Yes European Movable metal type is SPECIAL

#movable type #printing 

The uniqueness of Western Movable Type.

Yes the development of Movable Type is NOT unique to Western Europe.

Yes East Asia experimented with it too.

But No developing metal movable type does not make "Western Civilisation" superior !

BUT METAL TYPE IS SPECIAL.

WHY?

A unique combination of factors

A supply of paper for printing on.

A simple phonetic script with minimal symbols.

A market of readers and scholars needing personal copies of texts.

East Asia had all or most of those you say?

But Western Europe added on the final step of movable metal type.

And that market of readers and scholars was a MASS market.

There were limited print runs of luxury editions alongside of cheap religious texts and newsletters.

They had that elsewhere you say like Tokugawa Japan.

One final factor.

The alphabet.

Western movable metal type printing spread because of a common easily learned alphabet used all across Western Europe.

For Korean and Japanese printed Chinese characters were the prestige script. To combine them with hangul or kana ... woodblock printing was easier and cheaper especially in Japan though some parts of China were also book production centres.

The number of Chinese scholars who might have learnt kana or hangul or read Korean or Japanese books were limited but almost any five year old of can learn ABC.

Movable Metal type printing is special but if the Tokugawa regime hadn't kept such strict control over "dutch" learning or the Qing authorities have a strong cultural bias towards hand copying and calligraphy ...

This post is an expansion of some recent tweets posted on my @JVartndesign account