Section 100 Traditional Printing (Science and Technology Literature
The accompanying shopkeeper enthusiastically guided the entire printing process. In a hall, printers were printing. The carved book boards were numbered according to the thousand-character script and placed on the shelf one by one. The apprentices moved the book blocks to the special large desk according to the serial numbers called by the master. In the center of the hall are several large water tanks filled with ink. The apprentices used wooden buckets to draw ink, brought it to each printer and scooped it into the ink tray.
When printing, the printing master dips a special cylindrical flat-bottomed brush into ink and brushes it evenly on the board. Then he carefully covers the paper on the board and gently brushes the paper with the brush, and the words or pictures are printed on the paper. Just like that. Lift the paper off the printing plate, lay it on a shelf to dry, and the printing process is complete. The shopkeeper told Zhou Dongtian: A skilled printer can print 1,500 to 2,000 sheets a day. A good printing plate can be printed thousands of times.
In Zhou Dongtian's view, the engraving process of woodblock printing is a bit like the process of engraving a seal, except that there are more words engraved. The process of printing is the opposite of sealing. The seal is printed on the top and the paper is on the bottom. The process of block printing is more similar to rubbing. However, the characters on the carvings are in reverse Yang script, while the characters on the general stele are in Yin script. In addition, rubbing ink is applied to the paper, and block printing ink is applied to the plate. Block printing not only inherits the technologies of sealing, rubbing, printing and dyeing, etc., it is not an accident that it was invented in China.
If the printed books are easy to sell, then the bookstore's investment in printing the books is a one-time investment, and the subsequent investment, excluding paper, ink and labor costs, will be a net profit. If it is not easy to sell, the money invested in engraving is equivalent to losing money. The carved plates will either be bulldozed and reused, or they will have to sleep in the warehouse. Once the current situation becomes unstable or the bookshop closes down, a large number of stereotypes will be reduced to firewood. The owner of the bookstore is very careful when engraving a book to ensure that every book can be sold.
Therefore, the number of plates owned becomes an important capital of a bookstore-especially those plates that guarantee that books can be sold after printing. The shopkeeper proudly told Zhou Dongtian that his bookstore had more than 10,000 "perennially printable" plates, which was second to none among the bookstores in Nanjing.
Zhou Dongtian disagreed with this - it is said that there were more than 200,000 stereotypes stored in the Imperial College during the Southern Song Dynasty. In terms of physical objects, it was a very impressive number. Stacking more than 200,000 stereotypes would require a lot of space. amazing. Not to mention the manpower and material resources it took to carve it out. But in terms of the amount of information contained, 200,000 tablets are only 200,000 pages of books. Based on a book of 200 to 300 pages, it is only 1,000 books. Considering that the number of words on each page of stereotypical books is generally less than that of modern printed matter, the amount of information is even less. It's just the size of a unit's library. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the official bookstore in Hangzhou only had 160,000 plates.
A Sikuquanshu contains 4,000 kinds of books, which is barely enough to be the size of a street library in a small or medium-sized city. Zhou Dongtian knew that the scale of everything in the handicraft era was very small. Even with the technology of the 19th century, the printing industry in this time and space was doomed.
Zhou Dongtian looked at the piles of slabs in the yard and felt very emotional. China's large-scale printing technology has always been based on expensive engraving printing. It is difficult to publish works and books are rare and expensive. Many works were lost and forgotten because they were not given the opportunity to be published or reprinted. This cannot but be said to be one of the reasons why China is gradually lagging behind the West.
He strolled and walked into the second hall, where he suddenly became interested - it turned out that the plates carved here were images. The shopkeeper said that the carving was now "embroidered likeness" as used in novels. A new copy of "Water Margin" is being carved in the bookshop.
"This is the 'complex version' that the young man has painstakingly collected, not the 'simple version' from outside." The shopkeeper's face showed a proud look, "It's the one with the 'Three Signs'!"
Zhou Dongtian didn't know much about the edition of Water Margin, and he couldn't figure out what "simplified version" and "traditional version" meant, so he just agreed with it a few times. Merlin suddenly asked: "Are you printing "Jin Ping Mei" here?" He regretted asking this - wouldn't this affect his image?
"Yes, yes," the shopkeeper didn't think it was strange, "Xiao Lao, I have a copy of "New Engraved Embroidered Portraits Criticizing the Plum in the Golden Lotus" engraved by a fellow trader for sale on consignment. Not only is the engraving excellent, there are also 200 embroidered images in the book. It is a rare thing."
When I asked about the price, this book cost one or two silver dollars. The price is quite not cheap. Merlin decided to buy it.
"This book is in traditional Chinese and doesn't even have a single sentence to read. Do you really want to buy it?" Zhou Dongtian asked as the shopkeeper walked away for a moment.
"Of course I can't understand it, but after collecting one, it will become a precious information, a rare book!"
