Typography in Russia is the first book printer and the publication of the first printed book. Invention of the printing press

An invention without which today it is difficult to imagine the universal literacy of the population is the printing press. Undoubtedly, this machine has changed the world for the better. But when did it appear in our everyday life and what is its history?

Today, the scientific world is of the opinion that the first printing press was built by a German entrepreneur. However, there are reliable facts that similar devices were used by people much earlier. Even the inhabitants put seals on clay with the help of paint and a stamp. In the first century AD, fabrics decorated with patterns were common in Asia and Europe. In ancient times, stamps were placed on papyrus, and the Chinese had paper on which prayers were printed using wooden templates as early as the second century AD.

In Europe, the production of books was the lot of monasteries. At first they were copied by the monks by hand. Then they made a page template and printed it, but the process was long and a new one was needed for a new book.

Almost immediately, the carved boards were replaced with metal letters, which were applied with oil-based ink using a press. It is believed that the loose type technique was first used by Gutenberg (1436). It is his signature that adorns the most ancient printing press. However, the French and Dutch dispute this fact, arguing that it was their compatriots who invented such an important machine.

So, to the question of who invented the printing press, most of our contemporaries will answer that it was Johannes Gutenberg. He was born in Mainz in a family from the old noble family of Gonzfleischa. It is not known for certain why he left his native city, took up a craft and took his mother's surname. However, in Strasbourg, he made the main invention of the century.

Machine device

Gutenberg concealed how his printing press works. However, today it can be argued that in the beginning it was wooden. There is evidence that his first type existed as early as the sixteenth century. Each letter had a hole through which a rope was threaded to bind the typed lines. But wood is not a good material for such a thing. The letters swelled or dried out over time, making printed text jagged. Therefore, Guttenberg began to cut a stamp out of lead or tin, and then cast letters - it turned out much easier and faster. The printing press actually acquired its modern look.

The typography machine worked like this: initially, letters were made in a mirror form. Hitting them with a hammer, the master received prints on a copper plate. So the required number of letters was made, which were used repeatedly. Then words and lines were added from them. Guttenberg's first output was Donat's grammar (thirteen editions) and calendars. Having got the hang of it, he ventured on a more difficult task: the first printed Bible had 1,286 pages and 3,400,000 characters. The edition was colorful, with pictures, and drawn by artists by hand.

The Gutenberg case continued. In Russia, such a machine appeared in 1563, when, on the orders of Ivan the Terrible, Fedorov built his own machine.

Typography- the process of creating printed products. The term is usually used in a historical context.

China is considered to be the country where printing was invented. There in 1040-1048. a blacksmith named Pi Shen used a kind of composing process, carving characters on blocks of clay, firing them, composing them into text on a metal plate, and attaching them to this plate with resin. However, clay letters wore out quickly and did not give a clear imprint. This method has not found distribution, since the Chinese script is complex and consists of many hieroglyphs. In 1392, the Koreans achieved great success by using copper characters for reproduction of texts. In 1403, Emperor Tai Tzung, in order to improve public education, ordered Korean books to be printed using such characters.

The history of European book printing dates back to the 15th century, when the prototypes of printed publications appeared. These first books, mostly primitive illustrations with little text explanations for the illiterate consumer - "The Bible of the Poor" ("Biblia pauperum"), "The Mirror of Human Salvation" ("Speculum humanae salvationis") or "The Art of Dying" ("Ars moriendi") , were prints from solid boards (woodcut).

Woodcut books were widely used, but they were indirectly related to printing, since printing from boards could not provide a large number of copies, and the wooden form quickly wore out. However, it is worth noting that books were published by the woodcut method until 1530.

Gutenberg and his followers

The invention of printing, i.e. printing from a set consisting of individual letters belongs to the German printer from Mainz - Johannes Gutenberg. He spent a significant part of his life in Strasbourg, where he polished semi-precious stones and mirrors. In 1448, Gutenberg appeared in Mainz, where, having borrowed 150 guilders, he continued to work on casting a type set and designing a printing press. The year of the appearance of the first printed edition remains a subject of discussion - dates are given from 1445 to 1447. The first editions attributed to Johannes Gutenberg were small leaflet-calendars and textbooks.

The year of birth of European newspaper periodicals is considered to be 1609 (although some researchers give 1605). Its place of origin was Germany. The newspaper, which began with the words "Relation: Aller Furnemmen", was printed in January 1609 in the city of Strasbourg, and it contained news from Cologne, Antwerp, Rome, Venice, Vienna and Prague. The editor-publisher of this weekly was the typographer Johann Carolus, who had previously been involved in compiling handwritten news sheets.

In the same 1609, Avisa Relation oder Zeitung appeared in Augsburg, another weekly newspaper published by Luka Schulte. The Italian word "avviso", which has penetrated into the German press, testifies to the genetic connection between the first German weekly newspapers and their Venetian prototypes. The format of the German publications and the form of news presentation are also reminiscent of the Venetian avvisi.

