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107-745: The collection contains 17.7 million manuscripts , 1.2 million public documents, and tens of thousands of films and videos . The Duke University Libraries consists of the William R. Perkins Library, Bostock Library, and the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library on West Campus; the Lilly Library and Music Library on East Campus, and the Pearse Memorial Library at the Duke Marine Lab. It also includes

214-470: A 'jade seal jade block writing,' which did not require a brush: one blew on the paper and characters formed." He then used his powers to mystify a local governor. Eventually he was dealt with by the governor's successor, who presumably executed Gong. Timothy Hugh Barrett postulates that Gong's magical jade block was actually a printing device, and Gong was one of the first, if not the first printer. The semi-mythical record of him therefore describes his usage of

321-565: A blank hidden page. Later the sewn bindings were preferred rather than pasted bindings. Only relatively small volumes ( juan 卷 ) were bound up, and several of these would be enclosed in a cover called a tao , with wooden boards at front and back, and loops and pegs to close up the book when not in use. For example, one complete Tripitaka had over 6,400 juan in 595 tao . Despite the productive effect of woodblock printing, historian Endymion Wilkinson notes that it never supplanted handwritten manuscripts. Indeed, manuscripts remained dominant until

428-466: A distinctive long rectangular shape, were used dating back to the 5th century BCE or earlier, and in some cases continued to be used until the 19th century. In China, bamboo and wooden slips were used prior to the introduction of paper . In Russia, birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived. Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, and by

535-403: A doubling of the last letter of the abbreviation expresses the plural, just as pp. means "pages". A manuscript may be a codex (i.e. bound as a book ), a scroll , or bound differently or consist of loose pages. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations. The mechanical reproduction of a manuscript

642-538: A large printing block. The rise of printing was greatly influenced by Mahayana Buddhism . According to Mahayana beliefs, religious texts hold intrinsic value for carrying the Buddha's word and act as talismanic objects containing sacred power capable of warding off evil spirits. By copying and preserving these texts, Buddhists could accrue personal merit. As a consequence the idea of printing and its advantages in replicating texts quickly became apparent to Buddhists, who by

749-724: A major collection of Confederate imprints . Bostock Library, named for board of trustees member Roy J. Bostock , opened in the fall of 2005 as part of the University's strategic plan to supplement Duke's libraries. It contains 87 study carrels, 517 seats, and 96 computer stations, as well as 72,996 feet (22,249 m) of shelving for overflow books from Perkins Library as well as for new collections. The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds more than 350,000 rare books, 10,000 manuscript collections, and extensive collections of photography, film, and audio. The library

856-407: A manuscript, or script for short, is an author's or dramatist's text, used by a theatre company or film crew during the production of the work's performance or filming. More specifically, a motion picture manuscript is called a screenplay; a television manuscript, a teleplay; a manuscript for the theatre, a stage play; and a manuscript for audio-only performance is often called a radio play, even when

963-464: A metal stylus. In the Philippines , for example, as early as 900 AD, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus, but were punched much like the style of today's dot-matrix printers . This type of document was rare compared to the usual leaves and bamboo staves that were inscribed. However, neither the leaves nor paper were as durable as the metal document in the hot, humid climate. In Burma ,

1070-417: A new dimension of cultural reverence. Those who considered themselves real scholars and true connoisseurs of the book did not consider imprints to be real books. Under the elitist attitudes of the time, "printed books were for those who did not truly care about books". However, copyists and manuscripts only continued to remain competitive with printed editions by dramatically reducing their price. According to

1177-552: A public place in Luoyang during the Han dynasty for scholars and students to copy. The Suishu jingjizhi , the blibography of the official history of the Sui dynasty , includes several ink-squeeze rubbings, believed to have led to the early duplication of texts that inspired printing. A stone inscription cut in reverse dating from the first half of the 6th century implies that it may have been

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1284-456: A single block for a whole page, appeared in Europe in the mid-15th century. As they were almost always undated, and without statement of printer or place of printing, determining their dates of printing has been an extremely difficult task. Allan H. Stevenson , by comparing the watermarks in the paper used in block books with watermarks in dated documents, concluded that the "heyday" of block books

1391-546: Is Digital Scriptorium , hosted by the University of California at Berkeley . Woodblock printing Woodblock printing or block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later on paper . Each page or image is created by carving a wooden block to leave only some areas and lines at

1498-678: Is called facsimile . Digital reproductions can be called (high-resolution) scans or digital images . Before the inventions of printing, in China by woodblock and in Europe by movable type in a printing press , all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand. In the west, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls ( volumen in Latin) or books ( codex , plural codices ). Manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchment, on papyrus , and on paper. In Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia , palm leaf manuscripts , with

