by Heather on October 14, 2009
This past weekend on a visit to Chicago I stopped by Columbia College’s Center for Book & Paper Arts to see the current exhibit of Buddhist printing from the Derge Parkhang.
The Derge Parkang (also known as the Derge Sutra 
Printing Temple) was established in 1729 and is home to more than 300,000 woodblocks used to make copies of sutra (Buddhist teachings), thangka (fabric banners), and other spiritual images.
The exhibit includes examples of fabric and paper woodblock printing, photographs of the woodblock-carving and papermaking processes, hand-carved woodblocks from Derge Parkhang as well as a fascinating video documenting in detail the printing craft practiced at Derge Parkhang.
The prints are beautiful and phenomenally detailed, and the photographs and video really contributed to my appreciation of the prints and their place in the history of printing. I had a wonderful time and highly recommend that logophiles who find themselves in Chicago check this out. The exhibition is called Pearl of the Snowlands, and it runs until December 5, including panel discussions and workshops on November 21 & 22.
Detail of a hand-carved wood block. You can see by the ink that this block has been used for printing, though bare wood still peeks out in places.
by Heather on June 28, 2009
Recommended Read
Chappell, Warren and Robert Bringhurst. A Short History of the Printed Word. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks Publishers Inc., 1999. [ISBN-10: 0-88179-154-7]
A Short History of the Printed Word is an impressively complete history of print and its astonishing cultural ascendency, beginning with the invention of moveable type in eleventh-century China and ending with the rise of digital printing at the end of the twentieth century.
Printing technologies, design and the thingness of the printed page are the focus of this history. It’s a dense but very readable book that’s absolutely packed with details from the histories of paper-making, type-founding, printing, and book-binding. You’ll learn about the history and aesthetics of typeface design, page layout, and illustrations. Everyone from Bí Shēng to Gutenberg to Garamond to Picasso to Alfred A. Knopf is here.
I read this one from the first page to last and was fascinated by this account of how the printed word has transformed the world. That said, this is also a book that is happy to serve as a reference to dip in and out of as needed. If you’re a student or practitioner of book design or typesetting, this really is a must-read. And those of you who love books—not just their contents but the books themselves—will delight in A Short History of the Printed Word, too.
I’ll leave you with a few words from the book’s conclusion to let the authors describe their work:
Why so much emphasis here on the physical quality of books? Durability and beauty, like intelligence, are something more than luxuries. They are tactics for survival.
