Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 314, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 January 1920 — LED IN “ART PRESERVATIVE” [ARTICLE]

LED IN “ART PRESERVATIVE”

Conclusive Proof That the Koreans Were the First to Perceive Value 2 of Movable Type. Fifty pieces of movable type bear'ing the Chinese characters, being part of the first font of movable type ever made, were shown is the last week In the Museuifa of Natural History, In. New York. England has the otjier half of the font, which was cast in Seoul, Korea, In 1403, some years before the discoveries of Forster, Gutenberg and -the other early typemakers in Europe. It seems, thus, that to the - Koreans belongs the distinction of having invented and first produced separate type characters in metal. Each type Is cylindrically concave on the under side, in order to make It cling more firmly to the bed of beeswax which constituted the When the type had been firmly and evenly embedded in the wax the printer, sitting cross-legged before the form, covered the type with ink applied with a soft brush. Then the paper was laid lightly on the form and a piece of felt was brushed gently over the paper with one hand, after which the other removed the printed page. It was possible to strike off as many as 1,500 impressions a day in this way. • Th rown asid e a s u seless, th e font lay as rubbish on the floor of the government printing office at Seoul during the Japanese invasion of 1592-97, and so lay unnoticed and escaped being carried off into Japan. Later, however, the types were collected and the font again made up and used for printing. Although this font was the first to be made of movable metal type, various methods of printing had already been in vogue for centuries. Dr. Berthold Laufer, anthropologist and orientalist, has recently drawn up an excellent reference summary of the important dates in the history of priting. As early as 175/A. D. texts of the Chinese classics were engraved on stone tablets, and Impressions were taken on paper by rubbing. In 593 classicalbooks were printed by means of wooden blocks, block-printing on a smaller® scale having already been practiced. In 7G4 Japan adopted block-printing, and in the tenth eentury there were discovered tn Fayoum, Egypt, blockprinted books in Arabic.