The idea was laid back in the cattle brand or stamp, which the breeders gave their horses or cows.

The signs were branded with the help of spiral stamps – seals on clay disc.

In fact, this disc is the first example of printing well-connected text.

The next step is printing coins.

The inventors of the printing press are the Chinese.

The first method of mechanical reproduction of books was xylography, or woodcut printing.

It is originated in the Buddhist monasteries in China during the Dynasty Tian (618-907).

Pi Sheng invented movable type printing.

He moulded clay billets, squeezed out the characters with a stick in them, then burn them on fire to fixate.

The same chronicles show Pi Shen’s invention – typesetting tickets, where the characters – billets were stored.

You could get a few thousand squeezes with their help.

Everything is logical, but the books printed by Pi Shen, had not been preserved.

There is similar information about the beginning of printing in Tibet, Mongolia, Korea and Japan. Bronze letters, made in the XV century in Korea, survived.

The oldest in the history xylographic book was made in China, although the earliest experience in manufacturing of woodcuts are known in Japan.

In 770 AD on the order of the Empress Shotoku, millions of spells put in miniature pagodas, were printed this way.

First xylographic book is called “The Diamond Sutra”.

It was made in 868 AD and first discovered in 1900 in the “Cave of Thousand Buddhas” in Donghuan (Western China).

The book contains a message that it was cut by the master Wang Ji and he printed it “for the sake of their parents’ Souls”.

In Europe, xylographic book appeared after the Crusades.

Massive demand for paper money and playing cards, as well as print icons and papal indults contributed to its emergence and zenith.

One of the first secular xylographic books was “Calendar” by Regiomontanus from Konigsberg.

Xylographic technique was simple: the image (text) in the mirror order was cut on a wooden board, the paint was applied to the relief, a sheet of paper was applied, pressed and smoothed with a pad (matzo).

Separate sheets were stuck together, first in the form of tape (the scroll), later collected in a book.

One of the well-known xylographic publications in Europe was “the Bible of poor”, common in the Middle Ages.

It was a wide sheets depicting biblical scenes and characters, and explanatory inscriptions.

In the beginning xylographic books were distributed widely, but by the mid XVI century, they had left the book market.

Xylography was the last step before the invention of printing typesetting, the idea of which was in the air over a thousand years.

Scientists agree that the merit of the invention of printing should be assigned to Gutenberg.

In the years 1450-1455, Gutenberg printed his first Bible, called the 42-lowercase, because 42 lines of text in two columns typed and printed in it on every page.

In total it has 1282 pages. The elements of decoration of the book are made by hand. A part of the edition is printed on paper, other one – on vellum.

The essence of his invention was as follows: 1) Gutenberg invented a method of manufacturing of printed form by typing individual cast letters.

2) He invented the manual foundry unit.

3) He invented the printing press (the press).

It is likely that Gutenberg’s technique was different from today’s, but what exactly was the difference can not be determined.

He created the first printing equipment, invented a new method of manufacturing the font and made the foundry shape.

Stamps (punches) were made of solid metal, carved in mirror order.

Then they were pressed into a soft and malleable copper plate: it was a matrix, which was poured by metal alloys.

The essence of this method of manufacturing of the letters was that they could be cast in any quantity.

It is essential in the production of the book, if we consider that about two hundred letters are required for a medium-page book.

For printing equipment, not the press but the printing press and typesetting Booking (inclined wooden box with meshes) were then required.

The letters and punctuation marks were placed in them.

Johannes Gutenberg built such a printing press.

In due course the emergence of mechanical press had made a great contribution to the development of typography.