The Book: A Revolutionary Tale

What happens when a new technology threatens to steal the powers of books as we know them? Books are so much more than a medium for communicating stories and ideas. They are symbols, metaphors, physical objects that are almost alive. For the medieval Andalusian mystic Muhammad ibn ’Arabi the universe is an immense book and we are its characters, written ‘with the same ink and transcribed on to the eternal tablet by the divine pen’. For the English poet John Milton books ‘are not absolutely dead things’ but contain the essence of their author’s living intellect. And so for Milton ‘As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.’

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all are founded on books. For more than two thousand years, we have been people of the book. And across the same two millennia the ritual burning of books has been a feature of dictatorial regimes and totalitarian states. The symbolic import of book-burning was plain to German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.’ Such is the equivalence of book and human being. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero’s supernatural powers are sourced in his books. If you wish to eliminate Prospero’s magic, Caliban says, ‘burn but his books’.

The last time the book was subject to an epoch-changing technological innovation the rulers of heaven and hell were invoked, so unnatural did its powers of multiplication appear.

The book as we know it—the codex, made up of leaves bound at the side—was first mentioned by the Latin poet Martial in the first century AD, but it wasn’t popular until the fourth century when Roman jurists took to it for its convenience. It was also adopted as the communication medium of choice by the Christians, to distinguish their writings from those of the pagan Romans, who wrote on scrolls. The codex had other benefits for the Christians: it was economical (both sides of the page were used), portable and easy to hide.

Books were rare in Christian Europe until the fifteenth century, mostly confined to the libraries of the Church and other wealthy rulers. They were ‘manuscripts’ (from the Latin libri manu scripti, ‘books written by hand’) copied by monks and later by secular scholars who from the thirteenth century gathered around universities such as the Sorbonne.

In the mid fifteenth century the manuscript was subject to an epoch-changing technological innovation: a new technique of book making was invented. All evidence suggests the technique was created by Johann Gutenberg, a German metalworker in Mainz. Gutenberg combined and developed several already existing technologies—paper, artists’ oil paints, screw presses used for pressing olives and grapes and printing textiles, types used by bookbinders for stamping letters on bindings—to make the first printed book in 1456, the Latin Bible known as the Gutenberg Bible. The first dated printed work in Europe, however, was a pamphlet published in 1454: an indulgence offered by the pope to any Christian willing to contribute money to the Church’s campaign against the Turks, who had conquered Constantinople the year before. To distribute as many indulgences and raise as much money as possible, the Church enlisted the latest technology: the new art of printing.

Printing offered new possibilities of advertisement, self-promotion, celebrity. Almost immediately printers began to use the new technology to advertise their wares. A publisher’s list printed in 1469 declares: ‘Those desiring to procure the books listed below, which are edited with great care, printed at Mainz with a type like this, and well collated, should come to the address written below.’ Printers competed with each other by promoting their ‘more readable’ texts, their ‘more complete and better arranged indexes’ and ‘more careful proofreading and editing’. Within a decade news of the printing press had spread across Europe and by 1500 there were printing presses from England in the west (1476) to Turkey in the east (1494). The printing press reached the New World in 1539 when a Spanish printer and his assistant arrived in Mexico to set up a printing shop to make Christian books in an attempt to convert the locals.

One of the first to understand the revolutionary significance of the new communications technology was Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti, who wrote in the 1460s: ‘we greatly approved the German inventor who in these times has made it possible, by certain pressings down of characters, to have more than two hundred volumes written out in a hundred days from an original, with the labour of no more than three men; for with only one downwards pressure a large sheet is written out’. The time- and labour-saving advantages of the new press were great. In 1483 the Ripoli Press charged only three times as much for setting up and printing a translation of Plato’s Dialogues as a scribe did for duplicating the same work. The press produced 1025 copies; the scribe produced one.

Naturally enough, the early printers could only see the printing press in terms of the existing scribal culture, as a means of reproducing manuscripts in greater quantities. In this spirit, they printed mostly religious works and Latin classics in large manuscript-sized formats and in small print runs of around 300 copies. But these printed ‘manuscripts’ struggled to find a market. In the commercial powerhouse of fifteenth-century Europe, Venice, the first printing house opened in the 1460s and by 1474 nine of Venice’s twelve printers had gone bust. Perhaps the new technology wasn’t commercially viable. The merchant bankers of Venice thought otherwise. They realised its commercial potential and came to the rescue of the new industry, investing the large sums required to kick-start the printing presses. To the merchants of Venice the printed book was not simply a tool of scholarship or the Church, but a commodity that could be sold like pepper, silk, wax and any other luxury good. The business of printing was born in Venice. By 1500, with more than 268 printing shops, Venice was the centre of the new communications technology. Books were published in runs of 1000 copies and their price had fallen to the equivalent of a teacher’s weekly salary.

