Woodcuts and engraving were printed routinely in Europe from the 13th century, although the earliest printed woodcuts are from China around 868.

In China, there were no texts similar to the Bible which could guarantee a printer return on the high capital investment of a printing press, and so the primary form of printing was wood block printing which was more suited for short runs of texts for which the return was uncertain.

In the Mid-15th Century, things begin to change with the advent of the printing press. In 1452, Johannes Gutenberg conceives of the idea for movable type. In his workshop, he brings together the technologies of paper, oil-based ink and the wine-press to print books. The printing press is not a single invention. It is the aggregation in one place, of technologies known for centuries before Gutenberg.

In 1457 Fust and Schoffer published a large Psalter, known as the Mainz Psalter, which featured printed red and blue initials along with the black text. There is some debate about how these coloured letters were printed. They were either printed from two part metal blocks that were inked separately, re-assembled and then printed with the text, or they were stamped on after the main text was printed. Either way the process was time consuming and expensive so for several years it was more common for such decorative elements to be added by hand. The Mainz Psalter was also the first book to bear a printer's trademark and imprint, a printed date of publication and a colophon.

The first person to print illustrated books was Albrecht Pfister. Around 1460 he published a book titled Der Ackermann von Bohmen (The Farmer from Bohmen). The only surviving copy of the first edition contains no illustrations but space has been left for them. A second edition printed in 1463 does include images. In 1461 Pfister printed an edition of Der Edelstein (a series of fables in German) which contained 101 woodcut illustrations. The woodcuts were in simple outline and were probably intended to be hand colored. (Most surviving copies have in fact been colored.)

The 18th Century letterpress was nearly the same as its predecessors two hundred years beforehand. Gutenberg would have been at home in Ben Franklin's print shop.

A number of dramatic technological innovations have since added a great deal of character and dimension to the place of print in culture. Linotype, a method of creating movable type by machine instead of by hand, was introduced in 1884 and marked a significant leap in production speed.

Twenty years after Ben Franklin's death, presses were driven by steam. By the 1850s, printing establishments were no longer "shops" but instead had become industrial scale productions.

Offset printing was introduced in the era after World War II and replaced web letterpress printing in the US by the 1990s. Here we see a four unit web offset press (red ink not being used). Offset printing works like lithography, on the principle that grease and water don't mix.

Offset printing plate is placed into the press. Because the plates were much lighter than stereotype plates, offset presses could be calibrated for very fine color control.

The process of setting type continued to go through radical transformations with the development of photo-mechanical composition, cathode ray tubes and laser technologies. The Xerox machine made a means of disseminating print documents available to everyone. Word processing transformed editing and contributed dramatic new flexibility to the writing process. Computer printing has already moved through several stages of innovation, from the first daisy-wheel and dot matrix "impact" printers to common use of the non-impact printers: ink-jet, laser and thermal-transfer.

Both the Internet and interactive multimedia are providing ways of employing the printed word that add new possibilities to print's role in culture.

At DSI Forms we employ four web presses which allow us to print at widths up to 32". Plates today go directly from our computers to press via a digital plate making process that provides for very high quality color printing. These highly automated machines can take a roll of paper at one end and output printed, perforated, folded, individually numbered and stacked forms by the millions!