The first printed newspapers did not have a clearly defined title. The place of publication and the name of the editor-publisher were usually not indicated. The location of the news material did not depend on the degree of importance of the event itself, but on the day the information was received. The news itself was practically not commented on and was presented without any headings, political events interspersed with far from always reliable sensations.

Beginning in 1609, weekly printed periodicals began to spread rapidly throughout Europe: in 1610 the printed weekly "Ordinari Wohenzeitung" began to be published in Basel, in 1615 Frankfurt am Main and Vienna joined Basel. In 1616, the newspaper appears in Hamburg, in 1617 - in Berlin, in 1618 - in Amsterdam, in 1620 - in Antwerp, Magdeburg, Nuremberg, Rostock, Braunschweig, Cologne.

As for Cologne, in this city, starting from 1588, Michel von Eitzing published twice a year a selection of political and military events for half a year under the title "Relatio Historica" ​​("Historical Messenger") and sold his edition in autumn and spring on Frankfurt book fairs. In 1594, another publication appeared in Cologne, covering the events of the past six months. "Mercurius Gallo Belgicus" ("Gallo-Belgian Mercury") was published in Latin and was known far beyond the borders of Germany.

By 1630, weekly newspapers appeared in 30 European cities. The rapid spread of printed periodicals, and in the period from 1609 to 1700. in Germany alone, experts recorded the circulation of about 200 newspapers, due to the increased level of printing, the growth of cities and the increase in demand for various information from the urban population, the main consumer of this type of printed matter.

However, the process of the appearance of the first newspapers in a number of countries was held back by strict censorship procedures that regulated the appearance of printed materials. The widespread introduction of the institution of preliminary censorship, which appeared almost immediately after the invention of printing, was the state's reaction to the uncontrolled dissemination of ideas, opinions and information.

It was the effect of censorship restrictions that led to the fact that the first printed newspapers in England and France appeared with a relative delay. Under conditions of severe censorship pressure, the role of a kind of "catalyst" for the emergence of English and French newspapers was played by Holland, which in the 17th century was the most liberal country in Europe.

A well-established printing business and skillful use of the advantages of "ideological liberalism" allowed Holland to make a considerable profit from the sale of printed matter to neighboring countries (England, France), where it was in great demand.

In September 1620, Caspar van Hilten (publisher and editor of the first Dutch newspaper Courante uyt Italien, Duytsland, etc. - News from Italy, Germany, etc.) began to translate his own publication into French and distribute it to French territory under the name "Courant d" Italic & d "Almaigne, etc.". Apparently, this venture van Hilten was a commercial success.

In December of the same year, 1620, the Dutch engraver and cartographer Pieter van de Keere, who had lived for several years in London, began to publish an English-language newspaper in Amsterdam, representing an almost literal translation of the Dutch "couranto". The first issue of the Keere edition of December 2, 1620, was released without a title and began quite remarkably: “The new tydings out of Italic are not yet com” - “Fresh news from Italy has not yet been received.”

From the second issue, this edition has the name "Corrant out of Italic, Germany, etc." The news contained in the newspaper printed in Amsterdam could hardly be called fresh, but it gave readers an idea of ​​what was happening in Europe.

8. The emergence and development of the institution of censorship in Western Europe.

Censorship(lat. censorship) - control of the authorities over the content and dissemination of information, printed materials, musical and stage works, works of fine art, cinema and photo works, radio and television broadcasts, websites and portals, in some cases also private correspondence, in order to limit or prevent dissemination of ideas and information recognized by this government as undesirable.

Censorship is also called the bodies of secular or spiritual authorities exercising such control.

According to the doctor of historical sciences T. M. Goryaeva [Note. 1], censorship arose at the moment when a group of people who had power and property began to impose their will on others. The very word "censorship" came to be otlat. census, which meant in ancient Rome a periodic assessment of property to divide people into estates. The second meaning was related to the division according to the right to enjoy the privileges of citizenship. Thus, according to Goryaeva, the ancient censor monitored the reliability of the political orientation of citizens.

Censorship became an attribute of state and religious power in the era of antiquity. The Brief Jewish Encyclopedia cites as an example the destruction of the scroll of the prophecies of Jeremiah (608 - 598 BC) by the Jewish king Joachim. Encyclopedia Britannica notes that in Athens (480 - 410 BC) the books of the philosopher Protagorao gods were burned. Plato proposed to introduce a set of prohibitions that protect people from the harmful effects of works of art. He became the first thinker to substantiate the need to combine the artist's self-censorship with prior public censorship. Subsequently, censorship and repression for free thought became an integral part of the politics of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. In 213 BC. e. Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of all books except medical, agricultural, and scientific books to protect the empire from the perceived dangers of poetry, history, and philosophy.

