“The victory of the punch cutter over the scribe” (Einsenstein 236)
Shift in book production centres: From monasteries (rural) to universities attached to cathedral (urban & religious), to trade centres & book fairs (urban & commercial)
Capitalist venture: “The invention of printing was not the work of scholars. Scholars in the fifteenth century had all the books they needed: their attention was directed to the borrowing, copying and bargaining necessary to obtain more texts. It required hard, practical men, often men of little education, to see the potential of a new method of copying that would bring many hundreds of texts simultaneously to the marketplace.” (Pettegree. 20).
Evolution or revolution? “Unknown anywhere in Europe before the mid-fifteenth century, printers’ workshops would be found in every important municipal center by 1500” (Eisenstein 232).
“The invention of printing with movable type, which took place in Mainz in the middle of the fifteenth century, is one of the few instances where we can pinpoint a dramatic acceleration in the slow evolutionary process of the history of script” (Hellinga 207).
Incunabula identical to manuscripts: “These first printed books … so closely resemble … manuscript books as to be virtually indistinguishable to the unpracticed eye. Clearly the printer’s technical, aesthetic, and commercial aim was to reproduce exactly the handwritten manuscript. And they did not do so merely through inertia or in order to give their customers a familiar product; the practice suggests rather that the earliest printers had no conception of the unique potentialities of their invention, that they considered printing only a new and particular kind of writing […] and … what they had to sell consisted simply of less expensive manuscripts in greater numbers. Their difficulty in freeing themselves from traditional conceptions is explained by the fact that although typography was the greatest invention of the Renaissance its earliest development was shaped almost exclusively by clerical tastes and need” (Rice & Grafton 4-5).
Irony: “The absence of any apparent change in product was combined with a complete change in methods of production…” (Eisenstein 236).
Growth: Within a generation, the preparation of a book had moved away from fidelity to scribal conventions and toward serving the convenience of the reader” (Eisenstein 236).
“Early printed books, like manuscripts, usually did not have page numbers–the reader was expected to add these by hand” (Lyons 75).
Fixity: “'[T]ypographical fixity’ involved ‘the ability of printed books to give to the words and ideas they print a substantial and durable form, and to amplify this objectified verbal reality by the distribution of numerous identical copies of the same organisation of words on the page’” (Kernan 53 in Finkelstein & McCleery. 18).
Research & communication: “A codex provides not merely a narrative but a research resource” (Pettegree 5)
Simultaneous consultation and comparison: “The fact that identical images, maps and diagrams could be viewed simultaneously by scattered readers constituted a kind of communication revolution in itself” (Eisenstein 236)
Consequence: “An elite society gave way to a mass society” (Febvre & Martin 11).
“[Printing] was something more than a triumph in technical ingenuity … [it] was also one of the most potent agents at the disposal of western civilizations in bringing together the scattered ideas of representative thinkers. It rendered vital service to research by immediately transmitting results from one researcher to another; and speedily and conveniently, without laborious effort or unsupportable cost, it assembled permanently the works of the most sublime creative spirits in all fields [….] By doing so, it gave their ideas a new lease on life and endowed them with unparalleled strength and vigour. They came to have a new kind of coherence, and by the same token, an incomparable power for both transformation and propagation. Fresh concepts crossed whole regions of the globe in the very shortest time [….] The book created new habits of thought not only within the small circle of the learned, but far beyond, in the intellectual life of all who used their minds” (Febvre & Martin 11).
Social class: “Stereotyping [making a solid plate of a page from a mold of the original typecast] of created substantial profit incentives for reprinting many old and obsolete titles. In London, a virtual cartel of publishers produced and reproduced old titles for the cheap end of the market. As a result, ordinary readers were fed not the exciting romantic writers who were at the cutting edge, but the “old canon” of Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Spenser, Defoe and Goldsmith. This created a two-tier book market. Wealthy readers demanded new, more expensive works, but less well-off readers were sold cheap reprints of in controversial pre-Enlightenment worthies” (Lyons 106).
Entertainment: “The fragmentary survival of popular texts, later known as chapbooks, suggests that by the 1490s they were already known as a cheap source of entertainment” (Hellinga 216).
Birth of marketing: “selling books, printers discovered, takes as much ingenuity as printing them (Hellinga 217).
McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. The invention of movable type transformed a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. “A translation of sound into a visual code (1962: 22). Moreover, printing “split apart thought and action” (1962: 22).
Bibliography
Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The impact of Printing 1450-1800. [1958 French version, 1976] 1997.
Finkelstein, David, and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to the History of the Book. 2012.
Hellinga, Lotte. “The Gutenberg Revolutions.” Companion 207-218.
Lyons, Martin. Books: a Living History. 2011.
Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. 2011.
Rice, Eugene F. Jr. & Anthony Grafton. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. 2nd ed. 1994.