After a while, the shopkeeper fumbled and took out the book. The book was packed in four letters. It's heavy and weighty. Zhou Dongtian casually took out a book and flipped through a few pages. He felt the fragrance of ink coming to his nostrils and the delicate texture of the paper. The engraving and printing work are all above average. Because ink was used and the pages were not printed on both sides, there were a lot of bound books, thirty-six in total.
Each chapter is equipped with two embroidered portraits. The carving work was much better than the New Year paintings Zhou Dongtian saw outside. Among them, there are inevitably some pictures of yin and robbers, which are exquisitely carved and extremely human. It feels like a novel.
If we could come up with it, it would definitely be a hundred times better than its painter. Needless to say, the human body alone is stronger than this. Zhou Dongtian thought that there would be a huge market for a comic book called "Jin Ping Mei"? It's just that it's too troublesome to create original works. I don't know if there are any comics with this theme out there, and if anyone has brought them.
He suddenly thought of a question and asked: "Who is the author of this book?" I wonder if this historical mystery can be clarified in this time and space not long after the work came out?
"The book is signed Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng, but everyone says it is Mr. Fengzhou's handwriting."
Mr. Fengzhou is Wang Shizhen. Not long after the book came out, someone started to spread such a legend. Until modern times, this statement was the most popular. This was not news to Zhou Dongtian - he was slightly disappointed.
"Some people also say that it was the work of a certain husband." The shopkeeper lowered his voice and said, "It's hard to say."
Zhou Dongtian nodded, obviously he could not get a clear answer in this time and space.
The atmosphere in the late Ming Dynasty can be called open, and sexual relations between men and women are not considered a "shame". The shopkeeper saw that the two gentlemen were very interested in this, so he immediately brought a bunch of such novels for them to choose from, ranging from the famous """ to the less famous "The Story of the Madam", all kinds of miscellaneous. There are as many as twenty or thirty kinds. Some have been lost in old time and space. I heard from the shopkeeper that these books are not bad at selling, and they are a type that can be sold all year round. Zhou Dongtian read a few books and felt that this business opportunity was also very good. Immediately, I spent ten taels of silver and bought all these books.
The shopkeeper of the bookstore made another good deal and became more and more attentive to them. One question and ten answers. Zhou Dongtian turned his interest to the engraving workshop and saw that the workers carving the embroidery statues were different from the ones just now. They seemed to be carving some kind of incomplete pattern. After thinking for a moment, he suddenly understood that they were carving a panel for overprinting.
Walking into the next hall confirmed his thoughts. This is engaged in "set color printing."
Block printing generally only uses single color printing. In the Five Dynasties, some people began to try color printing. The process was to apply several different color materials on different parts of a board at the same time. Then print on the paper at once to produce a colored print. This method is called "single copy printing method". The famous Tianjin Yangliuqing prints were produced using this method.
This method is low-cost and fast, but the printed colors are easy to mix and penetrate, and the color blocks are clearly defined, making the pattern look dull.
Starting from the Yuan Dynasty, there has been the so-called "multiple copy printing", which is also the so-called "registration printing". Roughly speaking, you can carve as many plates as you want in as many colors as you want. Each printing plate is coated with different colors and printed on the same piece of paper in batches. The process of overlay color printing has lasted for a long time. In addition to printing factories, it was also used in printing and dyeing factories until the 20th century.
Nanjing had become the center of color overprinting in the Ming Dynasty, and most bookshops had the ability to do color overprinting.
Because the cost of overprinting is much higher - as many of the same carving boards are needed as there are colors, the color overprinting of books in the Ming and Qing Dynasties generally only used red and ink, and only the printing of New Year pictures used more Color.
The embroidery currently being printed in the bookshop only uses three colors. However, the shopkeeper was already very proud and said that this time he was "regardless of the cost and only pursued perfection."
During the entire visit, Zhou Dongtian learned from the shopkeeper that there were about a thousand kinds of books that could be printed in Nanjing. Divided into nine categories. There are tens of thousands of craftsmen, workers, and traders who rely on this for their livelihood. Business is booming. Books are not only sold to various provinces, but also exported in large quantities-especially to North Korea.
However, the best seller is "Shiwenji", which is also a "civil service examination guide book". Although new books are compiled every year, these books still sell well. Zhou and Mei could not help but sigh again.
Cai Yibang speculated that these two leaders were so interested in bookshops that they probably wanted to open a bookshop. He was a local aboriginal in Nanjing and had several poor relatives who ate this bowl of rice. He quickly seized this opportunity to recommend it to Zhou Dongtian.
Zhou Dongtian felt that this was okay, after all, there was still a need for engraving masters - he originally came to Nanjing with the intention of recruiting a group of skilled engraving workers for the Lingao printing factory, and the Hangzhou printing factory also needed them. He immediately agreed and asked him to recruit as many printing workers as possible. ro@.
