Chapter 1
The Breakthrough of
Typographic Printing
Asia as the Cradle of Printing
The invention of modern book printing is inextricably linked to the name
of Gutenberg. Gutenberg was considered by American journalists to be the
most important ‘Man of the Millennium’, and his work was seen as the central
turning point between the Middle Ages and the modern era. This, of course,
is rather a Western point of view. For in actual fact, letterpress printing had
already been invented centuries before in China; and even in Korea, a printing
method using movable metal type was practised from the 1230s onwards. The
famous Gutenberg Bible is therefore not the oldest surviving book that was
printed using this technique. In fact, a copy of the Korean Jikji is kept in the
Parisian Bibliothèque National, which was produced in 1377 using movable
type. A history of modern mass media intended not to reflect an overly Euro-
centric perspective should thus commence in Asia – in China and Korea in
particular, but also in Japan. A new and comprehensive interpretive bibliogra-
phy offers an excellent introduction to this topic (Walravens 2007).
The approach adumbrated above is ideal for re-discussing existing theses
on the social and cultural causes and consequences of book printing. To date,
the field of media studies, as well as historical works investigating the social
effects of modern printing, have tended to largely ignore or even negate the
relevance of the Asian development. Marshall McLuhan’s media study, for
instance, mentions Asia only incidentally. The fact that no industrialisation
took place in China despite the early invention of book printing is briefly
established in two sentences: ‘The purpose of printing among the Chinese
was not the creation of uniform repeatable products for a market and a price
system. Print was an alternative to their prayer-wheels and was a visual means