In this new highly competitive world, to reduce costs and accelerate production the Venetian printing house of Aldus developed a small layout and compact typeface, now known as italic. In 1501 Aldus printed the works of Virgil in a brand new portable format: the octavo, a distinct departure from the earlier printed books, which had imitated beautiful, handwritten manuscripts. The Aldine octavo proved to be one of the most significant developments of the information revolution. Among other things, it allowed scholars to carry a travelling library in their saddlebags and ushered in a new era of scholarly cross-referencing and textual comparison, replacing the tendency of medieval scholars to devote their lives to the intense study of one particular manuscript. Eager to exploit his innovation, Aldus obtained from the Venetian Senate and then the pope an exclusive privilege to use his new typeface. With the printed book came the first attempts to assign literary properties in law, the concepts of plagiarism and copyright, and the idea of the author. (Before the printed book a ‘writer’ merely copied books.) Despite his exclusive rights, however, Aldus’s new type was pirated and his venture was not a commercial success. It turned out there were not enough literate people to absorb the flood of new reading material. In Venice alone between 1481 and 1501, two million volumes were produced. In these difficult early years of printing, booksellers who resisted the new technology and refused to sell printed books soon found themselves out of business, as happened to the leading Florentine manuscript book merchant Vespasiano da Bisticci in 1478.

During its first fifty years, the book became just one more commodity and travelled along the same trade routes as other consumer goods. New books were launched at the annual spring fair in Frankfurt and a book published in Rome in 1500 was available in England within weeks. The scholar Erasmus—who used the press to promote his own humanist agenda, drawn by the certainty the printing press offered for the first time in history of putting the exact same book in the hands of thousands of readers—was nevertheless scandalised by the fact that in their brief history the demand for printed books had transformed them into commercial products like any other and taken them beyond the control of scholars and teachers.

Others scandalised by the new communications technology included the Venetian priest Fra Filippo de Strata, who wanted books banned from the Venetian republic because he thought they encouraged immoral and profane behaviour: ‘This is what the printing presses do: they corrupt susceptible hearts.’ In 1471 the Italian scholar Niccolò Perotti wrote to a friend about ‘this new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany’: ‘Even when they write something worthwhile, they twist and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.’

In the commercial centre of Venice a German printer, Erhard Ratdolt, devised a method for reproducing in print tables of figures, charts and other mathematical symbols. His innovation was an advance of such magnitude that it ushered in the scientific revolution, commonly dated to 1543, the year two landmark science books were published: On the Structure of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius and Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies. Ratdolt’s first mathematics book, the geometry of Euclid, was printed in 1482—and soon mathematicians and scientists were using the printing press as zealously as the Church to spread their word, or figures. Along with works of ancient Greek science and mathematics, books explaining Arabic commercial mathematics for merchants appeared: commercial imperatives and practical necessity drove the early printing programs as much as the agenda of scholars and humanists. The author of Portugal’s first printed arithmetic of 1519 makes this clear: ‘I am printing this arithmetic because it is a thing so necessary in Portugal for transactions with the merchants of India, Persia, Arabia, Ethiopia, and other places discovered by us.’

The power of the printing press to spread identical copies of the same text and to reproduce accurately mathematical symbols for the first time dealt the final blow to the old roman numerals that had been used in Europe for more than 1500 years. Although the Hindu-Arabic numerals we use today had reached Europe by the thirteenth century, they not been widely adopted and indeed had been prohibited by the Church and the Florentine guild of moneychangers for their alleged ease of counterfeit. Only with the printing press did the agile new numerals—which could be used not only to record numbers but also to make mathematical calculations such as 1 + 1 = 2—finally replace the clumsy roman numerals, which could be used only for recording numbers, not for doing calculations (for which an abacus was used).

The rapid spread of Hindu-Arabic numerals through printed books and the printing of books in the vernacular marked the beginning of the demise of Latin as the lingua franca of Europe—and its gradual replacement by numbers and figures, the language of science, as the new truly universal language. For the first time, European mathematics moved beyond the realm of philosophical speculation and into the practical hands of merchants, artists, architects and the wider population. A new genre arrived with the printing press: the instruction book. No longer were trade practices kept shrouded in the secrecy of medieval guilds—instead they were published, in the vernacular, for all to read. The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein says of this new genre: ‘There is simply no equivalent in scribal culture for the “avalanche” of “how-to” books which poured off the printing presses, explaining by “easy steps” just how to master diverse skills, ranging from playing a musical instrument to keeping accounts.’[1] Textbook-writing became a profitable occupation. Students could teach themselves through books and their knowledge could reach beyond that of their teachers, they could excel their masters. As one author remarks: ‘Why should old men be preferred to their juniors now that it is possible for the young by diligent study to acquire the same knowledge?’