The first censorship lists date back to the unacceptable apocryphal books, a list of which was compiled in 494 AD. e. under the Roman Bishop (Pope) Gelasius I. Prior censorship of books was first introduced in 1471 by Pope Sixtus IV. This was followed by similar decisions of Pope Innocent VIII (1487) and the Lateran Council (1512).

Later, under Pope Paul IV, in 1557, an Index of Forbidden Books (Index liborum prohibitorum) was issued to the inquisition tribunals. This list was canceled only in 1966. And in 1571, Pope Pius V established the Congrecatio Indicis, according to which no Catholic, under pain of excommunication, could read or keep books that were not included in the list specified by the pope. On the fires of religious censorship, not only banned books, but also their authors were often burned. The period of the Church Reformation was also notable for its intolerance of dissent. The European society of that time was infected with aggressive xenophobia, and the authorities supported church censorship through administrative, judicial and law enforcement measures.

Subsequently, critics of censorship appeared, such as Pierre Abelard, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Michel Montaigne, who began to express doubts about its usefulness and expediency. Supporters of a strict form of censorship were Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther and Tommaso Campanella. During the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers and politicians proclaimed the ideas of freedom of speech, press, and assembly. The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that if a church ban is not confirmed by state law, it is nothing more than advice. The poet John Milton, speaking in the English Parliament on June 16, 1643, for the first time specifically considered the features of censorship as a public institution. His critical treatise, The Areopagitica, hastened the abolition of pre-censorship in England, which took place in 1695.

9. The origin and formation of political journalism and its role in public life.

PUBLICITY(from the word public, public) - that area of ​​\u200b\u200bliterature that deals with political, public issues in order to pursue certain views in a wide range of readers, create, form public opinion, and initiate certain political campaigns. The origin of journalism belongs, of course, to the era when the mass reader first appeared, as well as the means of reproducing literary works in large numbers, i.e., to the beginning of the capitalist period of Europe, with the influx of new ideas that corresponded to new social relations, with the development of urban life and trade, with the advent of a number of discoveries and inventions, and first of all - typography. Journalism is the child of a young, emerging bourgeoisie and is developing in Europe along with the development of bourgeois relations. Therefore, the birthplace of journalism is Italy, where, along with the first banks, the first newspapers appeared and where, in the Renaissance, the first literary form of journalism arose - pamphlet, i.e. a small pamphlet of bright propaganda content, dealing with some topical, sore issue or attacking individuals and groups that are especially hated politically.

The end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, the epoch of the collapse of feudalism, with its subsistence economy, economic and spiritual stagnation, is a profoundly revolutionary epoch. And like all subsequent revolutionary epochs, it creates an extensive publicistic literature and, first of all, pamphlets. In addition to a number of Italian humanists who opposed the Catholic Church, especially

German humanists became famous at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century Erasmus of Rotterdam with his "Praise of Stupidity" and Reuchlin- with his "Letters of the Dark People", which ridiculed the ignorant monks, the most hated and reactionary social group of that time. The great social movement known as the Reformation, which stirred up huge masses of the lower strata of the population, created for the first time journalism for the people, popular, rude in form, but often caustic and witty. Poisonous pamphlets of a polemical nature were exchanged by the leader of the moderate reformation - Luther with the apostle of heretical communism and the leader of the peasant uprising of 1525 - Thomas Müntzer, who, in his pamphlets and appeals, cursed both the clergy and the authorities.

The pamphlet developed especially in the era of the first English revolution of the 17th century. The great English poet Milton wrote the first pamphlet in history in defense of freedom of the press. At the same time, the famous pamphlet “Killing - no murder” appeared, justifying the execution of the king. A number of pamphlets were written by the Democrat Lilborn and the Communists - "true Levellers". Since then, the pamphlet has become a favorite spiritual weapon of the English opposition parties and has provided examples of high agitational skill, especially during great political campaigns, such as the struggle for electoral reform and the abolition of the Corn Laws in the first half of the 19th century, the struggle for the liberation of Ireland or Chartism. The pamphlet (along with political newspapers) also reached a remarkable development in the era of the French Revolution, which opened with the pamphlet of the Abbé Sieyes "What is the Third Estate", reached its apogee in the newspapers of Marat and ended with the "People's Tribune" of Babeuf. In the era of restoration, French Shchedrin became famous with satirical pamphlets against the returning nobles and the royal administration - Paul Louis Courier. The socialist pamphlets of the 1930s and 1940s are also remarkable. After that pamphlet

more crowded out in France by newspaper journalism.