1605-688: Is called the Great spell of unsullied pure light ( Wugou jingguang da tuoluoni jing 無垢淨光大陀羅尼經) and was printed using woodblock during the Tang dynasty, c.  650 –670 AD. A similar piece, the Saddharma pundarika sutra, was also discovered and dated to 690 to 699. This coincides with the reign of Wu Zetian , under which the Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra , which advocates the practice of printing apotropaic and merit making texts and images,

1712-621: Is considered the most accurate of Buddhist canons written in Classical Chinese as well as a standard edition for East Asian Buddhist scholarship. In the Kamakura period from the 12th century to the 13th century, many books were printed and published by woodblock printing at Buddhist temples in Kyoto and Kamakura . The mass production of woodblock prints in the Edo period was due to

1819-711: Is often used by modern academics, especially where the animal has not been established by testing. Merovingian script , or "Luxeuil minuscule", is named after an abbey in Western France, the Luxeuil Abbey , founded by the Irish missionary St Columba c.  590 . Caroline minuscule is a calligraphic script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Latin alphabet could be easily recognized by

1926-538: Is the collection of twenty-nine Kaempfer Prints ( British Museum , London), brought in 1693 by a German physician from China to Europe, which includes flowers, fruits, birds, insects and ornamental motifs reminiscent of the style of Kangxi ceramics. Equally famous is the compilation Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden , published in two parts between 1679 and 1701. It was initiated by the scholar and landscape painter Wáng Gài and expanded and prefaced by

2033-409: The renmen-tai ( ja ), in which several characters are written in succession with smooth brush strokes. As a result, a single typeface was sometimes created by combining two to four semi-cursive and cursive kanji or hiragana characters. In one book, 2,100 characters were created, but 16% of them were used only once. Despite the appeal of moveable type, however, craftsmen soon decided that

2140-667: The Dead Sea scrolls make no such differentiation. Manuscripts using all upper case letters are called majuscule , those using all lower case are called minuscule . Usually, the majuscule scripts such as uncial are written with much more care. The scribe lifted his pen between each stroke, producing an unmistakable effect of regularity and formality. On the other hand, while minuscule scripts can be written with pen-lift, they may also be cursive , that is, use little or no pen-lift. Islamic manuscripts were produced in different ways depending on their use and time period. Parchment (vellum)

2247-489: The Diamond Sutra is 14 feet long and contains a colophon at the inner end, which reads: "Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [i.e. 11 May, AD 868 ]". It is considered the world's oldest securely dated woodblock scroll. The Diamond sutra was closely followed by the earliest extant printed almanac,

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2354-516: The English cottager cannot buy anything like the amount of printed matter for his penny that the Chinaman can for even less. A penny Prayer-book, admittedly sold at a loss, cannot compete in mass of matter with many of the books to be bought for a few cash in China. When it is considered, too, that a block has been laboriously cut for each leaf, the cheapness of the result is only accounted for by

2461-708: The Histories , philosophical works, encyclopedias, collections, and books on medicine and the art of war. In 971 work began on the complete Tripiṭaka Buddhist Canon ( Kaibao zangshu 開寶藏書) in Chengdu . It took 10 years to finish the 130,000 blocks needed to print the text. The finished product, the Sichuan edition of the Kaibao Canon , also known as the Kaibao Tripitaka , was printed in 983. Prior to

2568-455: The Ming dynasty author Hu Yinglin , "if no printed edition were available on the market, the hand-copied manuscript of a book would cost ten times as much as the printed work", and also, "once a printed edition appeared, the transcribed copy could no longer be sold and would be discarded". The result is that despite the mutual co-existence of hand-copied manuscripts and printed texts, the cost of

2675-572: The Mongol invasion of 1232. King Gojong ordered another set to be created and work began in 1237, this time only taking 12 years to complete. In 1248 the complete Goryeo Daejanggyeong numbered 81,258 printing blocks, 52,330,152 characters, 1496 titles, and 6568 volumes. Due to the stringent editing process that went into the Goryeo Daejanggyeong and its surprisingly enduring nature, having survived completely intact over 760 years, it

2782-875: The Northern Song dynasty around the year 1041 by the commoner Bi Sheng . Metal movable type also appeared in the Southern Song dynasty . The earliest extant book printed using movable type is the Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union , printed in Western Xia c. 1139–1193. Metal movable type was used in the Song, Jin , and Yuan dynasties for printing banknotes. The invention of movable type did not have an immediate effect on woodblock printing and it never supplanted it in East Asia . Only during

2889-595: The Qianfu sinian lishu (乾符四年曆書), dated to 877. Evidence of woodblock printing appeared in Korea and Japan soon afterward. The Great Dharani Sutra ( Korean : 무구정광대다라니경/無垢淨光大陀羅尼經 , romanized :  Muggujeonggwang Dadharanigyeong ) was discovered at Bulguksa , South Korea in 1966 and dated between 704 and 751 in the era of Later Silla . The document is printed on a 8 cm × 630 cm (3.1 in × 248.0 in) mulberry paper scroll. A dhāraṇī sutra

