Printing has been called “the art preservative of all arts.” The invention of individual movable cast-metal type, between A. D. 1440 and 1446, made printing a commercial possibility. The subsequent rapid spread of the art, in the hands of students and craftsmen, may be said to have been the centrifugal force of the Renaissance and the Revival of Learning, which age, if it can be chronologically delimited, began A. D. 1453. Printing divulged to the masses the ancient classics which had been locked up in monasteries and accessible only to clerics and the nobility. The common people began to read. Education became popularized. This book is a brief history of the evolution from xylographs to the methods used today for duplicating a typographical printing surface in a solid piece.
