Middle East: Islamic Golden Age Islamic Calligraphy Miniatures

Middle East
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People of various religious (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Muslims) and ethnic backgrounds
(Syriac, Coptic, Persian, Arab etc.) in the Middle East also produced and bound books in the Islamic
Golden Age (mid 8th century to 1258), developing advanced techniques in Islamic
calligraphy, miniatures and bookbinding. A number of cities in the medieval Islamic world had book
production centers and book markets. Yaqubi (d. 897) says that in his time Baghdad had over a
hundred booksellers.[20] Book shops were often situated around the town's principal mosque [21] as
in Marrakesh, Morocco, that has a street named Kutubiyyin or book sellers in English and the
famous Koutoubia Mosque is named so because of its location in this street.
The medieval Muslim world also used a method of reproducing reliable copies of a book in large
quantities known as check reading, in contrast to the traditional method of a single scribe producing
only a single copy of a single manuscript. In the check reading method, only "authors could authorize
copies, and this was done in public sessions in which the copyist read the copy aloud in the
presence of the author, who then certified it as accurate." [22] With this check-reading system, "an
author might produce a dozen or more copies from a single reading," and with two or more readings,
"more than one hundred copies of a single book could easily be produced." [23] By using as writing
material the relatively cheap paper instead of parchment or papyrus the Muslims, in the words of
Pedersen "accomplished a feat of crucial significance not only to the history of the Islamic book, but
also to the whole world of books".[24]
Wood block printing
Bagh print, a traditional woodblock printing in Bagh Madhya Pradesh, India.
In woodblock printing, a relief image of an entire page was carved into blocks of wood, inked, and
used to print copies of that page. This method originated in China, in the Han dynasty (before 220
AD), as a method of printing on textiles and later paper, and was widely used throughout East Asia.
The oldest dated book printed by this method is The Diamond Sutra (868 AD). The method
(called woodcut when used in art) arrived in Europe in the early 14th century. Books (known
as block-books), as well as playing-cards and religious pictures, began to be produced by this
method. Creating an entire book was a painstaking process, requiring a hand-carved block for each
page; and the wood blocks tended to crack, if stored for long. The monks or people who wrote them
were paid highly.
Movable type and incunabula
A 15th-century Incunable. Notice the blind-tooled cover, corner bosses and clasps.
Main articles: Movable type and Incunable
Selected Teachings of Buddhist Sages and Son Masters, the earliest known book printed with movable metal
type, printed in Korea, in 1377, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware c. 1045, but there are no known
surviving examples of his printing. Around 1450, in what is commonly regarded as an independent
invention, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in Europe, along with innovations in casting
the type based on a matrix and hand mould. This invention gradually made books less expensive to
produce, and more widely available.
Early printed books, single sheets and images which were created before 1501 in Europe are known
as incunables or incunabula. "A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look
back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more
perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in AD
330."[25]
19th century to 21st centuries

Steam-powered printing presses became popular in the early 19th century. These machines could
print 1,100 sheets per hour, but workers could only set 2,000 letters per hour. [citation
needed]
Monotype and linotype typesetting machines were introduced in the late 19th century. They
could set more than 6,000 letters per hour and an entire line of type at once. There have been
numerous improvements in the printing press. As well, the conditions for freedom of the press have
been improved through the gradual relaxation of restrictive censorship laws. See also intellectual
property, public domain, copyright. In mid-20th century, European book production had risen to over
200,000 titles per year.
Throughout the 20th century, libraries have faced an ever-increasing rate of publishing, sometimes
called an information explosion. The advent of electronic publishing and the internet means that
much new information is not printed in paper books, but is made available online through a digital
library, on CD-ROM, in the form of e-books or other online media. An on-line book is an e-book that
is available online through the internet. Though many books are produced digitally, most digital
versions are not available to the public, and there is no decline in the rate of paper publishing.
[26]
There is an effort, however, to convert books that are in the public domain into a digital medium
for unlimited redistribution and infinite availability. This effort is spearheaded by Project
Gutenberg combined with Distributed Proofreaders. There have also been new developments in the
process of publishing books. Technologies such as POD or "print on demand", which make it
possible to print as few as one book at a time, have made self-publishing (and vanity publishing)
much easier and more affordable. On-demand publishing has allowed publishers, by avoiding the
high costs of warehousing, to keep low-selling books in print rather than

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Main articles: Movable type and Incunable

19th century to 21st centuries

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