Xylography, or woodblock printing, is a process of transferring graphic content from incised wood to a flat surface. The printing block, with a raised mirror image of the content, is coated with ink, then the target medium, usually a sheet of paper, is pressed onto the block and peeled off. Xylography was the principal mode of printing in East Asia until the twentieth century, for books as well as stationery, posters, and ephemera. It enabled the production of nearly identical documents in huge quantities and facilitated the development of print cultures based on wide access to written material by diverse readers and intensive engagement by specialists with large volumes of information.
In *early modern China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Tibet, and Mongolia, woodblock printing on paper was the most common technique for book production, especially of books intended for a large readership, and for documents such as calendars, playing cards, and bureaucratic forms. It supplanted, but never replaced, hand copying; it coexisted with reprographic technologies such as rubbings of stone inscriptions and with movable type. By comparison with the latter it is well suited to the Sinographic (“Chinese character”) scripts of East Asia, with thousands of distinct graphs, and those like Mongolian, Manchu, and cursive Japanese in which each word is written in a single ligatured whole.
Some Arabic block prints of the ninth to fourteenth centuries and European block books of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries represent a similar technology, but neither dominated textual production in those regions. In early modern Europe, woodblocks were also the principal means of reproducing images that were mingled with typography, by contrast with copper engravings, which required a separate kind of press. The point at which xylography became dominant in East Asia is difficult to ascertain; for China, McDermott estimates that in elite book collections imprints outnumbered manuscripts from the turn of the sixteenth century.
The technological sources of xylographic printing lie in two well-established technologies: seals used to authenticate documents and blocks used to stamp textiles. With the advent of paper as writing medium around the first century CE, seals—previously used to create a relief impression in soft clay—were adapted to apply ink directly to this more affordable writing surface. And especially in religious contexts, such as the production of charms or talismans, seals grew from brief names and titles to longer passages of multiple sentences or complex series of glyphs.
Even when stamped directly on a document, a seal impression (sealing) tends to perform different informative work than the printed text in, for example, a book. The material fact of the sealing provides information about the document as object: it was issued by the party controlling the seal; if the seal is intact, the document has not been opened. The sealing’s function is the same whether it is attached to a document or to something without informational content, such as a bottle whose wax sealing proves that the wine is unadulterated. It may be infinitely duplicated, but detached from a host object, a sealing ceases to inform. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the other main form of mass-duplicated text in the ancient world, numismatic inscriptions. These were copied in the millions but produced value less by what they said than by where they said it. Likewise, the power of a magic talisman is embedded in its physicality and does not travel with the simple repetition of its verbiage.
Printing may thus be distinguished from mere impression by the decreased *semiotic involvement of the substrate. The paper and ink with which a book is produced, by printing or handwriting, are a material necessity, but users need not refer to them to make sense of a book’s words. In these terms, xylography is the world’s oldest and longest-used technology for the mechanized dissemination of information.
Most of the earliest (seventh- to tenth-century) printed books and references to printing in China involve the reproduction of sacred, especially Buddhist, texts. In Buddhism the dissemination of scriptures and icons was a meritorious act whose karma could redound to the party commissioning them. Woodblocks thus enabled patrons to perform good deeds on an industrial scale. In some cases the intent was more talismanic than communicative, as in the “Million Pagoda Dharani” commissioned by Japanese empress Shōtoku between 764 and 770. Each printed text was sealed inside a bronze stupa; their creation was a ritual rather than a communicative act. Other projects were, however, clearly intended to spread Buddhist doctrine, most notably editions of the complete Sinitic Buddhist canon produced by various ecclesiastical and state institutions. For example, the Haeinsa, a temple in Korea, preserves a set of over eighty thousand woodblocks carved between 1237 and 1248 that still yield readable prints of the Korean Buddhist canon.