2996-455: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten , as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has come to be understood to further include any written, typed, or word-processed copy of an author's work, as distinguished from

3103-539: The University of Timbuktu in Mali . Major U.S. repositories of medieval manuscripts include: Many European libraries have far larger collections. Because they are books, pre-modern manuscripts are best described using bibliographic rather than archival standards. The standard endorsed by the American Library Association is known as AMREMM. A growing digital catalog of pre-modern manuscripts

3210-774: The middens of Oxyrhynchus or secreted for safe-keeping in jars and buried ( Nag Hammadi library ) or stored in dry caves ( Dead Sea scrolls ). Volcanic ash preserved some of the Roman library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum . Manuscripts in Tocharian languages , written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia. Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in

3317-565: The 11th century, central government offices were saving tenfold by substituting earlier manuscripts with printed versions. The impact of woodblock printing on Song society is illustrated in the following exchange between Emperor Zhenzong and Xing Bing in the year 1005: The emperor went to the Directorate of Education to inspect the Publications Office. He asked Xing Bing how many woodblocks were kept there. Bing replied, "At

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3424-631: The 13th century the Chinese technique of blockprinting was transmitted to Europe", soon after paper became available in Europe. From 932 to 955 the Twelve Classics and an assortment of other texts were printed. During the Song dynasty , the Directorate of education and other agencies used these block print disseminate their standardized versions of the Classics . Other disseminated works include

3531-522: The 19th century. Ukiyo-e is the best-known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique for printing images on paper are covered by the art term woodcut , except for the block books produced mainly in the 15th century. According to the Book of Southern Qi , in the 480s, a man named Gong Xuanyi (龔玄宜) styled himself Gong the Sage and "said that a supernatural being had given him

3638-488: The 39 year old Su Shi remarked upon the unforeseen effect an abundance of books had on examination candidates: I can recall meeting older scholars, long ago, who said that when they were young they had a hard time getting their hands on a copy of Shiji or Han shu . If they were lucky enough to get one, they thought nothing of copying the entire text out by hand, so they could recite it day and night. In recent years merchants engrave and print all manner of books belonging to

3745-523: The 7th century, were using woodblocks to create apotropaic documents. These Buddhist texts were printed specifically as ritual items and were not widely circulated or meant for public consumption. Instead they were buried in consecrated ground. The earliest extant example of this type of printed matter is a fragment of a dhāraṇī (Buddhist spell) miniature scroll written in Sanskrit unearthed in a tomb in Xi'an . It

3852-475: The Bible came scores of commentaries. Commentaries were written in volumes, with some focusing on just single pages of scripture. Across Europe, there were universities that prided themselves on their biblical knowledge. Along with universities, certain cities also had their own celebrities of biblical knowledge during the medieval period. A book of hours is a type of devotional text which was widely popular during

3959-718: The Carolingian script, giving it proportion and legibility. This new revision of the Caroline minuscule was called English Protogothic Bookhand. Another script that is derived from the Caroline Minuscule was the German Protogothic Bookhand. It originated in southern Germany during the second half of the 12th century. All the individual letters are Caroline; but just as with English Protogothic Bookhand it evolved. This can be seen most notably in

4066-824: The Library Service Center, library offices located in the Smith Warehouse, as well as a few other departments. The professional schools have separately administrated libraries: the Goodson Law Library, Duke Divinity School Library, Ford Library at Fuqua School of Business , and the Seeley Mudd Medical Center Library. The Biological and Environmental Sciences Library was formerly part of the system but in 2009 it closed permanently. The William R. Perkins Library system has nine branches on campus. It includes

4173-568: The Middle Ages. They are the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscripts . Each book of hours contain a similar collection of texts, prayers , and psalms but decoration can vary between each and each example. Many have minimal illumination, often restricted to ornamented initials , but books of hours made for wealthier patrons can be extremely extravagant with full-page miniatures . These books were used for owners to recite prayers privately eight different times, or hours, of

4280-491: The Ming and Qing dynasties did wooden and metal movable types see any considerable use, but the preferred method remained woodblock. Usage of movable type in China never exceeded 10 percent of all printed materials while 90 percent of printed books used the older woodblock technology. In one case an entire set of wooden type numbering 250,000 pieces was used for firewood. Woodblocks remained the dominant printing method in China until

4387-696: The arm of the letter h. It has a hairline that tapers out by curving to the left. When first read the German Protogothic h looks like the German Protogothic b. Many more scripts sprang out of the German Protogothic Bookhand. After those came Bastard Anglicana, which is best described as: The coexistence in the Gothic period of formal hands employed for the copying of books and cursive scripts used for documentary purposes eventually resulted in cross-fertilization between these two fundamentally different writing styles. Notably, scribes began to upgrade some of

