Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 6, December 1852

by Various

All this class of books, as a rule, are worse than worthless; and we had far rather see the rising generation return to “Mother Goose,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Cinderella,” and thence to “Sandford and Merton,” Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, and works and writers of the like calibre, until fit to commence the real study of real history and real science, than have them stuffed with such farragoes of imbecility, reckless assertion, and plausible falsehood—under the plea of knowledge made popular—as, for instance, most of “The Histories for the Young,” which afford a perfect type of the class of works, to which we have just alluded.

To this train of thought we have been led, by observing the pertinacious and absurd folly, on the part of all the writers on the subject before us, of ascribing the art of wood-engraving and printing, to every nation which never possessed it, and the invention of it to none knows who.

It really seems that to these worthies it is quite argument enough to say, because the Chinese, Egyptians, Phœnicians, Greeks, or Romans did not possess such an art, but did possess such another, therefore they must have possessed that which they did not possess.

Thus—because the Egyptians made wooden moulds with reversed characters or figures, wherein to make fictile bricks, jars, or other implements—they possessed the art of wood-engraving and printing.

Because the Greeks and Romans used to engrave their laws and decrees on stone or metal, both in intaglio and relief, and even colored the depressed or prominent characters with various pigments, therefore the Greeks and Romans made use of printing and wood or metallic engraving—as understood in the present sense; that is to say, for the purpose of taking reversed impressions on paper, parchment, or the like, with ink or other pigments, from prepared blocks, or forms of movable types—the impressions, not the blocks or forms, being legible in the usual mode, from left to right, or the reverse, according to the nature of the character or language.

It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary now to state, not only that there is no reason for believing that any ancient nation was acquainted at all with any thing in the least degree approaching to the modern art of printing, but that there is a positive certainty that no people of antiquity was so acquainted.

In the same manner may be dismissed the Chinese claim to originality in this invention. So early as the 12th century, stamps, engraved with monograms, or fanciful figures, assumed by individuals as their signs manuals, wrought on them in relief, were in common use. They were made of wood or metal, dipped in ink or paint, and impressed on any document requiring signature; and they seem to have continued occasionally in use so late as to the reign of King Henry VIII. of England, whose warrant for the execution of the poet Surrey was signed by this method, and not by royal sign manual; the king being then in articulo mortis, and unable to sign his name.

At a much earlier period than this—so early, indeed, as the sixth century—the Emperor Justin I., in signing documents, made use of what is now called a stencil, a thin plate of wood or metal perforated with figures, characters, or other designs, which, when applied to a surface of blank paper or parchment, leaves the design on the exposed surface of the paper, all else being covered, open to the operation of a brush or pencil, which necessarily leaves the impress of the form invariably the same on all occasions.

From this practice of stenciling, perhaps, or more probably from the dipping of the signet-ring, which had been used for ages in impressing wax and the like, into ink, and impressing it on paper, was derived the idea of stamps engraved with monograms, and used as signatures—an invention of vast practical utility in an age when not one man of five hundred, even of kings and nobles, unless he were in holy orders, was capable of signing, or even reading, his own name. One of the earliest of these stamps is that of Gundisalvo Tellez, one of the Gothic invaders of Spain, affixed to a charter bearing date A. D. 840; and the same sign, after his death, was appended, by his widow, Flamula, to a grant for the good of her husband’s soul.

Now it has never been asserted or pretended that the Chinese, even at a much later period than this, had advanced beyond the use of monogram stamps impinged by hand.