Re: Monday answer
Monday answer.
At that time the big deal was PLAYING CARDS. Dan got it right, and Lynn had the right thoughts about the non-reader. If you type �playing cards� on any search engine lots of history is available. A piece from one site follows.
"It is clear that the earliest cards were executed by hand, like those designed for Charles VI. However, this was quite expensive, so other means were needed to mass-produce them. It is possible that the printing of woodcuts on paper developed because of the demand for implements of play. The technique of printing woodcuts was transferred from being used to decorate fabric to use on paper around 1400, very shortly after the first recorded manufacture of paper in Christian Europe, as opposed to Islamic Spain where it was much older. No examples from before 1423 survive, but it is clear that most cards of that period were printed as woodcuts by the early card makers or cardpainters of Ulm, Nuremberg, and Augsburg, from about 1418 to 1450, and that playing cards competed with devotional images as the most common uses for woodcut in this period.
Most early woodcuts of all types were coloured after printing, either by hand or, from about 1450 onwards, stencils. No woodcut playing cards exist whose creation can be confirmed as earlier than 1423 (1418 is the date of the earliest dated woodcut, a religious image). However, in this period professional card makers were established in Germany, so it has been speculated that woodcut was employed to produce cuts for sacred subjects before it was applied to cards, but that hand-painting and, especially, stencilling may have been used for cards before images of saints."
Oh, 900,000 impressions is the service life for a wood block print.