Books and Printing; a Treasury for Typophiles

by Unknown

What is true is that the monks, and to a less extent the lawyers, were the only people who had time to write at length during the century we have now reached. The lawyers we may leave to their own sadistic pursuits.... The Church deserves kinder consideration, even if the Church had outstayed its welcome. For Catholicism kept alive the lucidity of picture-language in an age when a new technique of illustration offered the only means of grace to the few men who saw the light of science through a miasma of verbal puns.

In short, we are here talking of the Missals, a form of sacred art with a charm to which even a hard-boiled technician such as the writer is not entirely indifferent. There is a pathetic earnestness about the tender care with which the monks illuminated their copies of devotional texts, and one which established what we may fairly call the first experiment in visual education for the people. The monks who made the missals offered a helping hand to the new industry. To be sure, we read a lot of rubbish written about what we owe to them; but they did one thing of enduring value besides starting hospitals and nursing the spectacle trade for the benefit of "poor blind men." They made block-books possible. In the admirable book already cited, this is what McMurtrie has to say about their contribution:

There is ... one exceedingly primitive block book, the Exercitium super Pater Noster, in which the illustrations are printed from woodcuts and the text added in manuscript.... The costume is that of the Burgundian court of the second quarter of the century, and this feature, in conjunction with the technique of design and cutting led Hind to date the book about 1430 and hardly later than 1440.

There is still argument about whether devotional block-books with both illustrations and text produced from fixed blocks antedated or synchronised with printing from movable type; but it seems fairly certain that block-books were in circulation before the wastefulness of cutting the same letter over and over again on the same block occurred to Gutenberg, and likely enough to many others. The issue is of academic interest only. What we can say certainly is that the printers of playing cards and of Heiligen were already involved in the book industry before it occurred to anyone to make punches and dies for letters of the alphabet in order to dispense with the necessity of repeatedly carving the same sign on a composite block. Metal-founders of the thirteenth century already knew the art of using stamps with single letters in relief to make an impress on fine sand for molten metal when making inscriptions, themselves to appear in relief on the finished casting. In bell foundries, among craftsmen who made pewter vessels with inscriptions, in the minting of coin and the casting of medals, the use of metal single-letter punches and dies was also commonplace.

In short, there is already in existence an industry of master printers when the record of Gutenberg's law-suit bequeaths the first documentary evidence of printing as we use the term today—moreover an industry working in close contact with ancillary crafts which had already solved the technical problems on whose solution printing on a larger scale at less cost was attendant. There is a market for books, with richer profits if the printer can solve the technical problem of outsmarting the monks in the art of making the first copy, as he can already outsmart them by reproducing the first copy without limit. In one sense, we now have a press.

Still, we have not explained the phenomenal rapidity with which the new technique of cutting stamps to make up a frame of continuous type spread throughout Europe, unless we look at our period in its social entirety; and if we are to do so we must take stock of many things which were not happening in China, the parent civilisation of the printing art. One of them is sufficiently obvious to be easily overlooked in an age of central heating. Europe, as post-war American tourists will agree, is rather cold and rather cloudy. That is why it is important to bring glass into the picture. GLASS is an invention of great antiquity, being in fact an early Egyptian amenity; but the very qualities we admire in the iridescent glass of Etruscan or Roman vessels make it equally unsuitable to the uses of domestic life or to the science of gas or temperature measurement. Before you have leisure to read, in the chilly north of the Hanseatic League or the Flemish wool trade, you must have a technique of house design utterly different from what meets your requirements in the sunny south of Greece and Italy, Crete or Egypt. It is therefore relevant that there is now, in the fifteenth century, a prosperous burgher class with houses equipped with windows made of glass, glass of poor quality by our standards but vastly better fitted to its principal use than the glass of antiquity. Nor is it irrelevant that spectacles are now coming into use for the old folk who have time on their hands.

The very fact that we now have windows brings into focus that we have an emergent class of semi-literate and relatively prosperous merchants and craftsmen, a class which is beginning to send its sons to grammar schools to get a smattering of reading and of the art of cyphers. This consideration prompts reflection upon the almost ubiquitous association of the goldsmith as the patron, partner or financier of the earliest master printers of books. There is now a wealthy craft of jewellers and armourers skilled in the art of using punches and dies to make patterns in relief on a metal surface, with a secure trade among the nobles and the wealthier merchants; and there are already the beginnings of a new trade in pictorial reproduction fostered by artists seeking patrons among them. Before printing by movable type begins, the wood-block illustration is competing with a better technique. Instead of smearing a sticky ink on a raised surface, it is now possible to achieve the same end by filling the crevices in a metal plate wiped clean; and who should be more concerned with promoting the use of pictorial reproduction by engraving than goldsmith and jeweller well versed in the uses of impressing a pattern in relief or intaglio?

What is happening in the fifteenth century is not the outcropping of inborn genius. Contrariwise, we should regard it as the confluence of a large number of new techniques, individually of little import to human advancement, collectively with a new momentum. Nor need we pride ourselves on the fact that European civilisation proved equal to exploiting to greater advantage what it had thanklessly received from the Eastern world. Paul Pelliot has discovered wooden types attributed to Wang Cheng in the beginning of the fourteenth century, well over a hundred years before the first dated printing from movable type in Germany; and if this invention came to nothing, have we far to seek the explanation? With twenty-six pigeonholes for a box of letter type at his elbow, the European compositor of the fifteenth century enjoys an immeasurable advantage over his fourteenth-century fellow craftsman who has to manipulate several thousand Chinese characters. Korea took up movable type, probably through Chinese influence, about fifty years before Europe.

No intelligent Anglo-American needs to be told at length how printing contributed to the diffusion of knowledge previously transmitted by oral tradition, how much more the master printers and book-makers from Gutenberg to Benjamin Franklin contributed to the making of our language habits than all the professors of their time, how much the trade in reading matter contributed to the great enlightenment of the four centuries which followed, how it also contributed to the liberation of Christendom from papal authority, what it bestowed on the age of Galileo and Newton, how it catalysed man's thought about human dignity and fundamental human rights. What we are prone to forget is how much water had to pass under the bridges before the homeland of Caxton or that of Franklin could assert the ability to read and to transcribe the written word as the birthright of every citizen.

In North America and in Northwestern Europe, literacy is today a medical diagnosis. That a person cannot read or write is now a sufficient criterion of mental defect; and this is so in a sense which would have been utterly false of Britain or the United States alike when Charles Dickens wrote an uncharitable record of his transatlantic itinerary. Until the middle of the nineteenth century there was everywhere a large underprivileged class cut off from the possession of books and without the incentive to purchase reading matter....