Hansen, M., “An Introduction to Blockbooks”. Accessed March, 2011: http://www.billyandcharlie.com/planets/Blockbooks.html Wood, S., “Gutenberg and After: Block Books”, in The Printed Book, Charles Sturt University, 2011. Accessed March, 2011: http://www.csu.edu.au/faculty/arts/humss/art317/csuonly/blockbook.htm | |
