page_title: Print culture
section_title: Development of print
hierarchical_section_title: Print culture / The development of print culture in Europe / Development of print
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece, Diamond Sutra from Cave 17, Dunhuang, ink on paper. A page from the Diamond Sutra, printed in the 9th year of Xiantong Era of the Tang Dynasty, i.e. 868 CE. Currently located in the British Library, London. According to the British Library, it is “the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book”. British Library Or.8210/P.2 Deutsch: Seite des Diamant-Sutra. Gedruckt im 9. Jahr der Ära Xiántōng der Tang-Dynastie (868 n. Chr.) ist es das weltweit älteste vollständig erhaltene, sicher zu datierende Exemplar des Buchdrucks.
context_page_description: Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar in the field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted print culture, which appeared in Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press, to scribal culture. Walter Ong, by contrast, has contrasted written culture, including scribal, to oral culture. Ong is generally considered one of the first scholars to define print culture in contrast to oral culture. These views are related as the printing press brought a vast rise in literacy, so that one of its effects was simply the great expansion of written culture at the expense of oral culture. The development of printing, like the development of writing itself, had profound effects on human societies and knowledge. "Print culture" refers to the cultural products of the printing transformation.
  In terms of image-based communication, a similar transformation came in Europe from the fifteenth century on with the introduction of the old master print and, slightly later, popular prints, both of which were actually much quicker in reaching the mass of the population than printed text.
context_section_description: The Chinese invention of paper and woodblock printing, at some point before the first dated book in 868 (the Diamond Sutra) produced the world's first print culture. Hundreds of thousands of books, on subjects ranging from Confucian Classics to science and mathematics, were printed using woodblock printing.
  Paper and woodblock printing were introduced into Europe in the 15th Century, and the first printed books began appearing in Europe. Chinese movable type was spread to Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty. Around 1230, Koreans invented a metal type movable printing which was described by the French scholar Henri-Jean Martin as "extremely similar to Gutenberg's". East metal movable type was spread to Europe between the late 14th century and early 15th century. The invention of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press (circa 1450) greatly reduced the amount of labor required to produce a book leading to a tremendous increase in the number of books produced. Early printers tried to keep their printed copies of a text as faithful as possible to the original manuscript. Even so, the earliest publications were still often different from the original, for a short time, in some ways manuscripts still remaining more accurate than printed books.
  Hand-copied illustrations were replaced by first woodcuts, later engravings that could be duplicated precisely, revolutionizing technical literature (Eisenstein 155).
caption: The intricate frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra from Tang Dynasty China, 868 AD (British Museum)
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