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4494-401: The art critic Li Yu and the landscape painter Wáng Niè. It was noted for the quality of its polychrome and drawings, which influenced Qing painting. In 989 Seongjong of Goryeo sent the monk Yeoga to request from the Song a copy of the complete Buddhist canon. The request was granted in 991 when Seongjong's official Han Eongong visited the Song court. In 1011, Hyeonjong of Goryeo issued

4601-551: The beginning of this text coming from the Abby of Saint-Martin at Tours . Caroline Minuscule arrived in England in the second half of the 10th century. Its adoption there, replacing Insular script , was encouraged by the importation of continental European manuscripts by Saints Dunstan , Aethelwold , and Oswald . This script spread quite rapidly, being employed in many English centres for copying Latin texts. English scribes adapted

4708-613: The book had declined by about 90 percent by the end of the 16th century. As a result, literacy increased. In 1488, the Korean Choe Bu observed during his trip to China that "even village children, ferrymen, and sailors" could read, although this applied mainly to the south, while northern China remained largely illiterate. In modern times, Chinese printing continued the tradition begun in medieval times. Black-and-white woodcuts were generally replaced by colored ones, achieved by printing successive runs with different inks. Between

4815-533: The carving of their own set of the Buddhist canon, which would come to be known as the Goryeo Daejanggyeong . The project was suspended in 1031 after Heyongjong's death, but work resumed again in 1046 after Munjong 's accession to the throne. The completed work, amounting to some 6,000 volumes, was finished in 1087. Unfortunately the original set of woodblocks was destroyed in a conflagration during

4922-464: The codex format (as in a modern book), which had replaced the scroll by Late Antiquity . Parchment or vellum , as the best type of parchment is known, had also replaced papyrus , which was not nearly so long lived and has survived to the present almost exclusively in the very dry climate of Egypt , although it was widely used across the Roman world. Parchment is made of animal skin, normally calf, sheep, or goat, but also other animals. With all skins,

5029-715: The collection, in accordance with national and international content standards such as DACS and ISAD(G) . In other contexts, however, the use of the term "manuscript" no longer necessarily means something that is hand-written. By analogy a typescript has been produced on a typewriter. In book, magazine, and music publishing, a manuscript is an autograph or copy of a work, written by an author, composer or copyist. Such manuscripts generally follow standardized typographic and formatting rules, in which case they can be called fair copy (whether original or copy). The staff paper commonly used for handwritten music is, for this reason, often called "manuscript paper". In film and theatre,

5136-498: The common people and were mass-produced. ukiyo-e is based on kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, beautiful women, landscapes of sightseeing spots, historical tales, and so on, and Hokusai and Hiroshige are the most famous artists. In the 18th century, Suzuki Harunobu established the technique of multicolor woodblock printing called nishiki-e and greatly developed Japanese woodblock printing culture such as ukiyo-e . Ukiyo-e influenced European Japonisme and Impressionism . In

5243-561: The creation of artistic books, and in preceding mass production for general consumption, were Honami Kōetsu and Suminokura Soan. At their studio in Saga, Kyoto, the pair created a number of woodblock versions of the Japanese classics, both text and images, essentially converting emaki (handscrolls) to printed books, and reproducing them for wider consumption. These books, now known as Kōetsu Books, Suminokura Books, or Saga Books, are considered

5350-432: The cursive scripts. A script that has been thus formalized is known as a bastard script (whereas a bookhand that has had cursive elements fused onto it is known as a hybrid script). The advantage of such a script was that it could be written more quickly than a pure bookhand; it thus recommended itself to scribes in a period when demand for books was increasing and authors were tending to write longer texts. In England during

5457-461: The day. Along with Bibles, large numbers of manuscripts made in the Middle Ages were received in Church . Due to the complex church system of rituals and worship these books were the most elegantly written and finely decorated of all medieval manuscripts. Liturgical books usually came in two varieties. Those used during mass and those for divine office. Most liturgical books came with a calendar in

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5564-663: The early 20th century, shin-hanga that fused the tradition of ukiyo-e with the techniques of Western paintings became popular, and the works of Hasui Kawase and Hiroshi Yoshida gained international popularity. A few specimen of wood block printing, possibly called tarsh in Arabic , have been excavated from a 10th-century context in Arabic Egypt . They were mostly used for prayers and amulets. The technique may have spread from China or been an independent invention, but had very little impact and virtually disappeared at

5671-546: The early centuries of the Christian era , manuscripts were written without spaces between the words ( scriptio continua ), which makes them especially hard for the untrained to read. Extant copies of these early manuscripts written in Greek or Latin and usually dating from the 4th century to the 8th century, are classified according to their use of either all upper case or all lower case letters . Hebrew manuscripts, such as

5778-408: The end of the 14th century. In India the main importance of the technique has always been as a method of printing textiles, which has been a large industry since at least the 10th century. Nowadays wooden block printing is commonly used for creating beautiful textiles, such as block print saree, kurta, curtains, kurtis, dress, shirts, cotton sarees. Block books, where both text and images are cut on

