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In 1482, Erhard Ratdolt, a prominent German printer in Venice, issued the editio princeps of Euclid’s Elements. Ratdolt experimented with the new technology of printing to overcome the difficulty in arranging geometric diagrams alongside the text. This article examines the materials and techniques that Ratdolt used in his edition of Elements including his use of vellum, gold printing, and illumination for special copies as well as his use of woodcuts, movable type, and metal-cast diagrams. Significantly, the legacy of Ratdolt’s innovations continued almost one hundred years later in subsequent editions of Elements. In 1572, Camillo Francischini printed Federico Commandino’s Latin translation and commentary, and today, there are at least two surviving copies of this edition printed on blue paper. Both printers, Ratdolt and Francischini, used the printing press to produce unique and bespoke books using material and visual cues from luxury objects like illuminated manuscripts. These case studies of Euclid’s Elements brings together the fields of art history, history of the book, and the history of geometry, and analyzes the myriad ways that printers employed the printing press in the early modern period to elevate and modernize ancient, mathematical texts.

This chapter gives a brief history of the development of professional mass media from its earliest days in late fifteenth-century England. At that time—within half a century of Gutenberg’s inventing movable type and the printing press—the press in England enjoyed a freedom which soon became severely curtailed under a system of press licensing introduced by Henry VIII. It was a system which, in its fullest form, was to last until after the English Revolution of 1688 and was to leave a lasting imprint on the political DNA of the United States and the British colonies as well as on Britain’s. The development of the press in the US and the constitutional protection accorded it, and the development of the press in Australia is outlined. Although Australia has no constitutional protection for the press, it also does not impose press-specific laws abridging its freedom. This history is contrasted with that of radio and television broadcasting which, from the first, was subject to lasting and quite detailed government regulation. The chapter demonstrates how the press developed alongside modern democracy and was seen as an essential part of that political development. It also addresses a related problem: the incapacity of the Anglophone democracies to exert meaningful accountability on the press. To illustrate the problem, the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed the British arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2011 is presented as a case study. The subsequent abortive efforts to impose effective and independent self-regulation in both Britain and Australia are described. The impact of social media on the financial fortunes as well as the editorial standards of the professional mass media rounds out the story.

Printing is important as a means of recording and distributing knowledge and ideas (information) in long-lived visual form and passing it on to future generations. It was not invented by Gutenberg, but his name is associated with it because of the obvious link to the Protestant Reformation and the rise of capitalism. This chapter is about the history of printing, starting with the invention of paper by the Egyptians or the Chinese, the invention of books, and the spread of Bibles, in Europe, and the ideas carried by those Bibles.

There is considerable interest in independent publishing models that operate at or on the periphery of our industry, beyond the ‘centre’ of commercial publishing—from ‘litmags’ (Edmonds 2015) to ‘prosumers’ (Stinson 2016); self-publishers, to digital-first and open access examples. There is less discussion of established ‘literary’ writers producing ‘peripheral’ works, which may be significant in the current context, when publishing faces the challenge of technological developments ‘orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type’ (Epstein 2010). As an author and publisher—working in both roles across distinct categories—I am interested in creative projects that mis/use aspects of generic forms to re/make (a)new literary fiction. In this paper, I consider David Mitchell’s latest novel/la, Slade House (2015), in light of its first appearance as a Twitter ghost story released at midnight on All Hallows’ Eve: a tale-in-instalments that gothic readers and fanfic communities alike would be familiar with, but was and still is more novel for mainstream trade publishers. Mitchell’s avant-garde example may work to illustrate the direction and fluidity of literary fiction at a point in publishing history when traditional practices are being challenged by writers via alternative models of production, which may exhibit a capacity to move between genres that might, in earlier times, have seemed exclusive.

Information technology and now especially “artificial intelligence” (AI) are transforming so many fields that it is probable we are living in one of the great Ages of Paradigm Shifts, comparable for example to that of the early modern period—from the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and 17th Century Absolutism, to the Enlightenment—all empowered by Gutenberg’s IT revolution of printing with movable type. This time the pace and scope of change have dramatically quickened and spread, owing to the technology’s increasing power; whereas previous momentous shifts took centuries to be resolved, ours is taking only decades, and is global, though still without clear denouement. It is massive, inexorable, and inevitable. Subscribe to JNEL

