The origin of movable type printing

Block printing is much more convenient than manual copying, and hundreds or thousands of copies can be printed at a time. But carving is still very labor-intensive. It takes years to carve a page and a big book. After the carving is completed, the plates must be stored in the house; At the same time, if you want to publish other works, you have to carve them from scratch. Manpower, material resources and time are not economical. In the Song Dynasty, Bi Sheng (? -105 1) lived in the heyday of block printing, and he pioneered movable type printing in the world through long-term personal practice. This method saves the cost of engraving books, shortens the time of publishing books, is economical and convenient, and is a great revolution with far-reaching influence in the history of printing. The basic principle of the popular movable type printing is exactly the same as that of the movable type printing method originally invented by Bi Sheng. This invention of Bi Sheng left the most reliable record in the 18th volume of Meng Qian Bi Tan written by Shen Kuo, a famous scientist in the Song Dynasty. During the Qing Dynasty in Song Renzong (A.D. 104 1 to 1048), Bi Sheng carved characters, a word and a seal with clay, and then burned them hard. First, prepare an iron plate with rosin, wax, paper ash, etc. I'm going. There are iron shelves around the iron plate, and there are many words written on the iron shelves. The whole hob is a plate. Heat on the fire, the medicine will melt, and flatten the words with a flat plate. In order to improve efficiency, two iron plates are used, one for printing and the other for typesetting. After printing this edition, the second edition will be fine, so it will be printed quickly if it is used alternately. Each word has several marks, and the most commonly used words are more, in case there is repetition on one board. As for the remote words that were not prepared, they were temporarily engraved and burned immediately. According to Bi Sheng's experiment, it is not easy to print three or five copies. If you print hundreds or thousands of copies, it will be soon. According to the clay sculpture characters recorded in Meng Qian Bi Tan, Zhai Jinsheng, a teacher in Jingxian County, Anhui Province, spent many years making100000 hard clay sculpture characters. He used his clay type to print books such as "The First Edition of Clay Printing Trial Printing". In recent years, several kinds of books printed in clay tablets have been found in Beijing Library. All these prove the authenticity of Bi Sheng's clay book in Meng Qian Bi Tan. Bi Sheng also tried to make wooden movable type, but he found that the texture density of wood was different, it was elastic after being dipped in water, and it was uneven when it was published. In addition, it is easy to stick medicine and it is not convenient to take it off, so he has to use clay as movable type. In the Yuan Dynasty, agronomist Wang Zhen invented wooden movable type, and also invented wheeled typesetting rack, which improved typesetting efficiency with simple machinery. His method of making wooden movable type and his printing experience are elaborated in detail in his book "Agricultural Books". Wang Zhen's method of creating wooden movable type is to select available characters from official rhymes and write them with rhymes. In addition, commonly used words such as "Zhi", "Hu", "Zhe", "Ye" and numbers also belong to the same category. Stick the words on the blackboard and carve them. The words are slightly separated. After carving, use a small saw with fine teeth to cut off the words one by one to form a square. Then take a knife and trim it around, so that each movable type meets the standard and the size is the same. When printing, put the movable type into the wooden helmet board, cut the bamboo pieces and clip them up. When the words are full, plug them with small wooden blocks, put a fence on the right and tie them with wooden pegs to prevent them from shaking again. If there is unevenness, pad the font with a small bamboo piece to make it smooth. Then brush and print. Use a brown brush to brush ink vertically along the border, not horizontally, and the same is true when printing. The storage type is made of light wood, which is similar to a round table top, with a diameter of about seven feet and a shaft height of about three feet. The roulette wheel is covered with a round bamboo frame, and movable type is placed in it according to rhyme. Each rhyme is numbered in turn. At the same time, prepare two roulette wheels, one for selecting available words and the other for selecting common words. There are also two pamphlets in which movable type is registered in numerical order on the roulette wheel. In typesetting, one person calls the number from the book and the other person sits between two roulette wheels. According to the called number, he took the movable type from the roulette wheel and put it in the helmet disc. Because the roulette wheel can rotate freely, the word picker can "push the word left and right" as long as he sits in the middle. Wang Zhen himself said, "It is difficult to find people through people, but it is easy to find people through words. This method of turning the wheel can be done without effort, and the number of words can be taken or circulated in rhyme. " In the second year of Yuan Chengzong Dade (A.D. 1298), he tried to print a 60,000-word Jingde County Chronicle in this way. It was printed into 100 copies in less than a month, with fast printing speed and good quality. His typesetting and printing methods are also a great innovation in the history of printing. After Wang Zhen, wooden movable type printing has become popular in China. It was more popular in Ming and Qing dynasties. In the thirty-eighth year of Qianlong in Qing Dynasty (A.D. 1773), the Qing government carved more than 253,500 kinds of movable type with jujube wood, and successively printed 138 kinds of Wuyingdian Juzhen Edition series, totaling more than 2,300 volumes. This is the largest printing of wooden movable type books in the history of China. Another development of movable type printing is the use of metal materials to make movable type. Wang Zhen also mentioned that some people used tin as movable type in modern times, which should be regarded as the earliest metal movable type in the world. However, because tin is not easily affected by ink and printing often fails, it has not been popularized. By the reign of Emperor Xiaozhong Hongzhi in the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1488 to 1505), copper movable type was officially popular in Wuxi, Suzhou, Nanjing and other places in Jiangsu. Printing books with copper movable type in China, the biggest project is to print the encyclopedia of the Qing Dynasty, integrating ancient and modern books. The spread of printing