Medieval kings and princes frequently had their
signatures cut on these blocks of wood or metal, in order to impress
them on charters, and a kind of engraving was employed to reproduce
pictures or written pages as early as the twelfth century.
It was a natural but slow evolution from block-impressing to the
practice of casting individual letters in separate little pieces of
metal, all of the same height and thickness, and then arranging them in
any desired sequence for printing. The great advantage of movable type
over the blocks was the infinite variety of work which could be done by
simply setting and resetting the type.
The actual history of the transition from the use of blocks to movable
type--the real invention of modern printing--is shrouded in a good deal
of mystery and dispute. It now appears likely that by the year 1450, an
obscure Lourens Coster of the Dutch town of Haarlem had devised movable
type, that Coster's invention was being utilized by a certain Johan
Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz, and that improvements were being
added by various other contemporaries.
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