From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Prints and Printmaking Outline

The Earliest Surviving Dated Complete Printed Book
(May 11, 868)

Chinese Paper Money
(994)

Playing Cards: One of the Earliest Forms of Block Printing
(1007 – 1072)

Block Printing May have been Practiced by Arabs and Jews as early as the Mid-14th Century
(Circa 1350)

The Earliest Dated European Woodblock Print
(1418)

Printing Playing Cards
(1418)

The Earliest Known Artist to Produce Copperplate Engravings
(1435 – 1455)

Card Printing in Venice Has Outside Competition
(1441)

The Giant Bible of Mainz
(April 4, 1452 – July 9, 1453)

An Intermediate Form between a Collection of Prints and a Blockbook
(Circa 1460 – 1465)

The First Book Printed in German and the First Dated Book with Woodcuts
(February 14, 1461)

Three Ways that Printing Changed Manuscript Culture
(Circa 1470)

The First Book with Engraved Maps
(1477)

The First Illustrated Travel Book: An International Bestseller
(February 11, 1486)

At Attempt to Record All Human Knowledge in Visual Form
(Circa 1625 – 1665)

Mezzotint Invented
(1642)

The First Treatise on Engraving and Etching
(1645)

The First Book on Mezzotint
(1662)

The First Book on Print Collecting
(1666)

Anatomy in the Style of Dutch Still-Life Painting
(1685)

Baroque Anatomy and Plagiarism
(1698)

Invention of Color Printing
(1719)

Possibly the First Color-Printed Mezzotint Published
(1721)

First Use of Color Printing in a Medical or Scientific Book
(1736)

Invention of Lithography
(1796)

Lithography by Zinc Plates
(1803)

Invention of Chromolithography
(1818)

Invention of Chromolithography?
(1818)