By contrast with religious evangelism, scholarly practice often favored copying texts by hand. This remained so in China even after the state-sanctioned printing of core *canonical works. In the Song period (960–1279) printing offices issued standard versions of key texts, notably ones from the curriculum of the civil service examinations, but printed books were just one part of the textual ecosystem, and a majority of texts remained in manuscript form. Printed books often served as models for handwritten copies, but many bibliophiles preferred texts proofread by a careful copyist to mechanically made books that thoughtlessly perpetuated mistakes.
At the same time, a commercial printing industry developed that produced cheaper editions of texts issued by the state (sometimes in nominal violation of the law) and a range of other books for a wide readership. These included study aids for examination students, classical and historical texts of all sorts, literary collections, *vernacular fiction, drama, and books on useful arts such as agriculture and medicine. Some regions became notorious for books printed on inferior paper from crudely executed woodblocks, a clear sign of a competitive market. Such productions boomed in the latter half of the Ming period (1368–1644) and until the end of the Qing (1644–1911), when mechanical printing techniques imported from the West began to supplant xylography.
Woodblock printing spread from China to its neighbors, including both regions in which Chinese was widespread as a language of scholarship, religion, and government (Korea, Japan, and Vietnam) and other areas such as Mongolia and Tibet. Unlike movable type, xylography requires no additional equipment to produce diverse graphic styles and sizes, or even multiple scripts. In Japan, where woodblock printing boomed in the Edo period (1600–1868), it was used to manufacture books in a variety of linguistic modes: Classical Chinese works nearly identical to their continental models; these same texts with interlinear, *marginal, or running Japanese-language commentary in the kana syllabary or a mix of kana and Sinographs; texts in various mixed forms with both Sinographs and kana; and Japanese texts in pure, *cursive kana. Any of these could incorporate illustrations in configurations ranging from figures set on their own page to a melding of image and text resembling modern comics.
Compared to most other printing methods, xylography presents a low economic and technical barrier to entry. Unlike letterpress, it does not require large capital investments for type or even a press. Blocks can be incised by craftspeople of varying skill and with little or no understanding of the content. In early modern China, for example, different artisans might cut the vertical, horizontal, and diagonal strokes. Once carved, typically on both faces, a block could produce thousands of copies. The yield depended on the hardness of the wood, quality of the carving, and frequency of use. Blocks could also be modified to fix damage, correct errors, or censor content.
Xylography is thus a robust technology for making graphic information rapidly and widely available in identical form. Transferring information from other media to woodblock prints inevitably entailed transformations. For example, multicolor printing was expensive and technically demanding, so the vast majority of xylography in East Asia was monochrome, mainly using soot-based black inks similar to those for handwriting and drawing. Multicolor printing using different pigments was a complex undertaking reserved for decorative works, stationery, and a small minority of books, notably texts with annotations and punctuation from multiple commentators distinguished by color. Variegated shading, too, was usually lost in the move from brushstroke to print, which tends to be either black or white, so xylography promoted a view of the document as a monochrome entity. The uniformity of block sizes also favored the standardization of the page as a frame for text and images and aided a shift from the scroll to the spine-bound volume in East Asia. Tibetan books, by contrast, were typically stacks of wide, short sheets on the model of Indic palm-leaf books; this form needed little modification for printing.
Different technologies tend to emphasize certain graphic features for replication. If typography isolates by doing something akin to digitization—engaging with text as a sequence of glyphs drawn from a finite set—xylography is indifferent, like photography, to the semantics of language and imagery; its domain is the whole page. Nonetheless, at other scales xylography shaped graphic design, promoting both visual styles that were easy to execute in wood (straight lines rather than curves, for one) and forms that conveyed information efficiently, such as “typefaces” that were graphically spare and confounded calligraphic aesthetics but made small, dense text more readable. It took writing out of the hands of the scribe and put it into the hands of millions.
Bruce Rusk
See also books; layout and script in letters; letterpress; proofreaders; scrolls and rolls