“By the 2nd century [the Chinese] already had the necessary tools for putting together printed material: paper, which they recently had discovered through experimentation with wood products; ink, which they had used for more than twenty-five centuries; and the final piece of the printing puzzle, surfaces bearing texts carved in relief. . . .

Some of these texts were sculpted into pillars of marble; they usually were Buddhist precepts. Pilgrims wanting to copy their wisdom merely applied wet sheets of paper, daubing the pillar’s surface with ink to make the relief characters stand out on their crude copies. Other relief carvings were religious seals. Their use, which had become extremely popular, led the Chinese to experiment with inks, and a high-quality, fast-drying product was in use by the 4th century.

Over the next 150 years marble pillars and seals gave way to wooden blocks. Easier to carve and more manageable to handle, wooden blocks could accomodate type of almost any height and width, and the wood’s natural porosity was superior for absorbing and transferring ink to paper. . . .

The oldest existing works printed by this method include . . . the first known book, The Diamond Sutra, a collection of Buddhist maxims and scriptural narratives, printed in China in 868.”

Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.