Movable type  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 11:30, 18 August 2007

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Movable type is the system of printing and typography using movable pieces of metal type.

In the 15th century, around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced in Europe the first movable type printing press).

Compared to the earlier woodblock printing, movable type pagesetting was quicker and more durable. Printing presses rapidly spread across Europe, leading up to the Renaissance, and later all around the world.

Effects of movable type printing on culture

For an example of the print revolution: see cultural setting at A Tale of a Tub.

The impact of printing is comparable to the development of writing and the invention of the alphabet or the Internet as far as its effects on the society. Just as writing did not replace speaking, printing did not achieve a position of total dominance. Handwritten manuscripts continued to be produced, and the different graphic modes of communication continued to influence each other.

Printing also was a factor in the establishment of a community of scientists who could easily communicate their discoveries through the establishment of widely disseminated scholarly journals, helping to bring on the scientific revolution.

Because of the printing press, authorship became more meaningful and profitable. It was suddenly important who had said or written what, and what the precise formulation and time of composition was. This allowed the exact citing of references, producing the rule, "One Author, one work (title), one piece of information" (Giesecke, 1989; 325). Before, the author was less important, since a copy of Aristotle made in Paris would not be exactly identical to one made in Bologna. For many works prior to the printing press, the name of the author was entirely lost.

Because the printing process ensured that the same information fell on the same pages, page numbering, tables of contents, and indices became common, though they previously had not been unknown. The process of reading was also changed, gradually changing over several centuries from oral readings to silent, private reading. The wider availability of printed materials also led to a drastic rise in the adult literacy rate throughout Europe.

Within fifty or sixty years of the invention of the printing press, the entire classical canon had been reprinted and widely promulgated throughout Europe (Eisenstein, 1969; 52). Now that more people had access to knowledge both new and old, more people could discuss these works. Furthermore, now that book production was a more commercial enterprise, the first copyright laws were passed to protect what we now would call intellectual property rights. A second outgrowth of this popularization of knowledge was the decline of Latin as the language of most published works, to be replaced by the vernacular language of each area, increasing the variety of published works. Paradoxically, the printing word also helped to unify and standardize the spelling and syntax of these vernaculars, in effect 'decreasing' their variability. This rise in importance of national languages as opposed to pan-European Latin is cited as one of the causes of the rise of nationalism in Europe.

External links

• Daniela Lesley Evans, 1998, A Critical Examination of Claims Concerning the ‘Impact’ of Print

Bibliography

• The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1993) - Elizabeth L. Eisenstein
• The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) - Herbert Marshall McLuhan