From Xylographs to Lead Molds; A.D. 1440-A.D. 1921

E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

AD 1440 AD 1921
Copyright, 1921 The Rapid Electrotype Company Cincinnati, Ohio

Printing has been called “the art preservative of all arts.” The invention of individual movable cast-metal type, between A. D. 1440 and 1446, made printing a commercial possibility.
The subsequent rapid spread of the art, in the hands of students and craftsmen, may be said to have been the centrifugal force of the Renaissance and the Revival of Learning, which age, if it can be chronologically delimited, began A. D. 1453.
Printing divulged to the masses the ancient classics which had been locked up in monasteries and accessible only to clerics and the nobility. The common people began to read. Education became popularized.
This brochure is a brief history of the evolution from xylographs to the methods used today for duplicating a typographical printing surface in a solid piece.

The art of writing, and that of printing from wooden blocks, and all the subsidiary arts of illuminating, decorating and binding manuscripts and books, had long passed out of the exclusive hands of the monasteries into the hands of students and artisans, before printing with individual movable cast-metal type was invented. This epoch making invention came into practical use between A. D. 1440 and 1446.
When, therefore, Johannes Koelhoff of Lubeck, Germany, printed the “Cologne Chronicle” in 1499, he used individual movable cast-metal type. Typographic printing had long before superseded Xylographic printing, that is, printing from a solid block of wood on which type of an entire page were cut individually by hand.