In Germany, before the revolution of 1848, the poet became famous as publicists Heine and critic Berne. But then the first place undoubtedly took Karl Marx, who in his pamphlets and newspaper articles was able to combine a brilliant literary talent, wit and caustic, killing sarcasm with a deep and clear theoretical analysis. That is why his pamphlets are both agitational and deeply scientific works. The first such work was the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. Then Marx's articles in the New Rhine Gazette, Louis Bonaparte's 18th Brumaire, where, with devastating satire and mockery of the hero of the coup of 1851, a class explanation of the very possibility of this coup is given - finally, "The Civil War in France" , manifesto of the First International, issued immediately after the pacification of the Paris Commune.

Lassalle was also a great master of the agitational and scientific pamphlet in Germany, who wrote his speeches and distributed them in the form of pamphlets.

According to UNESCO, today about 4 billion inhabitants of our planet are literate, that is, able to read and write at least one language. On average, one reader per day "swallows" about 20 pages of printed text. It is impossible to imagine modern society without books, and yet, for a large segment of its history, mankind managed without them.

However, the amount of knowledge accumulated by people, every year and decade became more and more. In order to transmit information to the next generations, it was required to fix it on a reliable carrier. Various materials have been used as such a carrier at different times. Rock inscriptions, baked clay tablets of Babylon, Egyptian papyri, Greek wax tablets, hand-written codices on parchment and paper were all precursors to printed books.

Polygraphy (from the Greek polys "a lot" and grapho "I write") is the reproduction of a text or drawing by repeatedly transferring paint to paper from a finished printing form. The modern meaning of this term implies the industrial reproduction of printed materials, not only books, but also newspapers and magazines, business, and packaging. However, in the Middle Ages, people needed books. The work of a copyist took a lot of time (for example, one copy of the Gospel in Russia was copied in about six months). For this reason, books were very expensive; they were purchased mainly by rich people, monasteries and universities. Therefore, like any other labor-intensive process, the creation of books sooner or later had to be mechanized.

Woodcut board. Tibet. XVII-XVIII centuries

C. Mills. Young Benjamin Franklin learns to print. 1914

Of course, book printing did not appear in a vacuum; its inventors used many technological solutions that already existed by that time. Carved stamps, which make it possible to print relief drawings on soft material (clay, wax, etc.), have been used by people since ancient times. For example, the seals of the Mohenjo-Daro civilization date back to the 3rd millennium BC. e. In Babylon and Assyria seals-cylinders were used, they were rolled over the surface.

Another component of typography, the process of ink transfer, has also been known to mankind for a long time. First, the technology of stuffing patterns onto fabric arose: a pattern carved on a smoothly planed wooden plate was covered with paint, and then pressed against a tightly stretched piece of cloth. This technology has been used since ancient Egypt.

China is traditionally considered the birthplace of printing, although the oldest printed texts found in China, Japan and Korea date back to about the same time as the middle of the 8th century. The technology of their manufacture differed from the modern one and used the principle of xylography (from the Greek xylon "tree"). The original text or drawing, made in ink on paper, was rubbed against the smooth surface of the board. Around the strokes of the resulting mirror image, the engraver cut the wood. Then the form was covered with paint, which fell only on the protruding parts, pressed tightly against a sheet of paper, and a direct image remained on it. However, this method was used mainly for engravings and small texts. The first accurately dated large printed text is a Chinese woodcut copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, published in 868.

Real printing of books began in China only in the middle of the 11th century, when the blacksmith Bi Sheng invented and put into practice typesetting movable type. As the Chinese statesman Shen Ko wrote in his treatise Notes on the Stream of Dreams, Bi Sheng carved signs on soft clay and burned them on fire, with each character forming a separate seal. An iron board covered with a mixture of pine resin, wax and paper ash, with a frame to separate the lines, was filled with seals placed in a row. After the end of the process, the board was heated, and the letters themselves fell out of the frame, ready for new use. Bi Sheng's clay type was soon replaced by wooden and then metal type; the principle of printing from typesetting proved to be very fruitful.

"Diamond Sutra". 868

In Europe, the xylographic printing method was mastered in the 13th century. As in China, at first it was used to print mainly engravings and small texts, then they also mastered books, in which, however, there were more drawings than text. A striking example of such a publication was the so-called Biblia pauperum ("Bibles of the poor") illustrated in the manner of modern comics anthologies of biblical texts. Thus, in Europe XIII-XV centuries. two types of book production coexisted - parchment manuscripts for religious and university literature and paper woodcuts for the poorly educated common people.

In 1450, the German jeweler Johannes Gutenberg entered into an agreement with the usurer Fust to obtain a loan for the organization of a printing house. The printing press he invented combined two already known principles: typesetting and printing. The engraver made a punch (a metal bar with a mirror image of letters on the end), a matrix was squeezed out in a plate of soft metal with a punch, and any required number of letters was cast from the matrices inserted into a special mold. Gutenberg fonts contained a very large number (up to 300) of different characters, such an abundance was necessary in order to imitate the look of a handwritten book.