The collection of Chinese wooden movable types is among the oldest treasures of the Imprimerie Nationale. The types were carved in Paris between 1715 and 1819, and they are a legacy of the first French attempts to master the expertise necessary to print Chinese alongside Western alphabetic scripts. This article, which is the result of research conducted at the Imprimerie Nationale, combined with a study of historical and literary sources from various periods kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and at Italian libraries, provides a description of the types’ physical characteristics and relates how they were created, designed, organized, engraved, employed, classified and stored. Our research focuses on the attempts to include Chinese characters in publications in Western languages which were made in Europe and particularly in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards. At a time when Europeans were beginning to expand their range of activities in Asia, printing in Asian scripts was a technical as well as a commercial, political and intellectual challenge. With no Chinese typographer to help, the French team modelled the types on characters found in a Chinese dictionary imported into France by missionaries, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century they published two dictionaries which included Chinese characters printed with wooden type.

The public mechanical clock and movable type printing press were arguably the most important and complex technologies of the late medieval period. We posit that towns with clocks became upper-tail human capital hubs—clocks required extensive technical know-how and fine mechanical skill. This meant that clock towns were in position to adopt the printing press soon after its invention in 1450, as presses required a similar set of mechanical and technical skills to operate and repair. A two-stage analysis confirms this conjecture: we find that clock towns were 34–40 percentage points more likely to also have a press by 1500. The press, in turn, helped facilitate the spread of the Protestant Reformation. A three-stage instrumental variables analysis indicates that the press influenced the adoption of Protestantism, while the clock’s effect on the Reformation was mostly indirect. Our analysis therefore suggests that the mechanical clock was responsible – directly and indirectly – for two of the most important movements in the making of the modern world: the spread of printing and the Reformation.

[EN] One way to develop a good project, such as the artist s book or visual poetry, is to have the knowledge of typography and the access to movable types that help to transmit and interpret the ideas. Traditional letterpress printing, although it has become obsolete at industrial level, has been widely used at some faculties of Fine Arts and at some studios, where artists can obtain their education and work on their personal or collective projects and use typography as the main form of expression. The type founders in the first half of 20th century created bold typographic designs, offering the artists and typographers possibilities to create their harmonic and poetic work, just like poets, from expressing their emotions to extending the letters all over the space, breaking down verses, allowing the echo of new words, created with subtly blurred typography, to vibrate., [ES] Un modo de poder desarrollar un buen proyecto, en poesía visual o de libro de artista, es tener conocimientos de tipografía y disponer de tipos móviles que ayuden a interpretar las ideas que se quieran transmitir. Los medios clásicos de impresión, aunque hayan quedado obsoletos a nivel industrial, están muy vivos y presentes en algunos centros de Bellas Artes o en algunos talleres, donde los artistas pueden formarse y llevar a cabo proyectos personales o colectivos en los que, la tipografía, es la protagonista del espacio expresivo. Los fundidores de la primera mitad del siglo XX, hicieron realidad atrevidos diseños tipográficos que posibilitaban, a los artistas y tipógrafos, realizar trabajos con gran armonía y poesía, al unísono que los poetas aportaban sus emociones, hasta ser capaces de que las letras se expandieran en el espacio, librando el corsé a los versos, permitiendo que vibrara el eco de nuevas palabras con tipografías sutilmente veladas.

Scientific identification of the movable type printing provides favorable evidence to research the invention and dissemination of movable printing technique. However, the methods used to identify movable type printing are either unscientific or time-consuming. To solve those problems, a new method based on registration is introduced in this paper. Firstly, the boundary points of each character image are extracted, and the affine iterative closest point (ICP) with bidirectional distance is used to measure the shape similarity between two character point sets. Secondly, a heuristic tree of Tangut characters based on shape similarity is constructed, which connects two point sets with small deformation. In this way, the large deformation between characters is divided into several small differences. After that, the coherent point drift (CPD) algorithm is used to achieve the registration between these character point sets along the heuristic tree. Finally, after comparing the registrations errors between the subject character point sets and model character point set carefully and observing their character images as well as the registration images between them, the judgment of whether these characters are printed with the same movable character model is to be made. Experimental results demonstrate that the identification method of movable printing proposed has the advantages of being automatic, fast and accurate.

