PRECTIKO, stereotype. Perhaps it would not have been improper to have treated of stereotype printing even before that of common printing: for the first ideas of this art were certainly anterior to those of printing by moveable types.
The method of printing linen and pa. per for hangings has been known in the east from time immemorial. Printing from wooden blocks, by the Jesuits, has been practised above sixteen hundred years in China. According to this plan, when an author chuses to print his work, he has it fairly transcribed upon a thin and transparent paper. Each leaf is then reversed and fastened upon a smooth block of hard wood, upon which the en graver cuts the characters, in relief. There must be, therefore, a separate block for every page.
At the end of the fourteenth and be ginning of the fifteenth century, the Ita lians, Germans, Flemings, and Dutch, be gan at the same time to engrave on wood and copper, but the previous advances had been gradual. The inscriptions, in relief, upon monuments and altars, in the cloisters and over church porches, serv ed as models for block-printing. The letters upon painted windows greatly re semble those in the books ofimages. The invention of cards was an intermediate step. Bullet, in his " Recherches Histo riques sur les Cartes a jotter," has proved from old chronicles, in particular from that of Petit-Jean de Sanitre, from edicts civil and ecclesiastical, and from the figures of the cards, that they were in vented towards Charles the Fifth's reign, about the year 1376. By the shape of the crowns, and the sceptres with the ,fear de his, he infers that the French in vented them. They soon were introduc ed into Spain, Italy, Germany, and Eng land. The names of the suits seem ra ther to imply a Spanish or Italian origin. At first the cards were painted ; about the year 1400 a method was devised of print ing them from blocks. To this we may directly trace the art of printing. The books of images form the next step. These also were printed from wooden blocks ; one side of the leaf only is im pressed, and the corresponding text is placed below, beside, or proceeding from the mouth of the figure. Of tliese scarce books, M.- Lambinet mentions seven : 1. Figures typicm veteris atque antitypicx novi testamenti. This is the work which in Germany is called the Bible of the Poor, because it was originally designed as an abridgment of the Bible for those who could not purchase the whole scrip tures in manuscript, and who probably could not read. There is one copy of this
work in the Bodleian Library, and ano ther at Christ's College, Cambridge. 2. Ilistoria S. Joannis Evangelista, ejusque visiones apocalypticz. 3. Distoria seu Providentia Virginis Maria:, ex cautico cauticorum. 4. Ars moriendi. 5. Ars memorandi notabilis per figures Evangi listarum. 6. Donates, seu grammatica brevis in usum scholar= conscripts. It is not easy to conceive how this can be classed among the books of images. 7. Sl cculum humanx- salvato as. There is to be an English tran:la,ion of this work. Two other Books of images, the Tewrdanck, and the Triumpf-wagen, are posterior to the common use of printing. It is clear, therefore, from the cotton and silk printing of the Indians, the Chinese block-printing, and these books of ima ges, and perhaps, also, from the hardic mode of writing, who cut their poems upon bars of wood, arranged like a grid iron, and which they called carving a book, that the idea of stereotype printing is by no means of modern origin. That it was prior to the art of printing with mm-eable types there can be no doubt ; since this latter mode of printing was first suggested by the Catholicon, which was printed with wooden tablets, in a series, and composed in forms. This mode of printing, except in China, where it is still practised, was laid aside soon after the invention of the common letter-press printing.
The history of the invention of modern stereotype is, like that of common print ing, involved in some obscurity as to the name of the person, to whom justly be longs the honour of an invention so use ful and curious. Mr. Andrew Tilloch, the worthy and ingenious editor of the Philosophical Magazine, has given the following extract, translated from Niewe Algemein Konst en Letter Bode, 1798, No. 232, which deserves particularly to be noticed. " Above a hundred years ago the Dutch were in possession of the art of printing with solid or fixed types, which in every respect was superior to that of Didot's stereotype. It may, how ever, be readily comprehended, that their letters were not cut in so elegant a man lier, especially when we reflect on the progress which typography has made since that period. Samuel and J. Leucht mans, booksellers at Leyden, have still in their possession the forms of a quarto Bi ble, which were constructed in this inge nious manner. Many thousand impres sions were thrown off, which are in eve ry body's hands, and the letters are still good.