The New Childrens Encyclopedia

WRITING AND PRINTING

169

PRINTING

The Chinese first invented

printing by blocks in the 7th

century. A word or whole page

was carved onto a wooden block,

which was dipped in ink and

printed onto cloth. The block

could be dipped and printed

again and again, but each print

had to be done by hand.

How do presses work?

Like the earliest hand printing,

presses use blocks carved in

relief—with reversed, raised

letters that print the right way

around. Letter blocks, called

“type,” are set into a frame and

covered in ink, and the paper is

pressed down on top.

Every day, millions of

newspapers are printed all over

the world. Japanese newspaper

The Yomiuri Shimbun

has the

highest circulation in the

world, with an estimated

10 million readers each day.

7 /^7 

Cyan

Yellow

Black

Color printing

How many colors can

you see on this page?

Technically, there are just

four: cyan (C), magenta (M),

yellow (Y), and black (K). As

the paper runs through the

CMYK printing rollers, a certain

amount of each colored ink is printed

onto the paper. At the end of the run,

the layers of ink have built up

to produce thousands of different shades.

CULTURE

BEST-SELLERS

The most popular books in the world are

known as best-sellers.

O

The biggest seller of all time is the

Christian Bible, at an estimated 6 billion

copies. It has been translated into 2,000

languages.

O
 Mao Zedong’s Quotations from

Chairman Mao sold some 900 million

copies.

O
 The seven Harry Potter books by J. K.

Rowling have sold more than 500 million

copies worldwide.

O
 Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has sold more

than 80 million copies.

O
 Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit

has sold 45 million copies worldwide.

 BAD MOVE In 1045, Chinese printer
Pi Sheng invented movable type. Each block
was carved with a character, and blocks could
be rearranged to make new pages. But with
thousands of characters, it didn’t really work.

Magenta

 THE GUTENBERG PRESS

Four hundred years after Pi Sheng, in 1455,

Johannes Gutenberg of Germany invented

the mechanical printing press, which used

metal movable type. For the first time in

Europe, books could be mass-produced, with

the Christian Bible being one of the first.