The key to achieving high-quality and practical van der Waals heterostructure devices made from various two-dimensional (2D) materials lies in the efficient control over clean and flexible interfaces. Inspired by the “movable-type printing”, one of the four great inventions of ancient China, we demonstrate the “movable-type” transfer and stacking of 2D materials, which utilizes prefabricated polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) film to engineer the interfacial adhesion to 2D materials, and provides a flexible, efficient and batchable transfer scheme for 2D materials. The experiments also verify the “movable-type” transfer can preciously control the position and orientation of 2D materials, which meets the burgeoning requirements such as the preparation of twisted graphene and other heterostructures. Importantly, water-solubility of PVA film ensures an ideal interface of the materials without introducing contamination. We illustrate the superiority of this method with a WSe2 vertical spin valve device, whose performance verifies the applicability and advantages of such a method for spintronics. Our PVA-assisted “movable-type” transfer process may promote the development of high-performance 2D-material-based devices.

In the long history of the development of civilization, Chinese movable type printing has played a pivotal role for disseminating information and it can be seen as the ancestor of the modern information age. From traditional engraving to type, from clay to lead type, from laser printing to 3D holographic printing, the techniques of encoding have been gradually developed and recorded, and these printed texts convey the progress of mankind. A brief introduction to encoding in the context of Chinese cultural communication is presented and, specifically, the role of encoding will be explored. In addition, digital holographic printing is introduced as a new approach and new medium to explore the enlightenment conferred by Chinese movable type printing on today’s society and especially the information revolution. Further, the future of encoding through the advanced technology of digital holographic printing is discussed. Two holographic artworks are presented to illustrate the principles expounded and the response to their display in national museums discussed.

Les caractères mobiles sont une invention chinoise, attestée dans les sources depuis le xie siècle. Cette contribution traite des caractères en argile et en bois. Les premiers sont les plus connus, en raison de leur fameuse description dans l’œuvre de Shen Kuo (1031-1095) : ce texte a certainement inspiré les hommes qui, pendant la dernière dynastie (1644-1911), ont repris ou adapté cette technique pour produire des types à usage privé. Quant aux caractères en bois – le matériel privilégié par l’imprimerie chinoise traditionnelle où la xylographie demeure la technique la plus répandue, il existe des descriptions sur leur production et leur usage, écrites par Wang Zhen (vers 1290-1333) et Jin Jian (mort en 1794). Ces textes, ainsi que les publications parfois illustrées qui nous les ont transmis, sont analysés dans cette contribution en tant que témoignages écrits sur ces techniques, mais aussi comme témoignages des pratiques d’impression et des projets éditoriaux, à titre privé, public ou impérial. Mobile types are a Chinese invention, quoted in the sources from the eleventh century. This article deals with types in clay and wood. The first are the best known, due to a famous description of their production written by Shen Kuo (1031-1095): this text has certainly inspired the persons who during the last dynasty (1644-1911) took over or adapted this technique to produce types for their private printing activities. As for the wooden characters (wood is the most common material in traditional Chinese printing process, where xylography remains the most widespread technique), descriptions about their production and use exist; they were written by Wang Zhen (circa 1290-1333) and Jin Jian (died 1794). These texts and the sometimes illustrated publications which have forwarded them to us are analyzed in this contribution as written sources about the techniques, but also as evidences of the printing practices and the editorial projects, as private, public or imperial enterprises.

[ES] Desde sus inicios, la llegada del libro de artista ha motivado una serie de cambios en la relación libro-texto y libro-imagen. Por una parte, el texto pasa de ser únicamente literario a convertirse en un elemento plástico; por otra, la imagen deja de estar subordinada al significado del texto para ser, por sí sola, una estructura espacial y estética. El objetivo principal de este proyecto es plasmar una serie de reflexiones utilizando tanto la tipografía como la imagen en sí mismas, haciendo una investigación al mismo tiempo sobre el libro de artista y su relación con ambos campos (texto e imagen)., [EN] Since its inception, the arrival of artist's book has caused a series of changes between the relationship of book-text and book-image. On the one hand, text changes from being exclusively literary to turn into a visual element; on the other, image stops being subordinate to the meaning of the text to be, by itself, a spatial and aesthetic structure. The main objective of this project is to express a series of reflections using both typography and image in themselves, researching at the same time about the artist's book and its connection with both fields (text and image).

While China's invention of printing took place several centuries ahead of Europe's, it was in Europe where the more advanced printing technology of movable type took hold and where book production reached far higher levels. This article explores the extent to which China's complex logographic writing system explains these different outcomes. Using an economic analysis, I show how China's preference for block printing technology over movable type can be justified as the rational choice of commercial producers. In addition to this, model simulations also predict that movable type would be used in China under some specific circumstances which closely match the historical record. On the other hand, the use of block printing would not have led to larger printing costs in China, and as such should not be regarded as the reason behind China's modest level of book production when compared to Europe's.