Do you know your aquatint from your drypoint? Your intaglio from your lithograph? The appearance of any one finished print can vary so much from another – the feathery delicacy of etching replaced by the bold forms of linocut or the carved sinews of a woodblock – that it can be difficult to believe they all derive from the same initial process.

What image appears when an object – be it carved, chemically altered, or engraved – is covered in ink and pressed into a piece of paper? As Holly Black explains, it is difficult to know when this technique first originated. Was it with the work of monks carving woodblocks in the mid-9th century to print the lines of the Diamond Sutra (now held in the British Library)? Or does it have its origins centuries earlier? Black draws attention to China’s 7th-century empress, Wu Zetian, who schemed and blackmailed her way from courtesan to ruler. Though no extant version now exists, she commissioned 100,000 copies of a spiritual text which appeared to predict and legitimise a female ruler. For such a large commission, surely printing would have been the medium of choice rather than the laborious work of hand copyists and calligraphers? There are enough hints in other texts – from Buddhist devotional writing to trade documents from the Silk Roads – to suggest that the woodblock was already well-known........

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