Movable type

Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual letters or punctuation).

The world's first known movable type system for printing was made of ceramic materials and created in China around A.D 1040 by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127). In 1377, currently the oldest existing extant movable metal print book, Jikji, was printed in Korea. The diffusion of both movable-type systems was, however, limited. They were expensive, and required an enormous amount of labour involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets or metal tablets, required for scripts based on the Chinese writing system, which has thousands of characters.