Jikji, the Metal Type Book

In an archive room in Paris, someone has just reached up to a high shelf and lowered a box onto the table.

The room is so quiet that the box lid can be heard scraping as it opens. Inside is paper, thin paper gone the color of tea, gathered into a book sewn with thread along its spine. The woman standing at the table turns the pages very slowly, one sheet at a time, until she reaches the last page.

Then she stops.

The bookmakers of old had a habit of writing a few small lines on the last page. They told where the book was made, in what year, and by what method. She reads those lines. She reads them once more. And she understands that the thing under her ten fingertips is no ordinary old book.

The year is 1972.

The woman's name is Park Byeong-seon. She was born in 1923 and left her homeland to study in France. From 1967 she worked at the National Library of France. Her job was to sit among the documents connected with her own country and go through them one by one. Most of them had been left as they were for decades.

The book in the box has a very long title, so people usually call it Jikji for short. A monk named Baegun compiled it late in the Goryeo period, to record the core teachings of Zen Buddhism. Goryeo was a Korean kingdom founded in 918 that lasted until 1392. The lines on the last page say it plainly: the book was printed in the seventh month of 1377, at Heungdeoksa Temple in the city of Cheongju, with movable metal type.

What makes it special lies in those last few words, so they need to be explained with care.

People in East Asia had known how to print books long before that. The most familiar method was the woodblock. A craftsman took a board of wood and carved a whole page of text onto it in reverse. Then he inked it and pressed it onto paper. The method was beautiful and durable. But once a page was carved, that block could only ever print that one page. To print another book, the carving had to start again from the beginning. This very text of Jikji was itself carved into woodblocks a year later, and that complete woodblock edition still survives in Korea today.

Movable metal type was something else entirely. Each character was cast on its own, a small block of metal only a little bigger than a fingertip. The pieces were set together into a page, and after printing they were taken apart, wiped clean and put back in the basket. The next day, the very same characters were set into a completely different page. One basket of type could print a sutra this month and a book of medicine the next.

One more point should be set straight. Old Korean records mention printing with metal type even earlier. But no printed copy from those earlier times has survived. So the surest and most accurate thing to say about Jikji is this. Of all the books printed with movable metal type that people still have, this is the oldest. It came 78 years before the Bible that Gutenberg printed in Europe.

The road it took from a temple in Cheongju to that wooden table in the archive room was a long one.

The book was originally printed in two volumes. The first volume was lost long ago, and no one knows where it is. Only the second volume made the whole long trip. A French diplomat named Victor Collin de Plancy came to work in Korea, and the book came into his hands there. He kept it until 1911, when it was sold to a collector named Henri Vever. Vever kept it until the end of his life. He left it to the National Library of France in 1950. In 1952, the book officially entered the library's collection.

Then it lay still.

A book that joins a collection is entered in a register, given a number and placed on a shelf. Then it stays there. For 20 years, people walked past it every day, and hardly any of them knew what they were walking past. Until the day that box was lowered onto the table.

That same year, the book was put on display at a major book exhibition in Paris, held for International Book Year. Researchers from many countries crowded around the glass case. And the West recognized exactly what the small lines on the last page had stated centuries before.

Park did not stop there. Three years later, in the same library, she tracked down another storeroom. There she found a collection of books on Korean royal rituals, misfiled among the Chinese books and lying under dust. She followed the story of those books for nearly the rest of her life. In 2011, they were returned to Korea. She died that same year.

Meanwhile, in Korea, another story was waiting underground.

The name Heungdeoksa was right there in the book, but the temple itself had vanished long ago. No one could point to where it had once stood. In 1985, work began on leveling a plot of land in Cheongju. As soon as the machines dug in, artifacts came to light. The work had to stop, and a team of archaeologists took over. Among the bronze objects dug up was a broken gong. On its face was carved the name of the temple, Heungdeoksa.

That confirmed where the temple had stood, right where the book had been born. A broken piece of bronze in the earth answered a few lines on a page half a world away.

In 2001, Jikji was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. That is UNESCO's program for documentary heritage.

There is something a little strange in this story, and it can stay strange. The oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type is in Paris. The ground where it was printed is in Cheongju. Two halves of the same story, nearly a whole map apart. Every country has pages of its own lying somewhere far from home.

If one scene from all of this is worth keeping, it is the first.

A quiet room. A box lowered onto a table. A woman turns the book to its last page, reads the few small lines there, and looks up. No one in the room cries out. There is no bell, no camera flash. There is only one woman who has just realized what she holds. It had waited on a library shelf for a full 20 years, and in this world for nearly six centuries, to meet someone who could read it.