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Books entered an entrepreneurial stage with the emergence of manuscript culture. In this stage, new rules about written language and book design were codified—books were elaborately lettered, decorated, and bound by hand. Inventors also began experimenting with printing as an alternative to hand lettering and a way to speed up the production and binding of manuscript copies.

Manuscript Culture

During Europe’s Middle Ages (400 to 1500 C.E.), Christian priests and monks transcribed the philosophical tracts and religious texts of the period, especially versions of the Bible. Their transcriptions took the form of illuminated manuscripts, books that featured decorative, colorful illustrations on each page and that were often made for churches or wealthy clients. These early publishers developed rules of punctuation—for example, making distinctions between small and capital letters, and leaving space between words to make reading easier. Some elements of this manuscript culture remain alive today, in the form of design flourishes such as the drop capitals occasionally used for the first letter in a book chapter.

Block Printing

If manuscript culture involved advances in written language and book design, it also involved hard work: Every manuscript was painstakingly copied one book at a time. To make mechanically produced copies of pages, printers in the third century in China came up with an innovation that made mass production possible.

These Chinese innovators developed block printing. Using this technique, printers applied sheets of paper to large blocks of inked wood in which they had hand-carved a page’s worth of characters and illustrations in relief. They derived these carvings from authors’ and illustrators’ works, which could range from plays and scriptures to instructional materials (such as advice about how to plant crops). The oldest dated block-printed book still in existence is China’s Diamond Sutra, a collection of Buddhist scriptures printed by Wang Chieh in 868 C.E. to honor his ill mother.

Movable Type

The next significant step in printing came with the invention of movable type in China around the year 1000. This was a major improvement (in terms of speed) over block printing because, rather than carving each new page on one block, printers carved commonly used combinations of characters from the Chinese language into smaller, reusable wood (and later ceramic) blocks. They then put together the pieces needed to represent a desired page of text, inked the small blocks, and applied the sheets of paper. This method enabled them to create pages of text much more quickly than before.