Johannes Gutenberg examines the first printing press. 19th century engraving

Type-setting cash desk with letters.

The printing press was a manual press, similar to a wine-making press, which connected two horizontal planes with a pressure screw: a typesetting board with letters was installed on one, and a slightly moistened sheet of paper was pressed against the other. The letters were covered with printing ink from a mixture of soot and linseed oil. The design of the machine turned out to be so successful that it remained virtually unchanged for three centuries.

In six years, Gutenberg, working almost without help, cast at least five different types, printed the Latin grammar of Aelius Donatus, several papal indulgences, and two versions of the Bible. Wanting to defer loan payments until the business was profitable, Gutenberg refused to pay Fust interest. The pawnbroker sued, the court decided to take over the printing house, and Gutenberg was forced to start the business from scratch. However, it was the protocol of the trial, discovered at the end of the 19th century, that put an end to the question of the authorship of the invention of the printing press, before that its creation was attributed to the German Mentelin, the Italian Castaldi and even Fust.

The official history of printing in Russia began in 1553, when the first state printing house was opened in Moscow by order of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. During the 1550s, it printed a number of "anonymous" (without imprint) books. Historians suggest that deacon Ivan Fedorov, known as the Russian first printer, worked in the printing house from the very beginning. The first printed book in which the name of Fedorov and Peter Mstislavets, who helped him, was the Apostle, work on which was carried out, as indicated in the afterword, from April 15bZ to March 1564. The following year, Fedorov's printing house published his second book, The Clockworker.

Gutenberg printing press.

By the middle of the XVIII century. there was a need not only for more books, but also for the rapid release of newspapers and magazines in large circulations. The manual printing press could not satisfy these requirements. The printing press, invented by Friedrich König, helped radically improve the printing process. Initially, in the design known as the "Sulsk press", only the process of applying paint to the printing plate was mechanized. In 1810 Koenig replaced the flat pressure plate with a rotating cylinder, a decisive step in the development of a high-speed printing press. Six years later, a double-sided printing machine was created.

Although the flatbed printing press was a truly revolutionary invention, it still had serious drawbacks. Its printing form made reciprocating movements, significantly complicating the mechanism, while the return stroke was idle. In 1848, Richard Howe and August Applegate successfully applied the rotary (i.e., based on the rotation of the device) principle for printing needs, which was successfully used for printing designs on fabric. The hardest part was fixing the printing plate on the cylindrical drum so that the characters would not fall out as it rotated.

The improvement of the printing process continued throughout the 20th century. Already in its first decade, first two-color, and then multi-color rotary machines appeared. In 1914, the production of machines for intaglio printing was mastered (their printing elements are recessed in relation to blanks), and six years later for flat or offset printing (printing and blank elements are located in the same plane and differ in physical and chemical properties, while this ink lingers only on printers). Nowadays, all printing operations are automated and controlled by computers. There is no shortage of printed paper books for a long time, but now they are competing with electronic books.

With the invention of offset printing, the printing cycle has accelerated significantly.

Johannes Gutenberg. Logo of the brewing company "Schöfferhofer".

The time of the invention of printing refers to the era of the end of the struggle between democracy and the aristocracy in the medieval cities of Europe, the flourishing of humanism and the beginning of an unprecedented growth in artistic creativity.

A new stage of social development required the reproduction of books at a pace that medieval scribes could not provide. The invention of printing meant a revolution, but every revolution has its own history. The case of Johannes Gutenberg, the universally recognized creator of the European method of printing, was a remarkable result of a process that stretched for a millennium.

There are four fundamental components of modern printing methods: a typesetting plate, along with the necessary procedure for setting it up and fixing it in position, a printing press, the right type of printing ink, and a printable material such as paper.

Paper was invented in China many years ago (Dai Lun) and has long been widely used in the West. It was the only element of the printing process that Johannes Gutenberg had ready-made. Although even before Gutenberg, some work was carried out to improve the remaining elements of typography. Chinese sources testify that at the beginning of the second millennium it was (from a specially fired clay mass, and later from bronze). There is no reason to believe that Gutenberg was familiar with the experience of the Chinese. Obviously, Gutenberg came to solve the problem of movable type on his own and introduced many important innovations. For example, he found a metal alloy suitable for typesetting, created a matrix for accurate and accurate casting of letter sets, oil-based printing ink and a machine suitable for printing.

But Gutenberg's overall contribution is much more valued than any of his personal inventions or improvements. His merit lies mainly in the fact that he combined all the elements of printing into an efficient system of production. It is for printing, unlike all other previous inventions, that the process of mass production is essential. Gutenberg created not just one device, not just one mechanism, and not even a whole series of technical devices. He created a complete finished industrial process.