5885-571: The end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, three—and five—color prints appeared. The oldest surviving print is the Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Calligraphy and Paintings (1644) by Hu Zhengyan , of which there are several copies in various museums and collections. It is still commonly reproduced in China today and its images are very popular: it includes landscapes, flowers, animals, reproductions of jades, bronzes, porcelain and other objects. Another outstanding series

5992-616: The end of the empire it remained cheaper to pay a copyist than to buy a printed book. Seven hundred and fifty years after the first imperially sponsored printed works in the Northern Song, the greatest book project of the eighteenth century, the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (四庫全書), was produced as a manuscript, not as a printed collection. About 4 percent of it was printed in movable type in 1773, but it

6099-515: The engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin ( Conquests of the Emperor of China , 1767–1773). The emperor himself commissioned the Jesuits to instruct Chinese artisans in the intaglio technique, but they did not obtain good results. Already in the 19th century, the growing xenophobia against Europeans was progressively relegating the use of engraving in China. In the 20th century, the genre was revived by

6206-399: The expense of producing more than 200,000 individual pieces of type. Even woodblock printing was not as cost productive as simply paying a copyist to write out a book by hand if there was no intention of producing more than a few copies. Although Sejong the Great introduced Hangeul, an alphabetic system, in the 15th century, Hangeul only replaced Hanja in the 20th century. And unlike China,

6313-433: The first and finest printed reproductions of many of these classic tales; the Saga Book of the Tales of Ise ( Ise monogatari ), printed in 1608, is especially renowned. Saga Books were printed on expensive paper, and used various embellishments, being printed specifically for a small circle of literary connoisseurs. For aesthetic reasons, the typeface of the Saga-bon , like that of traditional handwritten books, adopted

6420-576: The form of a leishu (類書), a type of encyclopedic reference book used to help examination candidates. Imperial establishments such as the Three Institutes: Zhaowen Institute, History Institute, and Jixian Institute also followed suit. At the start of the dynasty the Three Institutes' holdings numbered 13,000 juan , by the year 1023 39,142 juan , by 1068 47,588 juan , and by 1127 73,877 juan . The Three Institutes were one of several imperial libraries, with eight other major palace libraries, not including imperial academies. According to Weng Tongwen, by

6527-447: The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many books were written in the script known as Bastard Anglicana. From ancient texts to medieval maps, anything written down for study would have been done with manuscripts. Some of the most common genres were bibles, religious commentaries, philosophy, law and government texts. " The Bible was the most studied book of the Middle Ages". The Bible was the center of medieval religious life. Along with

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6634-510: The front. This served as a quick reference point for important dates in Jesus' life and to tell church officials which saints were to be honored and on what day. In the context of library science , a manuscript is defined as any hand-written item in the collections of a library or an archive. For example, a library's collection of hand-written letters or diaries is considered a manuscript collection. Such manuscript collections are described in finding aids, similar to an index or table of contents to

6741-477: The half-literate, [...] which anyway had to be very brief because of the laborious process of cutting the letters". John Man's The Gutenberg Revolution makes a similar case: "wood-blocks were even more demanding than manuscript pages to make, and they wore out and broke, and then you had to carve another one – a whole page at a time". Commentaries on printing in China from the 1990s on, which cite contemporary European observers with first-hand knowledge, complicate

6848-644: The high literacy rate of Japanese people. The literacy rate of the Japanese by 1800 was almost 100% for the samurai class and 50% to 60% for the chōnin and nōmin (farmer) class due to the spread of private schools terakoya . There were more than 600 rental bookstores in Edo , and people lent woodblock-printed illustrated books of various genres. The content of these books varied widely, including travel guides, gardening books, cookbooks, kibyōshi (satirical novels), sharebon (books on urban culture), kokkeibon (comical books), ninjōbon (romance novel), yomihon , kusazōshi , art books, play scripts for

6955-429: The hundred schools, and produce ten thousand pages a day. With books so readily available, you would think that students' writing and scholarship would be many times better than what they were in earlier generations. Yet, to the contrary, young men and examination candidates leave their books tied shut and never look at them, preferring to amuse themselves with baseless chatter. Why is this? Woodblock printing also changed

7062-542: The industry began to decline, with stereotyped images. This coincided with the arrival of European missionaries who introduced Western engraving techniques. The Jesuit Matteo Ripa edited in 1714–1715 a series of poems by Emperor Kangxi, which he illustrated with landscapes of the imperial summer residence at Jehol . During the reign of Emperor Qianlong the one hundred and four maps of the Chinese Empire made by Jesuit missionaries were printed, as well as illustrations of his military victories, which he commissioned in Paris from

7169-429: The introduction of lithography in the late 19th century. Traditionally it has been assumed that the prevalence of woodblock printing in East Asia as a result of Chinese characters led to the stagnation of printing culture and enterprise in that region. S. H. Steinberg describes woodblock printing in his Five Hundred Years of Printing as having "outlived their usefulness" and their printed material as "cheap tracts for

