However, the efficiency that we now see in today’s printing process owes a great deal to the early pioneers who wanted to record words and images in a printed format and often used a great deal of artistic skill and patience to do so.

One such method that inspired future generations to record events in a printed format was the process of Woodblock Printing, which originated in ancient China.

In Europe, the printing of these types of images onto cloth were further developed into the printing of images on paper, with these being commonly known as ‘woodcuts’.  The use of these techniques in Europe in order to print substantial amounts of text together with images in a block-book format only arose after the development of movable type, which is the system of combining printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document.

This was developed by Bi Sheng, a Chinese inventor, about four hundred years later.