Printing not only brought the ascendency of scientific language and reasoning. More famously, it divided the Church and brought about the demise of divine revelation as the source of truth. Martin Luther’s protestant revolution was the first movement to use the press as a tool of propaganda against the establishment: ‘For the first time in human history a great reading public judged the validity of revolutionary ideas through a mass-medium which used the vernacular language together with the arts of the journalist and the cartoonist.’[2] Courtesy of the printing press, Luther’s Ninety-five Theses of 1517 spread throughout Europe in just four weeks, ‘as if the angels themselves had been their messengers and brought them before the eyes of all the people’. Luther himself was baffled by their rapid dissemination. He told the pope: ‘It is a mystery to me how my theses, more so than my other writings, indeed, those of other professors were spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our academic circle here.’

The proliferation of books altered the way people wrote. It launched a vernacular publishing program, including the publication of Bibles in languages other than Latin, such as the first English translation of the Bible made by William Tyndale in 1525 (he was burnt at the stake for his heresy). Printing in the vernacular made possible the standardisation of language and encouraged the idea of national identity based on a particular language.

In response to the multiplication of printed books with standardised images and ideal types—with illustrations of stereotypical regional dress or representations of the ideal prince, courtier, merchant, teacher—came a new form of literary individualism: the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. In 1572 Montaigne began to write about himself and thereby broke one of Europe’s ‘greatest taboos’. For the first time ever, a writer revealed his private, idiosyncratic self: ‘Here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion, without striving or artifice: for it is my own self that I am painting. Here, drawn from life, you will read of my defects and my native form.’ Montaigne established a new literary form in order to connect through his own vulnerability and imperfection with an unknown audience of readers. His essays were an unfixed work in progress. They were first published in 1580, revised, extended and republished in 1588, and Montaigne continued to rework them until his death in 1592.

Other authors similarly reached out to their new audiences, inviting suggestions and corrections from their readers in a new interactive form of creation. Readers of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas, sent him valuable information and maps of regions he didn’t cover. His atlas became a collaborative enterprise and in this spirit Ortelius acknowledged in his book his readers’ contribution. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume saw this as print’s most remarkable quality: ‘The Power which Printing gives us of continually improving and correcting our Works in successive Editions appears to me the chief advantage of that art’.[3]

These are some of the many unlikely repercussions of Gutenberg’s press. And we are living through a communications revolution that is greater than Gutenberg’s. Perhaps the internet will prove to be the new spiritual force of our times; perhaps the global community of interconnected humans will become a new being. In 2006 the Church of Google was founded:

We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google’s divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods. We reject supernatural gods on the notion they are not scientifically provable. Thus, Googlists believe Google should rightly be given the title of “God”, as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a scientifically proven manner.

The Church of Google has even compiled a list of nine proofs ‘which definitively prove Google is the closest thing to a “god” human beings have every directly experienced’.[4]

When Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the church door it was not a revolutionary action: ‘It was entirely conventional for professors of theology to hold disputations over an issue such as indulgences’ and ‘church doors were the customary place for medieval publicity’.[5] But Luther’s theses went beyond the church door. Might blogging do for women what the printing press did for Luther—take their talk beyond its traditional, circumscribed realm? In America, 42 million women blog, tweet and update their social networks every week. ‘The cliché is that blogs are little more than an online diary, but scratch around most blogs and you’ll find women want change,’ says Julie Power, a blogger at MomstoWork.com. Activist Gloria Feldt, who took up blogging after thirty years lobbying for women’s reproductive rights, says ‘Women bloggers have so much power … At last I could say what I wanted to say.’ The Bahrain blogger Esra’a al-Shafei says the goal of her blog is ‘to piss off as many dictators as possible’. Through blogging and tweeting, Australian blogger Mia Freedman forced the clothing company Cotton On to withdraw baby clothes with slogans such as ‘I’m a tits man’, ‘F**k the milk, where’s the whiskey’ and ‘They shake me’. The company apologised and withdrew the T-shirts with the offending slogans, promising to review its range ‘to ensure no reference is made to categories pertaining to sexually explicit behaviour, child abuse, drugs and profanity’.

So, what happens when a new technology threatens to steal the powers of books as we know them? Elizabeth Eisenstein gives the best answer to this question in concluding her history of the printing revolution: ‘Few, if any, of the changes we have outlined could have been predicted. Even with hindsight, they are difficult to describe.’[6]

Notes
1. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979, p.88. Back to article

2. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.164. Back to article

3. Eisenstein, The Printing Press, p.77. Back to article

4. www.thechurchofgoogle.org Back to article

5. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution, p.168. Back to article

6. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution, p.275. Back to article