7276-418: The introduction of printing, the size of private collections in China had already seen an increase since the invention of paper. Fan Ping (215–84) had in his collection 7,000 rolls ( juan ), or a few hundred titles. Two centuries later, Zhang Mian owned 10,000 juan , Shen Yue (441–513) 20,000 juan , and Xiao Tong and his cousin Xiao Mai both had collections of 30,000 juan . Emperor Yuan of Liang (508–555)

7383-405: The introduction of the mechanical printing press in the mid fifteenth century. Reliable figures of the number of imprints of each edition are as hard to find in Europe as they are in China, but one result of the spread of printing in Europe was that public and private libraries were able to build up their collections and for the first time in over a thousand years they began to match and then overtake

7490-416: The kabuki and jōruri (puppet) theatre, etc. The best-selling books of this period were Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko (Life of an Amorous Man) by Ihara Saikaku , Nansō Satomi Hakkenden by Takizawa Bakin , and Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige by Jippensha Ikku , and these books were reprinted many times. From the 17th century to the 19th century, ukiyo-e depicting secular subjects became very popular among

7597-405: The kammavaca, Buddhist manuscripts, were inscribed on brass, copper or ivory sheets, and even on discarded monk robes folded and lacquered. In Italy some important Etruscan texts were similarly inscribed on thin gold plates: similar sheets have been discovered in Bulgaria . Technically, these are all inscriptions rather than manuscripts. In the Western world, from the classical period through

7704-529: The largest libraries in China. During the 16th and 17th centuries, printmaking enjoyed great popularity, especially in the illustration of books such as Buddhist texts, poems, novels, biographies, medical treatises, music, etc. The major center of production was initially in Kien-ngan ( Fujian ) and, from the 17th century, in Sin-ngan ( Anhui ) and Nanjing ( Jiangsu ). On the other hand, in the 18th century,

7811-554: The late 15th century had largely replaced parchment for many purposes there. When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were sometimes made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium , each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud. The oldest written manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their Middle Eastern resting places, whether placed within sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, or reused as mummy -wrappings, discarded in

7918-402: The libraries of antiquity are virtually all lost. Papyrus has a life of at most a century or two in relatively humid Italian or Greek conditions; only those works copied onto parchment, usually after the general conversion to Christianity, have survived, and by no means all of those. Originally, all books were in manuscript form. In China, and later other parts of East Asia, woodblock printing

8025-675: The literate class from different regions. It was used in the Holy Roman Empire between approximately 800 and 1200. Codices, classical and Christian texts, and educational material were written in Carolingian minuscule throughout the Carolingian Renaissance . The script developed into blackletter and became obsolete, though its revival in the Italian renaissance forms the basis of more recent scripts. In Introduction to Manuscript Studies , Clemens and Graham associate

8132-474: The movable type system was kept mainly within the confines of a highly stratified elite Korean society: Korean printing with movable metallic type developed mainly within the royal foundry of the Yi dynasty. Royalty kept a monopoly of this new technique and by royal mandate suppressed all non-official printing activities and any budding attempts at commercialization of printing. Thus, printing in early Korea served only

8239-590: The number of all the preceding centuries combined. Private libraries of 10–20,000 juan became commonplace while six individuals owned collections of over 30,000 juan . The earliest extant private Song library catalogue lists 1,937 titles in 24,501 juan . Zhou Mi's collection numbered 42,000 juan , Chen Zhensun's collection lists 3,096 titles in 51,180 juan , and Ye Mengde (1077–1148) as well as one other individual owned libraries of 6,000 titles in 100,000 juan . The majority of which were secular in nature. Texts contained material such as medicinal instruction or came in

8346-541: The original level; it is these that are inked and show in the print, in a relief printing process. Carving the blocks is skilled and laborious work, but a large number of impressions can then be printed. As a method of printing on cloth , the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220 AD. Woodblock printing existed in Tang China by the 7th century AD and remained the most common East Asian method of printing books and other texts, as well as images, until

8453-716: The population organized around the NGO "Sauvegarde et valorisation des manuscrits pour la défense de la culture islamique" (SAVAMA-DCI). Some 350,000 manuscripts were transported to safety, and 300,000 of them were still in Bamako in 2022. An international consultation on the safeguarding, accessibility and promotion of ancient manuscripts in the Sahel was held at the UNESCO office in Bamako in 2020. Most surviving pre-modern manuscripts use

8560-581: The present. The oldest extant book printed with movable metal type is the Jikji of 1377. This form of metal movable type was described by the French scholar Henri-Jean Martin as "extremely similar to Gutenberg's". Movable type never replaced woodblock printing in Korea. Indeed, even the promulgation of Hangeul was done through woodblock prints. The general assumption is that movable type did not replace block printing in places that used Chinese characters due to

