Books and Printing; a Treasury for Typophiles

by Unknown

Twenty thousand years or more separate the way of life of the Aurignacian hunters, who contributed the first pictures to the modern symposium of human communications, from the beginnings of settled community life and the beginnings of a priestly script. Fully three thousand years separate the way of life of the first Semitic trading folk who had an alphabet from the vast expansion of knowledge which occurred in Northern Europe after the spread of printing from movable type during the half century before the voyages of Columbus. Civilised mankind had to surmount many hurdles before it was possible to exploit to the fullest extent the considerable economy signalised by the introduction of alphabetic writing.

At first, there were few people who had any use for the art of writing except as a convenience of commercial intercourse. There was in fact no incentive to adapt the art of writing with letters to the flexible uses of daily speech.... An age-long popular tradition of community singing and community dancing lies back of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes; but it was one which could assume so novel an aspect only in the trading communities of the islands in the Mediterranean, where constant interchange of personnel promoted conditions less propitious to the dominance of a priestly class of avaricious landed proprietors than under the earlier dynasties of Egypt and the near East. Thus and there, at an early date, a segment of tribal ritual crystallises as a secular pursuit; and where there is a flourishing drama there is also a motive for writing, equally aloof from association with the repetition of sacred texts or from the limited requirements of the counting-house. There is, in fact, an incentive to write down what is more than a ceremonial password, an epitaph or a bill of goods, an incentive to record in writing what living people actually speak.

It is indeed a far cry from the Greek drama to the free-and-easy visual speech of a modern novel or of a modern newspaper in the Western world; but we unduly belittle our too often overrated debt to Greek civilisation, if we fail to pay tribute to an innovation which entitles Greek literature to rank as a cardinal contribution to the self-education of the human species. To a far greater extent than the Romans, the Greeks wrote about the life of their times with an intimacy and liveliness which foreshadows the adaptation of writing to all the familiar uses of speech. For the Latin which generations of schoolboys reluctantly construed in the grammar schools, Latin in the Gladstone tradition, was actually dead when committed to writing, a language as remote from the common speech of the Italian peninsula as the idiom of Gertrude Stein from that of the contemporary American household.

Within the framework of Greco-Latin society, the written word became available to the more prosperous citizens on a scale unprecedented in the civilisations which had preceded them; but there were still very few who read much or read often. The spoken word was still the main instrument of instruction and of political persuasion. Even among those who could read, there were still few who could also write. There were in fact two formidable impediments alike to the use of the written word as a medium of instruction or of propaganda and to the availability of any considerable body of written matter for those with inclination and training in the art of reading. Needless to say, one was the laborious nature of the only available means of multiplying the products of the pen, when it was necessary to copy every script individually by hand; and since this was a labour commonly entrusted to slaves, deficiency in penmanship gave little affront to self-esteem among the still privileged few who could read with ease. The other handicap was the writing surface itself, often of its very nature inadaptable to free circulation and at best costly.

PAPER is so much a part of every-day life that we too easily overlook the significance of writing material as a circumstance limiting the advancement of literacy. It is on that account worthy of more than a single sentence. The clay tablets of Babylon and Crete might serve the purpose of stocking a temple or a palace library; but no household of modest size could have accommodated the contents of several issues of the New Yorker, if transcribed in the cuneiform tradition. Much the same may be said about the wax tablets in common use among the Roman contemporaries of Cicero. Indeed the advantage Egyptian civilisation, and thereafter the mainland Greek, Alexandrian, and late Latin, enjoyed from the use of papyrus is difficult to exaggerate. Papyrus consists of longitudinal ribbons of reed laid on a wet surface, stuck with gum to an overlaying layer of similar strips at right angles, dried in the sun and subsequently polished. It has a double advantage over clay and wax. It is not bulky, and its smooth surface permits an easy cursive style of writing. On the other hand, its manufacture is tedious; and it does not stand up to a moist climate.

Long before printing began in Europe—during the Han dynasty in the first century A.D.—the Chinese had taken a lesson from the wasp, which makes its nest by chewing vegetable fibre and pressing the moist suspension into a film of even thickness. As a source of vegetable fibre, the Chinese used anything which came to hand: old fishing nets, worn-out rope and hemp, macerating it in tubs before removing with a sieve the artificial detritus. It is then possible to compress the latter to required thickness, and the triturated fibres adhere when dry. The Mandarin had now material far superior to papyrus, alike for copying or for storing the written word; but he lacked the incentive to share the advantage of this invention with his underprivileged compatriots. Chinese literature received a new impetus; but there were still few who could enjoy its benefits....

The capture of Samarkand by the Arabs in A.D. 750 marks the date when paper starts on its trek to the as yet non-existent printing presses of Europe. The Moslem invaders of Spain and Sicily brought it with them into the territories they conquered, and with it a recipe for deriving the fibre basis from old rags. For three centuries after its introduction to Christendom, somewhere about A.D. 1200, it had to compete with parchment or vellum made from stretched, pressed and dried animal membranes. What was probably decisive in establishing its supremacy was the spread of water mills in the two centuries before Caxton. Power was necessary to speed up maceration of the raw material; and we have record of paper mills in Germany by A.D. 1336. Had it not been for this new tempo and economy of production of thin, smooth and flexible material for the impress of the written word, the vastly increased volume of written matter put into circulation by the printing press could not have come about.

As we all know, printing from movable type began in Europe about fifty-years before Columbus set out on his first voyage; but few of us reflect upon the dramatic speed with which the new trade spread from one city or one country to another. A single leaf of a sibylline poem called the Fragment of World Judgment is supposedly the earliest extant product of the new technique, probably issued about the year 1445 from the press of Gutenberg, a master printer, then resident in Strasbourg. From law-suit records we know that Fust, a goldsmith of Mainz who financed Gutenberg's earliest trials, was printing there during the fifties; and McMurtrie, author of The Book, states that

the first dated piece of printing preserved to us appeared in 1454, which is thus the earliest date that can be set beyond any speculation or controversy. In that year four different issues of a papal indulgence appeared in printed form. The occasion was historic. Constantinople had fallen to the Turks the year before. At the solicitation of the king of Cyprus, Pope Nicholas V granted indulgences to those of the faithful who should aid with gifts of money the campaign against the Turks. Paulinus Chappe, as representative of the king of Cyprus, went to Mainz to raise money of this cause. Ordinarily, these indulgences would have been written out by hand, but in this case, as there were a considerable number to be distributed, the aid of the new art of printing was enlisted, and forms were printed with blank spaces left for filling the dates, the names of the donors to whom they were issued, and other details.

The new art turned out to be a double-edged weapon in the hands of papal authority. A Latin Bible in two columns of forty-two lines to the page came out in 1456, most probably, according to McMurtrie, from the press of Fust, now in competition with Gutenberg. As early as 1478, a Cologne master printer issued a Bible in two different German dialects with well over a hundred illustrations. There were 133 editions of it during the next fifty years. To be sure, a century was to elapse before printed Bibles were available in the home tongue throughout Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and the Low Countries; but it was a disastrous step to make the poorer clergy Bible-conscious.