The first attempts to replicate printed materials were embossing, which began to be used in Europe in the 13th century for the production of playing cards. Then - making a convex drawing on a wooden board and imprinting it on a sheet - goes into the field of book business. The beginning of the 15th century was marked by the appearance of paintings and small works printed in this way. Woodcut printing was especially developed in the Netherlands.

It remained to take the last step - cut the board into movable letters and move on to typing. The embodiment of this thought logically followed from the method of teaching literacy - the folding of words from individual letters.

The basis of Gutenberg's invention is the creation of what is now called type, i.e. metal blocks (letters) with a bulge at one end, giving the imprint of the letter. The letter is so simple that we take it for granted, and it seems strange the long, painstaking work that Gutenberg had to do to create the letter. Meanwhile, it can be said without exaggeration that Gutenberg actually proved his genius by solving the problem of type production, and it was precisely with this that he created a new art.

He began, apparently, with a simple division of a wooden board into movable wooden letters. However, this material, due to its fragility, changes in shape from moisture and the inconvenience of fixing in a printed form, quickly proved unsuitable for solving the problems that the inventor faced.

The emergence of the idea of ​​a metal type did not predetermine the achievement of the necessary results. Most likely, Gutenberg began by carving letters directly on metal plates and only later mastered the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe enormous advantage of casting exactly the same type of letters in a once created form.

But there was one more detail on which the inventor had to work hard - this is the creation of a punch. It is possible, of course, to cut the shape of a letter or word deep into the metal and then, pouring fusible metal into the forms prepared in this way, to obtain letters with a convex point of the letter. However, it is possible to greatly simplify the task if you make one model of a convex letter on solid metal - a punch. With a punch, a series of inverse in-depth images of the desired letter are imprinted in softer metal, matrices are obtained, and then a quick casting of any number of letters is organized. The next step is to find an alloy that provides both ease of manufacture (casting) and sufficient strength of the font to withstand repeated printing. Only the invention of the punchson, the necessary alloy, and the organization of word casting marked a decisive and irrevocable success. All this path of searching was extremely long and difficult, and it is not surprising that Gutenberg could use almost the entire fifteen years of his Strasbourg life to go through it.

Gutenberg obviously owns the introduction of the first type-setting cash desk and a major innovation in printing - the creation of a printing press. The Gutenberg printing press is extremely simple - it is a simple wooden screw press. As a fundamental principle, he used the presses that already existed by that time, which were used in winemaking. Gutenberg converted a grape juice press into the world's first commercial printing press.

The best black paint in the Middle Ages was considered soot obtained by burning a vine and ground with vegetable oil. Gutenberg invented printing ink - Lampenruß, Firnis und Eiweiß/lamp black and linseed oil or drying oil.

The first works of Gutenberg were small pamphlets and one-sheets; for larger works, he had no capital and had to seek it from others. At the beginning of 1450, Gutenberg entered into a community with the wealthy burgher of Mainz, Johann Fust, who lent him money. At the beginning of 1450. the project of a major publication began to take over the thoughts of the first printer - a grandiose project at that time. It was supposed to publish the full text of the Bible in Latin. It was for this work that Gutenberg had to borrow huge sums of money from Fust. By the way, at about the same time, the printer Pamfilius Castaldi worked in Italy, the master Lavrenty Koster worked in Holland, and Johann Mentelin worked in the same Germany. All of them made the transition from printing from wooden boards by rolling with a soft roller to printing with movable type using a press. However, the decisive technological innovations were associated with the Gutenberg typography.

For a long time, the first Bible was revered as the first printed book in general. It is rightfully the first book, because the books that came out earlier, in their volume, rather deserve the name of pamphlets. In addition, this is the first book that has come down to us in its entirety, moreover, with a fairly large number of copies, while all previous books have survived only in fragments. In its design, it is one of the finest books of all ages. There were 180 such books in total: Gutenberg printed 180 copies of the Bible, 45 of them on parchment, the rest on Italian paper with watermarks. And although this is not the first incunabula, it is distinguished from other early printed editions by the exceptional quality of design. To this day, only 21 books have survived in their entirety. $ 25-35 million - and for what other book such fabulous sums were not paid. The first books published in Europe from the beginning of printing until January 1, 1501 were called incunabula (from Latin incunabula - "cradle", "beginning"). Editions of this period are very rare, since their circulation was 100 - 300 copies.