8667-547: The prevailing wood-based technology extremely disturbing, even dangerous". Matteo Ricci made note of "the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold". Two hundred years later the Englishman John Barrow, by way of the Macartney mission to Qing China, also remarked with some amazement that the printing industry was "as free as in England, and

8774-443: The printing process to deliberately bewilder onlookers and create an image of mysticism around himself. However, woodblock print flower patterns applied to silk in three colours have been found dated from the Han dynasty (before AD 220). Inscribed seals made of metal or stone, especially jade, and inscribed stone tablets probably provided inspiration for the invention of printing. Copies of classical texts on tablets were erected in

8881-477: The profession of printing open to everyone". The commercial success and profitability of woodblock printing was attested to by one British observer at the end of the nineteenth century, who noted that even before the arrival of western printing methods, the price of books and printed materials in China had already reached an astoundingly low price compared to what could be found in his home country. Of this, he said: We have an extensive penny literature at home, but

8988-556: The quality of the finished product is based on how much preparation and skill was put into turning the skin into parchment. Parchment made from calf or sheep was the most common in Northern Europe, while civilizations in Southern Europe preferred goatskin. Often, if the parchment is white or cream in color and veins from the animal can still be seen, it is calfskin. If it is yellow, greasy or in some cases shiny, then it

9095-418: The recorded performance is disseminated via non-radio means. In insurance, a manuscript policy is one that is negotiated between the insurer and the policyholder, as opposed to an off-the-shelf form supplied by the insurer. About 300,000 Latin, 55,000 Greek, 30,000 Armenian and 12,000 Georgian medieval manuscripts have survived. National Geographic estimates that 700,000 African manuscripts have survived at

9202-447: The rendition as a printed version of the same. Before the arrival of prints, all documents and books were manuscripts. Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, music notation , explanatory figures, or illustrations. The word "manuscript" derives from the Latin : manūscriptum (from manus , hand and scriptum from scribere , to write ). The study of

9309-829: The same time as the printing press from Europe. An edition of the Confucian Analects was printed in 1598, using a Korean moveable type printing press, at the order of Emperor Go-Yōzei . Tokugawa Ieyasu established a printing school at Enko-ji in Kyoto and started publishing books using domestic wooden movable type printing-press instead of metal from 1599. Ieyasu supervised the production of 100,000 types, which were used to print many political and historical books. In 1605, books using domestic copper movable type printing-press began to be published, but copper type did not become mainstream after Ieyasu died in 1616. The great pioneers in applying movable type printing press to

9416-553: The semi-cursive and cursive script style of Japanese writings was better reproduced using woodblocks. By 1640 woodblocks were once again used for nearly all purposes. After the 1640s, movable type printing declined, and books were mass-produced by conventional woodblock printing during most of the Edo period . It was after the 1870s, during the Meiji period , when Japan opened the country to the West and began to modernize, that this technique

9523-426: The shape and structure of books. Scrolls were gradually replaced by concertina binding (經摺裝) from the Tang period onward. The advantage was that it was now possible to flip to a reference without unfolding the entire document. The next development known as whirlwind binding ( xuanfeng zhuang 旋風裝) was to secure the first and last leaves to a single large sheet, so that the book could be opened like an accordion. Around

9630-462: The small, noble groups of the highly stratified society. Western style movable type printing-press was brought to Japan by Tenshō embassy in 1590, and was first printed in Kazusa, Nagasaki in 1591. However, western printing-press were discontinued after the ban on Christianity in 1614. The moveable type printing-press seized from Korea by Toyotomi Hideyoshi 's forces in 1593 was also in use at

9737-600: The start of our dynasty, there were fewer than four thousand. Today, there are more than one hundred thousand. The classics and histories, together with standard commentaries, are all fully represented. When I was young and devoted myself to learning, there were only one or two scholars in every hundred who possessed copies of all the classics and commentaries. There was no way to copy so many works. Today, printed editions of these works are abundant, and officials and commoners alike have them in their homes. Scholars are fortunate indeed to have been born in such an era as ours! In 1076,

9844-474: The traditional narrative. T. H. Barrett points out that only Europeans who had never seen Chinese woodblock printing in action tended to dismiss it, perhaps due to the almost instantaneous arrival of both xylography and movable type in Europe. The early Jesuit missionaries of late-16th-century China, for instance, had a similar distaste for wood-based printing for very different reasons. These Jesuits found that "the cheapness and omnipresence of printing in China made

9951-486: The typewriter in the late 19th century. Because of the likelihood of errors being introduced each time a manuscript was copied, the filiation of different versions of the same text is a fundamental part of the study and criticism of all texts that have been transmitted in manuscript. In Southeast Asia , in the first millennium, documents of sufficiently great importance were inscribed on soft metallic sheets such as copperplate , softened by refiner's fire and inscribed with

