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 brochure is a brief history of the evolution from xylographs to
the methods used today for duplicating a typographical printing
surface in a solid piece.