However, in the midst of work on the Bible, Fust demanded the return of the loan. Due to the inability to pay most of the debt, a lawsuit arose that ended tragically for Gutenberg: he lost not only the printing house, but also a significant part of the equipment of his first printing house. The lost one apparently included the matrices of the first Gutenberg type; the font itself, already badly knocked down, remained the property of Gutenberg. Gutenberg's creative genius was apparently completed by one former Gutenberg apprentice, Peter Schaeffer, and the profits made after the publication of the Bible flowed into Johann Fust's pocket. Schaeffer soon became Fust's son-in-law, marrying his only daughter Christina. Now the printing house bore their names "Fust und Schöffer" (Fust and Schöffer). Schaeffer is credited with such innovations in typography as the dating of books, the publisher's mark, the Greek font, printing with colored inks. Schaeffer fused lead with antimony and received a typographic hart (from hart - hard (German), and made the transition from clay (large, stucco) forms, which were used by his teacher Gutenberg, to copper forms. Scheffer and Christina had four sons who continued a family business, the wheat beer "Schöfferhofer" is still produced in Mainz in his honor.

Thus, Gutenberg lost his monopoly on his invention. Under such conditions, he could not withstand the competition of his wealthy rival and, having published a few small books, was forced to close the printing house. He managed to resume printing only for a short time, in 1460-1462. After the sack and fire of Mainz on October 28, 1462, Gutenberg no longer acted as a printer. On January 17, 1465, Archbishop Adolf II of Mainz of Nassau granted Gutenberg an estate, court dress, 2,180 measures of grain and 2,000 liters of wine for life. Gutenberg died on February 3, 1468 and was buried in Mainz in the Franciscan church.

The invention of Gutenberg made a radical revolution because it solved the problem of making books of any size, many times accelerated the process of printing them; it provided reasonable prices for books and profitability of work. Typography deprived the monks-scribes of income in the first place. Only bookbinders did not suffer. Johannes Gutenberg and other early printers most often produced books unbound, it was up to the readers to take care of this. There were no problems with this, because bookbinding workshops existed in every more or less large city.

It cost nothing for the monks to declare Gutenberg's invention a creation of the devil, and the inventor a servant of Satan. That such a danger to Gutenberg was quite real is proved by the burning in Cologne of the first copies of the printed Bible, as the work of Satan. Typography brought with it the desacralization of the "holy book": henceforth the Bible is publicly available and can be studied independently, without the priest's commentary, and this is enough for communication with God. The "Book of Creation" could not only be contemplated admiringly, strictly observing church instructions, but actively and independently explored.

Gutenberg dissected the craft unity of the simplest printing into separate specialized types of work: type making, typesetting and printing. This invention completely changed the technique of printing and rebuilt the structure of the printing process.

The glory of the creator of one of the most brilliant arts should belong to a person who has devoted his whole life to bringing his work to the end, in order to create for the first time a printing house and a book.

Computer technologies penetrate everywhere into all spheres of human activity. The electronic media born by them are increasingly crowding the position of the printed word. And yet, even in the 21st century, it is difficult to imagine our life without all that is dryly called "printed products."

It can be said without exaggeration that the invention of printing rightly takes its place among the real breakthroughs of human thought among such significant discoveries as the invention of the compass, gunpowder and paper. Being essentially a purely technical invention, or rather even technological, printing became a catalyst for human progress that determined the development of civilizations in the second half of the past millennium.

Mankind went a long way to the invention of the printing press, and the history of the creation of a printed book was not cloudless and, for various reasons, was torn apart by five centuries of oblivion.

For a long time, human memory was the only means of preserving and transmitting social experience, information about events and people. The immortal poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are known to have been written down in Athens on scrolls around 510 BC. Prior to this time, for centuries, poems had been circulated orally. The invention of writing can probably be considered the first information revolution in the history of mankind, which advanced the peoples that made it far. However, the possession of writing did not guarantee the peoples either global leadership or historical longevity. This is evidenced by the fate of the disappeared peoples who once had their own written language (for example, the Sumerians).

Currently, there are about 8,000 alphabets and their variants in the world, adapted to different languages ​​and dialects. The most common alphabets are based on the Latin alphabet.

Typography (translated from Greek - polywriting) is the reproduction in a large number of copies of the same text or drawing.

The idea of ​​printing was laid down in the brand or brand, with which cattle breeders marked their horses or cows. The stamping principle was already known in the cuneiform cultures of the Ancient East (the Sumerians, Babylon, Egypt). Symbols were applied spirally on the clay disc with the help of stamps. In fact, this disk was the first example of printing related text. The next stage is the printing of coins. Then "stone" books and books on clay tablets appeared, later - papyrus scrolls, and from the 2nd century BC. - books on parchment (parchment). Then, in the era of Aristotle and Plato, manuscripts were revealed to the world.

We can say that printing was invented twice: in the 900s AD. in China (China) and then in XV | century in Western Europe. Chinese book printing originally used a technology in which a board was used as a printing plate, on which texts and symbols were cut. Around 725. The world's first newspaper Di-bao (Messenger) was published. In 770. At the behest of Empress Shotoku, a million spells were printed in this way, which were embedded in miniature pagodas. Then comes the stamping.