10058-425: The very end of Imperial China: As a result of block-printing technology, it became easier and cheaper to produce multiple copies of books quickly. By the eleventh century, the price of books had fallen by about one tenth what they had been before and as a result they were more widely disseminated. Nevertheless, even in the fifteenth century most books in major libraries were still in manuscript, not in print. Almost to

10165-411: The wideness of sale. Other modern scholars such as Endymion Wilkinson hold a more conservative and skeptical view. While Wilkinson does not deny "China's dominance in book production from the fourth to the fifteenth century," he also insists that arguments for the Chinese advantage "should not be extended either forwards or backwards in time." European book production began to catch up with China after

10272-633: The writer Lou Siun, who founded a woodcut school in Shanghai in 1930. Influenced by contemporary Russian engraving, this school dealt especially with popular, agricultural and military subjects for propaganda purposes, as is evident in the work of P'an Jeng and Huang Yong-yu. In 1234, cast metal movable type was used in Goryeo (Korea) to print the 50-volume Prescribed Texts for Rites of the Past and Present , compiled by Ch'oe Yun-ŭi , but no copies survived to

10379-415: The writing (the "hand") in surviving manuscripts is termed palaeography (or paleography). The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts, while the forms MS. , ms or ms. for singular, and MSS. , mss or mss. for plural (with or without the full stop, all uppercase or all lowercase) are also accepted. The second s is not simply the plural; by an old convention,

10486-435: The year 1000, butterfly binding was developed. Woodblock prints allowed two mirror images to be easily replicated on a single sheet. Thus two pages were printed on a sheet, which was then folded inwards. The sheets were then pasted together at the fold to make a codex with alternate openings of printed and blank pairs of pages. In the 14th century the folding was reversed outwards to give continuous printed pages, each backed by

10593-586: Was a common way to produce manuscripts. Manuscripts eventually transitioned to using paper in later centuries with the diffusion of paper making in the Islamic empire. When Muslims encountered paper in Central Asia, its use and production spread to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa during the 8th century. 4,203 of Timbuktu's manuscripts were burned or stolen during the armed conflict in Mali between 2012 and 2013. 90% of these manuscripts were saved by

10700-410: Was hand-carved movable wooden type. Indeed, the entire collection was only printed for the first time in the 1980s. Access to books, especially large works, such as the Histories , remained difficult right into the twentieth century. Not only did manuscripts remain competitive with imprints, they were even preferred by elite scholars and collectors. The age of printing gave the act of copying by hand

10807-412: Was made from sheepskin. Vellum comes from the Latin word vitulinum which means "of calf"/ "made from calf". For modern parchment makers and calligraphers, and apparently often in the past, the terms parchment and vellum are used based on the different degrees of quality, preparation and thickness, and not according to which animal the skin came from, and because of this, the more neutral term "membrane"

10914-676: Was named after board of trustees member and alumn David M. Rubenstein in 2011. The Divinity School Library is located next to Perkins Library in the Duke Divinity School . It contains 400,000 volumes, as well as various periodicals and other materials to support the study of theology and religion. The library is the host institution for the Religion in North Carolina Digitization project, a collaborative digitization project with Wake Forest University and

11021-652: Was printed in Japan around AD 770. One million copies of the sutra, along with other prayers, were ordered to be produced by Empress Shōtoku . As each copy was then stored in a tiny wooden pagoda, the copies are together known as the Hyakumantō Darani (百万塔陀羅尼, "1,000,000 towers/pagodas Darani"). Woodblock printing spread across Eurasia by 1000 AD and could be found in the Byzantine Empire . However printing onto cloth only became common in Europe by 1300. "In

11128-464: Was said to have had a collection of 80,000 juan . The combined total of all known private book collectors prior to the Song dynasty number around 200, with the Tang alone accounting for 60 of them. Following the maturation of woodblock printing, official, commercial, and private publishing businesses emerged while the size and number of collections grew exponentially. The Song dynasty alone accounts for some 700 known private collections, more than triple

11235-402: Was the 1460s, but that at least one dated from about 1451. Block books printed in the 1470s were often of cheaper quality, as a cheaper alternative to books printed by printing press . Block books continued to be printed sporadically up through the end of the 15th century. The method was also used extensively for printing playing cards . Ceramic and wooden movable type were invented in

11342-525: Was translated by Chinese monks. The oldest extant evidence of woodblock prints created for the purpose of reading are portions of the Lotus Sutra discovered at Turpan in 1906. They have been dated to the reign of Wu Zetian using character form recognition. The oldest text containing a specific date of printing was discovered in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang in 1907 by Aurel Stein . This copy of

11449-402: Was used for books from about the 7th century. The earliest dated example is the Diamond Sutra of 868. In the Islamic world and the West, all books were in manuscript until the introduction of movable type printing in about 1450. Manuscript copying of books continued for a least a century, as printing remained expensive. Private or government documents remained hand-written until the invention of

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