This technique originated in the Far East. It was used in the West from around the year 1000, chiefly for decorating fabrics, reproducing pious images, and for making playing-cards. From the 15th century it was used to print ‘block books’ such as aids to calculation, calendars and ‘donats’, educational grammar books in which each page is engraved on a single block. In early block books, the texts were handwritten; woodcuts being used+ only for illustrations, but at a later stage text and images were engraved and printed together.
Woodblocks and type can be printed simultaneously. This fact, combined with modest production costs of (as compared with other techniques such as metal engraving), gave the woodcut a second lease of life at the end of the 15th century.
The first stage in making a woodcut is to draw the image on to a flat piece of softwood (such as apple, pear or cherry) which has been cut with the grain (in the same direction as the fibres). By means of knives and gouges the parts of the image which are to remain white are cut away. Woodcut technique became increasingly sophisticated during the sixteenth century, with the use of hatchings, contours, curves and perspective.
Engraving on metal overtook the use of woodcuts in the seventeenth century, but wood returned to favour in the nineteenth with the technique of wood engraving in which the block is cut across the grain.