In East Asia, printing and the dissemination of printed works originated as early as 751 when the Korean scroll printed from woodblocks – the Pure Light Dharani Sutra – was printed from woodblocks on to a single sheet of paper.^[1] East Asian printers carved the reverse image of a text onto wooden block, rubbed ink on the surface of the block, and then pressed a sheet of paper against the block. This technique, called xylography, allowed them to print individual sheets of paper, which they sewed into entire books. Xylography was the dominant print technology in China, Korea, and Japan at this time and had the advantage of requiring few tools (no machinery), and so was in widespread use.

Replica of Dharani sutra in the Koren Culture Museum in Incheon Airport, South Korea. Image Source: Wikipedia

The oldest surviving Korean cast-metal printing types have been carbon dated to between 798 and 1166. In Korea these bronze types were used in 1239 to print the Nammyeong Cheon Hwasangsong Jeungdoga, a poetical work written by a Chinese monk that only exists today in a later woodblock edition.^[3] The oldest extant book printed from cast-metal type is the Jikji Simche Yojeol (Essential Passages Pointing Directly to the Mind).^[4] This book, compiled by Master Baegun (1298 ~ 1374), recounts stories of venerated Buddhist Chan monks and was printed by Baegun’s students in Cheongju, Korea in 1377, shortly after his death. As noted by Wonhaeng, President of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism in 2020, the sole surviving copy of Jikji is now “in the safekeeping of the National Library of France [and] remains an essential cultural legacy of the Korean nation.”^[5]

Biblia Latina, Mainz: Johann Gutenberg & Johann Fust, 1455 Image Source: The Morgan Library and Museum

The 42-line Gutenberg Bible was printed from cast-metal type in Mainz, Germany about 1455. The type casting process conventionally attributed to Gutenberg begins by carving a single type character on the end of a steel punch. This carved steel character is then “punched” into a softer copper matrix which is then justified and inserted into the base of an adjustable hand mold used to cast large numbers of individual lead-alloy type characters. In 2001, Paul Needham, then Scheide Librarian at Princeton University, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a 25-year-old Princeton physics graduate, carefully compared single letter forms (i.e., a lower case ‘i’) photographed from Gutenberg’s 1456 printing of the papal bull, Bulla Thurcorum. The differences observed in a single letter as it appeared in several places on the same page could not be satisfactorily explained given the relative uniformity typically achieved when casting type with the adjustable hand mold. Needham and Agüera y Arcas’s concluded that, “each physical piece of type was manufactured individually, and was not the outcome of a mass-reproduction process at all,” a clear break from centuries of tradition.^[6] A New York Times article at the time asserted that Needham and Agüera y Arcas believed “Gutenberg employed a cruder printing method, sand casting, used at the time for making metal objects,” and that the punches did not represent whole letters but rather parts of the letter’s shape that could be combined to configure single letters.^[7] One goal of the From Jikji to Gutenberg project is to address the uncertainty related to Gutenberg precise method of type casting

Both the 42-line Gutenberg Bible^[8] and Jikji^[9] were inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in 2001 to mutually recognize their “outstanding universal value.”^[10] Yet Jikji, printed over 70-years before the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, remains almost unknown in the West. Fully exploring these two archetypes will provide a better understanding of their historic origins.

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