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.
Within ten years of the issue of the Indulgence mentioned above,
printing by movable type was going on in several German cities other
than Mainz and Strasbourg. German printers brought the art to Rome
in 1467, and two years later John of Spire, like Fust a goldsmith,
had started work in Venice. In Switzerland, says McMurtrie, it seems
likely that "the first printing office in Basle began work about
1467." Printing in Paris starts about a year later. In 1469, Caxton, a
Kentishman, who had occupied consular status to the English Merchant
Adventurers at Bruges, began translating into his own tongue for the
press the _Recuyell of the Histories of Troye_, printed there in 1475.
A year later, he returned to England, set up business with Colard
Mansion in the Almonry near Westminster Abbey, and from that office
produced _The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers_. This, states
McMurtrie,
was the first dated book printed in England, the Epilogue being dated
1477 and in one copy November 18. Though this was the first _dated_
book, it was not certainly the first issue of the press, Caxton's
translation of Jason and a few other publications of slight extent
having probably preceded it.
Within twenty years from the start, on the threshold of the
discovery of the New World, printing from movable type is thus in
full swing throughout Europe. The speedy and consequent intellectual
ferment is an oft-told tale, scarcely worth further comment, if it
were not too customary to dwell on the alleged impact on natural
knowledge, as on biblical criticism and political theory, of Greek
scholarship imported into Europe by Byzantine immigrants in flight
from the victorious Turks. The fact is that the positive outcome of
Alexandrian mathematics, astronomy, medicine and mechanics had long
ago penetrated north-western Europe through visits of students to the
Moorish universities in Spain, where positive knowledge had attained
a higher level than ever before through the marriage of Alexandrian
science to Hindu number-lore. Equally indisputable is the fact that
the universities of Toledo, Cordova and Seville were midwives of
the cartography which Jewish pilots put at the service of Henry the
Navigator. That the new technique of printing made available for the
great explorations of the fifteenth century a new scientific amenity
for which there was a pre-existing and insistent demand is evident from
the mounting number of nautical almanacks published between Gutenberg's
first productions and the project of Columbus. Soon there were to
follow manuals of military science propounding problems of ballistics
created by the introduction of gunpowder into warfare--like paper, from
Chinese sources by way of the Moslem world.
Why monks, such as Adelard of Bath, should disguise themselves as
Moslems to study in the Moorish universities during the twelfth century
is easy to understand. The Church had assumed the responsibilities
of the ancient priesthoods as custodians of the calendar, and hence
of astronomical lore, when Christianity became the official religion
of the Roman Empire. As founders of hospitals in conformity with
the beatitude of the sick visitor, they were prohibited from active
participation in the advancement of medicine as a science by Papal
bulls against dissection of the human body, but on that account the
more well-disposed to Jewish missionaries of the Moorish culture, when
the latter set up schools of medicine on the campuses of the mediaeval
universities....
That Ionian scientific speculations exerted a salutary influence on
Newtonian science, when the atomic concept invaded modern European
thought after the seventeenth-century translations of Gassendi and
others, is not open to dispute. Nor need we rob the fugitive scholars
of Constantinople of the credit for playing a minor part in this
climax off-stage; but the efflorescence of science in the seventeenth
century was the immediate consequence of technological advances made in
the preceding century, and put into circulation through a commercial
undertaking which had to sell science to a reading public of master
pilots, mining engineers, artillery commanders and spectacle-makers
before naturalistic science had paid its way into university cloisters
under a more accommodating sobriquet as natural philosophy.
With this overdue obituary on the immigrants from the fall of
Constantinople in the year preceding the first dated product of the
new printing technique let us leave them; and again get into focus
the astonishing speed of its spread in an age when the craft guilds
jealously guarded their secrets. Here is a technical revolution of the
first magnitude at a time when technical innovations diffused leisurely
against menacing obstacles of custom thought and of legal sanctions. As
such, its tempo is a challenge to curiosity; and part of the answer to
the enigma is that there was already a flourishing craft of printing to
take advantage of the economy of movable type, when Gutenberg and Fust
began their partnership.
Again, we must pause to pay a debt of gratitude to China, and to
civilisations far older than the Chinese. We have seen that the seal is
the oldest form of signature; and that all our knowledge of one of the
earliest literatures of the world comes from clay tablets on which the
Sumerian priesthoods engraved their sign-language with a punch to which
it owes the characteristic style called cuneiform. The same impulse to
impose the signature of a sky-sign on the clay tablet had led men to
impress symbols of ownership or good omen on the soft clay products
of the potter's wheel before the baking began. A stamp is, after all,
a seal to carry a pigment; and the practice of stamping pottery with
coloured patterns is of great antiquity. The next step is intelligible
in its own territory. In China, whence the silkworm made its lethargic
way across the great trade routes of Asia, stamping patterns on silk
was probably a practice before the Christian era began; and it was
China which produced the first paper. Probably about A.D. 700, though
it may well be earlier, the practice of stamping charms by wood blocks
on paper began there. In A.D. 767 the Empress Shotoku of Japan ordered
a million Buddhist charms to be printed from wood blocks on paper for
placing in miniature pagodas.
The Chinese predilection for games such as _Mah Jongg_ is an ancient
tradition; and an early use of block printing--long before it came
into Europe--is the production of _sheet dice_ or, as we should say,
playing cards. As charms--pictures of saints--and as playing cards,
wood-block printing established a market in Europe at least a century
before Gutenberg's Bible. Fortunately, we know some facts about this,
as often by a happy dispensation. For the age-long obstruction of the
legal mind to progress conspires with its obsessional drive to record
its own ineptitudes and us to perpetuate milestones of progress by
the resistance it offers to innovation. Thus we have the record of
a prohibition issued by the Provost of Paris in A.D. 1397 against
working men playing cards on working days; and there were many such
prohibitions in German towns about this time. We have also originals of
contemporaneous wood-block prints portraying saints for sale at shrines
by travelling pedlars and palmers, encouraged to foregather by papal
indulgences for the pilgrims.
Like _Snap_ and other children's card games of today, the first playing
cards were wholly pictorial, in suits exhibiting the feudal hierarchy,
starting with the king and queen. The joker is a relic. Sometimes, the
wood block of the picture card accommodated a title or epithet, and
often the _Heiligen_, or shrine charms promoted by the clergy as an
antidote to the carnal indulgence of card-playing, would carry the name
of the saint. Either way, the next step was inevitable. We are now in
sight of printing as a medium for the rapid circulation of knowledge;
but we have to take stock of several features of the folk ways of
Europe in the Middle Ages before we take the next hurdle.
When we reach the threshold of the fifteenth century, writing is
no longer the prerogative of a priestly caste. There are merchants
with big balances in the wool trade, the herring trade and the spice
trade. There are pilots who have to rely on their _rutter_ books to
navigate cargoes of the spice trade over long ocean routes. There is
a mounting volume of manorial accountancy and litigation connected
with the exchange of produce between the countryside and the boroughs
where master-craftsmen and merchants are now aspiring to domestic
conveniences heretofore inaccessible to the landed gentry. All this
signifies the pre-existence of considerable semi-literate personnel to
provide a market for the products of Gutenberg's trade. It is necessary
to say this, because school history too often exhibits the Church and
the Law as the custodians of literacy.
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.