Typographic Hegemony and Bibliographical Monoculture: The Ascendancy of Mechanical Print in Modern Korea

Abstract This article explores how “Western” mechanical printing figured prominently in the expansion of imperialists’ interests in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Korea as both the main technological imperative and the hegemonic discourse. Negotiating and compromising with the native practices and deep history of print in Korea, the implantation of industrial printing fundamentally transformed the country’s literary cultures and epistemology. All participants in this change—Christian missionaries, Japanese colonizers, and Korean intellectuals—contributed to the domination of typography that gave rise to the circulation of printed matter on an unprecedented scale, which brought about the wide usage of the easy Korean alphabet and expanded readership even by women and nonelites. The discourse centering on typography as the symbol of modernity and progress also led the imperialists to redefine and recategorize Korean antiquarian books. The practices and projects that developed, such as Japanese collectors’ cannibalization of Korean books to put together imperial albums or binding Korean editions in Western styles, mirrored the colonial body politics that rendered the colonized inferior subjects in the material dimension. Typographic domination was vital to imperialists’ expansion in Korea not simply because it helped disseminate their ideas to Korean readers but also because it subordinated Korean written culture to the one introduced by the imperialist powers. More important, the typographic domination engineered by Japanese colonialists became so naturalized as to continue and shape the field of bibliography in postcolonial Korea, in what can be best described as bibliographical monoculture.