Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 276

1850.

Movable Metallic Types in Chinese.

247

ART. IV. Movable Metallic Types among the Chinese.

THERE is good reason for believing that the Chinese had the art of printing books by blocks and types fully six hundred years before it was known in Europe, and though their knowledge does not detract from the merits of the invention of Götenburg and Fust, still how many precious manuscripts and palimpsests might have been saved from ir- recoverable destruction if Europe had had commercial and literary intercourse with China in the days of the Heptarchy and Hejira. Movable types are still employed by printers, though the common mode of printing by xylography is regarded as cheaper. We have recently made the acquaintance of an enterprising bookseller and printer named Tang, who has devoted much attention to the manufacture of movable types by casting them in molds, and has already produced two fonts, with which he has printed several works. Mr. Tang is a partner of a bookselling firm in Canton, which has expended upwards of ten thou- sand dollars on these fonts.

According to his account, the mode of making the type is to carve the character upon a small block of wood of the right size, cutting the strokes clean, and then make an impression of its face in fine clay, into which mold the melted tin is poured. The clay is separated from gritty particles by stirring it up in water, and pouring off that which does not soon settle, afterwards drying it. Four types are cast at once in a frame, and the clayey matrix broken in pieces when they are taken out, to be re-made for a second casting by a similar impres- sion of the wooden type. They are afterwards planed to a uniform height. The next page is printed with these tin types, raised to the same height as the English ones, in order to take the impression in the common hand-press; they are only 43 lines high, partly in order to suit the woooden frame in which they are set up and printed, but chiefly to save the expense of tin.

The frame in which the types are set up and printed off, is a solid piece of rosewood, planed smooth, with its top guarded on three sides by a ledge, the top of which, just the height of the types, forms the border of the page when printed. The types are then set up in the framne, no composing stick being used, the columns separaied by neat brass rules, and the leaf divided by a central column as in Chinese books. In the specimen here given, the types are not spaced, but in works printed with the other and larger font, the characters are usual- ly separated. Twenty-one columns exactly fill the frame; a moving slide secures the types on the top, and completes the border round the