On the whole, however, this method protected the scribes quite effectively against the risk of being burned together with their parchment offspring and the system worked well enough as long as books were copied by hand and it took five whole years to get out an edition of three volumes.
All this of course was changed by the famous invention of Johann Gutenberg, alias John Gooseflesh.
After the middle of the fifteenth century, an enterprising publisher was able to produce as many as four or five hundred copies in less than two weeks’ time and in the short period between 1453 and 1500 the people of western and southern Europe were presented with not less than forty thousand different editions of books that had thus far been obtainable only in some of the better stocked libraries.
The Church regarded this unexpected increase in the number of available books with very serious misgivings. It was difficult enough to catch a single heretic with a single home made copy of the Gospels. What then of twenty million heretics with twenty million copies of cleverly edited volumes? They became a direct menace to all idea of authority and it was deemed necessary to appoint a special tribunal to inspect all forthcoming publications at their source and say which could be published and which must never see the light of day.
Out of the different lists of books which from time to time were published by this committee as containing “forbidden knowledge” grew that famous Index which came to enjoy almost as nefarious a reputation as the Inquisition.
But it would be unfair to create the impression that such a supervision of the printing-press was something peculiar to the Catholic Church. Many states, frightened by the sudden avalanche of printed material that threatened to upset the peace of the realm, had already forced their local publishers to submit their wares to the public censor and had forbidden them to print anything that did not bear the official mark of approbation.
But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued until today. And even there it has been greatly modified since the middle of the sixteenth century. It had to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously that even that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to inspect all printed works, was soon years behind in its task. Not to mention the flood of rag-pulp and printers-ink which was poured upon the landscape in the form of newspapers and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify, in less than a couple of thousand years.
But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion how terribly this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon the rulers who force it upon their unfortunate subjects.
Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman Empire, had declared himself against the persecution of authors as “a foolish thing which tended to advertise books which otherwise would never attract any public attention.”
The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner had the Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden books was promoted to a sort of handy guide for those who wished to keep themselves thoroughly informed upon the subject of current literature. More than that. During the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany and in the Low Countries maintained special agents in Rome whose business it was to get hold of advance copies of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon as they had obtained these, they entrusted them to special couriers who raced across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the valuable information might be delivered to their patrons with the least possible loss of time. Then the German and the Dutch printing shops would set to work and would get out hastily printed special editions which were sold at an exorbitant profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory by an army of professional book-leggers.