Gutenberg’s Bible of around 1455 is often considered a turning point in history, and the mechanism of printing that produced it a core invention of the West. It is only recently that mainstream research has started to reckon with the many caveats this ‘famous first’ entails. Rather than just the first printed book, we now describe it as the first document to be bound as a codex, and printed in a press, with oil-based ink, from type that was both movable and made of metal, which happens to survive intact. If any stipulation changes, the story changes with it. For example, the Jikji, a Korean Buddhist document from 1377, was printed from metal movable type, but it was printed by hand and not bound in the form of a codex. And it contained printed pictures.

When the focus shifts to those pictures, or to the invention of printmaking with artistic intent, the historical record opens up. The tale that Holly E J Black tells in The Story of Printmaking unavoidably engages with familiar faces – Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, William Blake, Katsushika Hokusai, Francisco Goya, Mary Cassatt, Edvard Munch and Tracey Emin all make an appearance. But by bringing in unjustly overlooked figures and her own personal experiences of printmaking, Black refreshes our attention. The result is a compelling volume, its insights governed by an expertise that spans centuries and cultures. 

Black covers a huge variety of techniques. The various terms are all defined in a glossary given at the end of the book, but some readers might quibble with their usage. The word ‘printed’ is ambiguous, and the author does not always distinguish manual printing methods (or printing by hand with stamping, block-printing and rubbing) from the wholly different mechanical methods (using tools) that follow from Gutenberg. ‘Book’, too, is sometimes used to include all printed formats that are not single-sheet artworks, including scrolls. This can lead to confusion. For instance, we start in the Gobi Desert with the discovery of the Diamond Sutra, printed in 868. This is described both as a block-printed scroll (with manual production, water-based inks and rolling) and as a printed book (which implies much later printing in a press with oil-based inks and binding).

As the narrative moves from ancient East Asian scrolls to the woodcuts and intaglio prints of the European Renaissance, Black hones in on scandal. The rise of celebrity printmakers was eventful. On just one page, Andrea Mantegna orders two hits on alleged copyists in the late 1400s (both murder attempts were thwarted) while Antonio da Trento seeks shelter with Parmigianino after the Sack of Rome in 1527, only later to abscond at dead of night with as many of his master’s prints and matrices as he could carry. Nor does Black shy away from violence and horror. In a later episode, she describes the accident that severed the right arm of the 20th-century Mexican lithographer José Sánchez. Such was his dedication to printmaking that Sanchez caught the severed limb with his other hand so as not to stop the press, while his colleagues and assistants either fainted or ran away. 

Refreshingly, Black’s account does not merely name women, but also confronts the sexism that has typically hindered them. Volcxken Diericx co-founded Aux Quatre Vents printing house in Antwerp with her husband, Hieronymus Cock, in the 16th century. She was actively involved – and prominently named – in the family publishing business during her lifetime. But her contributions have been downplayed. After Cock’s death, she was praised by the humanist Dominicus Lampsonius, in 1573, because she ‘bravely undertook a business that transcends your sex/And now follow in the path your husband once trod’. The Story of Printing is in part a rallying cry for researchers interested in Diericx and others like her.

Black’s tale winds its way through mezzotint and satire in 18th-century England and Spain to the vogue for Japanese ukiyo-e in 19th-century Paris. In the 20th century, it connects German Expressionism, Picasso, postwar Abstract Expressionism and the metal-cut graphic work coming out of Mexico in the 1950s and 60s. Discussions of later 20th-century Pop Art, lithography and screenprint segue into the use of prints to fight apartheid in South Africa. Generalisations are unavoidable, but Black grounds her narrative in detailed accounts that bring her subjects to life. The story of Tatyana Grosman is a case in point. After fleeing Yekaterinburg as a child when Tsar Nicholas II was murdered a few streets away, and escaping the Nazis by crossing the Pyrenees on foot, she found some lithographic stones in her garden that had been repurposed for paving. She set about printing from them ‘despite knowing … nothing about printmaking’ and in due course created one of the most influential lithography studios of the 20th century, Universal Limited Art Editions. 

A book like this is only as good as its images, and fortunately it is extremely well illustrated. Even when the original images are printed in black ink on white paper, the condition of each impression and the variations in hue are hugely informative. The reproductions are true to life, and show the importance of paper colour. The book concludes with Transmutation by Julie Mehretu (2018), an aquatint in delicate gradations of grey that showcases the book’s matt, opaque paper stock and high-quality colour printing.

Here is a text that spans one thousand years: there are bound to be omissions. One surprise is that the story skips medieval printmaking and the Arab world. Arabic amulets, or tarsh, were block-printed from the ninth or tenth century in the Middle East, with text that was artistically designed, laid out and sometimes (manually) printed in colour. Roma tribes made them. They immigrated to Bavaria from the 1410s, and it is thought that they perhaps translated their skills to produce the earliest surviving printed images in the West: block-printed woodcuts of Catholic iconographies from around the 1420s. Since these images were produced in the generation before Gutenberg, and in the same region, Black might have used them to bridge her discussions of East Asia in the 800s and Europe in the Renaissance.

But on the whole Black compresses an astounding amount of research into one concise and beautiful package. Reading her book, I felt as if I were watching José Clemente Orozco in thrall to the Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada in the early 20th century. Orozco ‘used to stop enchanted for a few minutes … to observe the printmaker … Sometimes, I was bold enough to filch a few of the metal shavings that fell as the maestro moved his burin over the typemetal plate.’ Holly E J Black has filched so many revealing moments, from so many sources, about so many people, that The Story of Printmaking reads like a love letter to the craft.