In premodern East Asia, woodblock printing was the stable and almost exclusive choice of technology of producing books. It is therefore curious why the court of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) continuously cast movable types. Throughout Chosŏn history, type casting was consistently an important project of the royal court. Metal types were cast thirty-nine times in Chosŏn, and only six of them were private casting. Fourteen out of twenty-six kings of Chosŏn initiated and carried out type-casting projects, and a few of them did multiple times. Still, the main technology of book making in Chosŏn was woodblock printing, not typography. This talk discusses how typography was used in early-modern Korean book production, how the two technologies coexisted in Chosŏn, and why the Chosŏn dynasty showed a particular interest in typography—against the tide of technology.
Young Kyun Oh is an Associate Professor of Chinese in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. He works on the cultural connection among East Asian societies, with particular foci on the language and the book. His ultimate interest lies in how cultures interact to influence each other, how language, books, and other kind of media function as vehicles of cultural transmission and exchange, and how different geographical regions come to be seen as forming a continuous cultural space. He is the author of “Engraving Virtue: the Print History of a Premodern Moral Primer“ (Brill, 2013), which explores the print history of the “Samgang Haengsil-to“ [Illustrated Guide to the Three Relations], one of the most frequently printed, reprinted, reedited, and distributed texts in Choson Korean (1398-1910).