Estampage is a technique for obtaining a direct impression of a relief image. The first experiments of such a peculiar method of printing date back to the period practically coinciding with the time of the invention of paper in China (2nd century AD). The method consists in obtaining impressions from flat stone reliefs; a slightly moistened paper is applied to the relief, which is rubbed with special brushes and pressed into the recesses with a light tap; after that, water-based paint is applied to the surface of the dried paper, which has taken on relief forms, with a large flat brush and swabs.

Then in the Buddhist monasteries of China, approximately in 618-907. woodcut technology, or edged woodcut engraving, appeared. The first woodcut book was called the Diamond Sutra. It was made in 868 and first discovered in 1900. in the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas in Donghuang (Western China). In Europe, the woodcut book, as such, appeared during the Middle Ages after the Crusades. One of the famous woodcut publications was the "Bible of the Poor".

During the Renaissance in Europe, printing was reborn. In the 1440s, the woodcut method was perfected by the German Hans Gensfleisch or Johannes Gutenberg (1394/1399 - 1468).

The invention of book printing by I. Gutenberg marked a major turning point in the history of book culture - the end of the medieval book and the birth of the book of modern times. This invention was prepared and inspired by the entire development of the culture of the late Middle Ages, which created both the technical and general cultural prerequisites for it, and determined the urgent need for a new type of book.

It was in his printing house in the German city of Mainz that printed books first saw the light, typed with metal movable letters, cut out in a mirror image. The book printing technology he developed turned out to be the most productive for that time. Gutenberg came to the conclusion that it was necessary to quickly cast any amount of type - a word-casting process. This process was thought out by him to the smallest detail and for its implementation were developed: a method for making a printing plate by typing in separate letters, a manual type-casting device, a manual printing press for obtaining an imprint from a type-casting form.

The invention of the printing press determined the further development of the technology of book production and had a strong impact on the typology and art of the book, having received general cultural significance - the path for the formation of mega-civilizations, such as Western European, Chinese, and Islamic, was determined. We can say with confidence that the history of world culture is inseparable from the history of the printed book.

If a handwritten book was a very expensive item, and therefore, their largest collections, as a rule, were located in monasteries and universities, then the era of I. Gutenberg turned the book into a public domain, which means that it became a necessary element in the process of knowledge, education, and the formation of an aesthetic taste, a means of influencing the masses and even an information weapon. Already at that distant time, kings, emperors, clergymen and those in power in the era of the New Age began to use the book to promote their ideas, form this or that ideology, and strengthen their power. For example, Henry VIII and his Prime Minister Thomas Cromwell published pamphlets to establish the Church of England.

The first half of the 15th century is the time of great geographical and scientific discoveries, the transition to new socio-economic and political relations, the birth of a new worldview and attitude, the birth of new cities and new states, the era of the Reformation, when the Bible was translated into German by Martin Luther and published by a large circulation. The ongoing changes have led to a high demand for the book, resulting in the need for printing. By the end of the century, more than a thousand printing houses had been founded, which had already produced about 40 thousand publications with a circulation of approximately 12 million copies. Simultaneously with the triumphant march of book printing across Europe, a new form of the book was born and quickly asserted itself, and with it a new book aesthetics.

The presence of a book market, the simultaneous demand for a large number of copies, at least of some of the most common and important books, raised the issue of circulation for printing houses, especially since printing technology is primarily a circulation technique, moreover, it is economically profitable as a result of the ability to produce a large number of copies from one set. the number of equal impressions. Thus, another practical problem, which was becoming more and more urgent, was also solved: careful verification of the text before its reproduction, without exposing the book to the danger of distortion during repeated rewriting. But in order for these tasks to be consciously set, it is necessary, on the one hand, the development of scientific criticism of texts, and on the other hand, the emergence of the very idea of ​​circulation as a specific, predetermined form of a book subject to technical reproduction.

In 1494 The Montenegrin Printing House, located in a monastery in the city of Cetinje, founded by the monk Macarius, began its activity. The first book in the Old Slavonic language "Okhtoih the first voice" was printed.

In 1517-1519. in Prague, Francis Skorina, a Belarusian pioneer printer and educator, printed the book “Psalter” in Cyrillic in Church Slavonic.

Typography in Russia originates in the 50s of the 16th century in a Moscow printing house located in the house of the priest Sylvester (author of Domostroy). Here were published in Church Slavonic: three Four Gospels, two Psalters and two Triodion. A feature of Russian fonts was the use of superscripts with line crossings separately from other letters. This made it possible to skillfully imitate the appearance of a handwritten book page. Tin was used for casting fonts, so the letters could not withstand large print runs.

In 1563 The first state printing house began its activity, known for the fact that Ivan Fedorov and Pyotr Timofeev Mstislavets worked in it. It was there that the first dated book, The Apostle, was produced. The work on its publication lasted almost a year - from April 19, 1563 to March 1, 1564.