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New Day Cafe: the Oldest Extant Book Printed with Moveable Type [1]
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Date: 2025-06-30
Contrary to popular belief in this country, the Gutenberg Bible is not the oldest extant book printed with moveable type. Instead the distinction belongs to Jikji, a collection of Korean Buddhist teachings, which was printed 78 years earlier. Neither are the oldest books printed with moveable type, only the two earliest surviving examples
The Jikji is now digitized and online!
From “Open Culture”: www.openculture.com/…
“The Jikji, printed in Korea, (is) a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.
Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier. Margaret Davis nods to this history, (M. Sophia) Newman concedes, writing that ‘movable type was an 11th century Chinese invention, refined in Korea in 1230, before meeting conditions in Europe that would allow it to flourish.’ This is more than most popular accounts of the printed word say on the matter, but it’s still an inaccurate and highly cursory summary of the evidence…
Without surviving documentation, this early history of printing in Asia relies on secondary sources. But “the entire history of the printing press” in Europe” is likewise ‘riddled with gaps,’ Newman writes. What we do know is that Jikji, a collection of Korean Zen Buddhist teachings, is the world’s oldest extant book printed with movable type. The myth of Johannes Gutenberg as “a lone genius who transformed human culture,” as Davis writes, ‘endures because the sweep of what followed is so vast that it feels almost mythic and needs an origin story to match.’ But this is one inventive individual in the history of printing, not the original, godlike source of movable type.”
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