Books are a part of life familiar from childhood. Now they are increasingly being replaced by electronic "readers" and tablet computers, which are more convenient for use, for example, in transport, but the charm of turning over paper pages is incomparable. No matter how digital technologies are improved, a paper book will always remain in human life.
The first printed book in the history of mankind
It is believed that the very first book was printed in China in the year 868. As a matter of fact, it was not even a book in the usual sense, but was a roll of gray paper wrapped around a wooden base. The book is known as the Diamond Sutra (a more complete title is the Sutra of Perfect Wisdom Cutting Through the Darkness of Ignorance as a Lightning Bolt). This is a treatise on the virtues needed to enter the path of righteous life - a kind of Buddhist Bible. This is not surprising, because, as a rule, the first printed publications were religious texts, since they were of the greatest value to people of those times. We even know the name of the printer who made this copy of the sacred sutra: Wang Ji.
The "Diamond Sutra" was printed using the method of woodcut, that is, a print from a wooden board on which letters were cut with a knife. The typing technology of printing was too laborious for the Chinese at that time, because in their language there were thousands of hieroglyphs.
History of printing in Europe
The first European printed books were also printed using woodcuts and were called incunabula. The most famous of them was the so-called "Bible of the poor, " printed around 1423. Incunabul has not reached our time. In many ways, they looked like handwritten books, since xygraph printers tried to imitate the handwritten font as accurately as possible. Distrustful of all the new citizens, they did not immediately appreciate the merits of printed books and continued to value much more the texts manually copied in monasteries.
The real flowering of printing came in Europe after the invention of typesetting technology by Johann Guttenberg. In order to print a book, it was no longer necessary to cut out the text of its pages on wooden boards - the printing galleys became typesetting, consisting of separate letter letters. Guttenberg's first printed book was the 42-line Bible, published in 1455.
