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From Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present, by Jeremy M. Norman. |
| 1920194019501960 |
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| 900 | "We have been able to form some picture of what had been achieved by the early years of the ninth century. The full measure of the achievement of the Carolingian period can easily be appreciated if one moves forward a century, to the year 900, and takes tock of how much Latin literature had by then, on the evidence of our extant manuscripts, been copied. The picture has changed dramatically. By the end of the ninth century the major part of Latin literature had indeed been copied and was enjoying some degree of circulation, however limited, localized, or precarious it may in some cases have been." (Reynolds, Texts and Transmission [1983] xxvii-xxviii)./ |
| 932-953 | Feng Tao, prime minister of China, orders the printing of the Confucian classics from wood blocks. The work of editing and printing the Classics and their Commentaries lasts for 21 years and extends to 130 volumes. "The chief purpose of printing was not yet to make literature more accesible to the masses, but rather to authenticate the text. For more than a century after Feng Tao--up to the year 1064--the private printing of the Classics was forbidden. All printing must be done by the government and must give the orthodox accepted text." "The work of Feng Tao and his asssociates for printing in China may be compared to the work of Gutenberg in Europe. There had been printing before Gutenberg--block printing certainly and very likely experimentation in typography also--but Gutenberg's Bible heralded a new day in the civilization of Europe. In the same way there had beeen printing before Feng Tao, but it was an obscure art that had little efffect on the culture of the country. Feng Tao's Classics made printing a power that ushered in the renaissance of the Sung era." (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed []1955] 72). |
| Circa 965 | At the Muslim university at Cordoba, Spain, the royal library is reputed to contain over 400,000 volumes. "Its catalog, alone consisted of forty-four volumes. Under Al-Haim II (961-976) this library was reported to have given employment to over 500 people. . . .Elsewhere at Moslem Sapin there was a total of seventy libraries in the 10th century, several in Toledo. In addition to the royal library, these included libraries in universities in Cordoba, Seville, Malaga, and Granada , among others, and in numerous mosques. Private libraries flourishe din Moslem Spain, and it was said that Cordoba was the greatest book market in the western world in the 10th century." (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 81). |
| 972-983 | The whole Buddhist canon, usually called the Tripitaka, is printed from wood blocks in Ch'eng-tu, China. "This collection consisted of 5,048 volumes ocvering 130,000 pages. It therefore required the cutting of 130,000 blocks. This massive work, together with additions, was reprinted frequently during the Sung." (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 89.) |
| 988 | Muhammad ib Ishaq (Abu al Faraj) called Ibn Abi Al-Nadiim (d.995) writes the Fihrist, an index of the books of all nations which are extant in the Arabic language and script. This is the earliest universal bibliography. It will be first published in Leipzig, 1871-72. Though Muslim countries trade extensively with the Chinese at this time, and widely adopt the use of paper, they do not adopt printing. |
| 994 | "China had been issuing paper money for more than a century when Christendom saw its first paper. China had been on a paper money basis for four hundred years when block printing began in Europe. Chinese paper money was still being issued during Gutenberg's lifetime. . . :" "Paper money was the first form of Chinese printing met with by European travelers, was independently discussed by at least eight pre-Renaissance European writers, and, so far as is known, the only form of Chinese printing described in European writings of the pre-Gutenberg days." (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 108-9). |
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| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
March 18, 2006. Please report errors and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.)
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