Vest-Pocket Vocabulary Xylog’raphy, n. engraving on wood. Word in the Wild: The park ranger says carving your initials in trees isn’t xylography—it’s just vandalism. Xylography refers to engravings in wood as well as the impressions made from them. The term was used in the nineteenth century to distinguish wood-block printing from that using moveable type. […]
This past weekend on a visit to Chicago I stopped by Columbia College’s Center for Book & Paper Arts to see the current exhibit of Buddhist printing from the Derge Parkhang. The Derge Parkang (also known as the Derge Sutra Printing Temple) was established in 1729 and is home to more than 300,000 woodblocks used […]
Recommended Read Chappell, Warren and Robert Bringhurst. A Short History of the Printed Word. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks Publishers Inc., 1999. [ISBN-10: 0-88179-154-7] A Short History of the Printed Word is an impressively complete history of print and its astonishing cultural ascendency, beginning with the invention of moveable type in eleventh-century China and ending with […]