The history of printing pre-dates Johann Gutenberg but few know the details of how printing came to be. I came upon a 1999 book that gives insight about how printing came to be, A Short history of the Printed Word, 2nd Edition by Warren Chappel and Robert Bringhurst. It makes clear the evolution, development, and significance of the printed word.
"The
lucid and lively narrative is interspersed with more than 200 illustrations of
calligraphy, typefaces, and pages from the greatest books ever printed, as well
as presses and workshops," asserts the back cover copy. "The authors take the reader through the evolution of
the printing press. They explore the
contributions of the great printers and typographers, from Gutenberg to Goudy,
and investigate the complex interaction between the creation of moveable type
and the societies it reflected and influenced."
I leave you with selected excerpts that are of particular interest to me:
I leave you with selected excerpts that are of particular interest to me:
A Millennium
Of Printing
For nearly ten centuries, typographic printing has been a force of
immense importance. By typographic printing I mean impressions from
master sets of characters accurately composed into words, lines and
pages. Such printing has been the tool of learning, the preserver of
knowledge and the medium of literature. Until the electronic age, it was
the great means of communication over distances in space. It remains the
greatest means of communication across time. The press has also become and
remained a symbol of freedom, defended in Milton’s Areopagitica and protected
in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Despite the press’s role in the spread of
commercial propaganda and other forms of information pollution, and its
widespread use for the manufacture of mass opinion in place of individual
thought, freedom of the press remains a vital fact or aspiration in most
societies of the world.
Apart from its importance as a means of communication, printing
has had, and continues to have, an impressive life as an art and craft. On the
lowest level there is a childlike pleasure to be derived from stamping and
duplicating, not greatly removed from the delight of making mud pies. On the
highest level – that of the best composition and presswork – printing affords
the artist the many and varied satisfactions of meaningful texture and form.
Printing Prior to Gutenberg
Everyone, it seems, has heard of
Johann Gutenberg, even if not everyone knows that he was born in Mainz circa
1394 and died in 1468. Many people know that Gutenberg printed a Bible,
and many people know, or think they know, that he invented the process of
printing from movable type. In fact, there are many books still in existence
that were printed from movable type in China and Korea before Gutenberg was
born.
The Benchmarks Of Printing
What are the benchmarks that can serve as
references and guides in tracing the history of printing? I would put
first an understanding of the alphabet,
and an appreciation of its practical as well as its aesthetic aspects. Second,
a regard for the sculptural
nature of type as it was
produced first in eleventh-century China and then by European punchcutters of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As the third and fourth benchmarks I
would suggest awareness of the
arrangement of type and the actual impression from it. These four together
determine the form and texture of a piece of printing, and are outside the time
flow of people, places, events, developments and dates. It is possible to put
the best piece of contemporary printing beside a page of the Gutenberg Bible,
and to compare the two without asking the slightest concession for the older
piece, on either aesthetic or technical grounds, though it was made 550 years
ago. The best of the old books, like the best of the old paintings, are that
good.
Digital Vs. Print
It is possible that printed books as
repositories of human experience and creativity may in time be overshadowed or
even replaced by digital replicas. Once made, such replicas are very
quickly copied and easily stored in a small space – but they cannot be read
without a prosthesis. They are invisible and useless without the intervention
of an exceedingly complex, electrically powered machine. Such a scheme
may look good to accountants and to marketers. But for authors and for
readers, there can be no substitute for a well-designed, well-printed,
well-bound book that one can see and feel as well as read. A tangible,
stable, well-made page is just as desirable, and just as useful, now as it was
in the fifteenth century.
Handmade Books
Most readers nowadays, alas, have never touched nor even seen a book
made by hand from handmade materials. That means most readers have never
encountered a book made to be read with the whole sensorium. The books of
trade and academic publishers are as a rule now designed for the eye alone –
and often for an inattentive eye that looks no further than the jacket. Trade
books that are designed with care and imagination are prone to overdo the
visual element, because when books are manufactured by an automated process
from machine-made paper, chopped into pages and bound with a strip of glue, the
visual is the only element
left. This accounts for a curious paradox: some of the
best-designed trade and academic books of recent years are also some of the
worst designed.
The Cultural Importance Of Small
Publishers
In recent years, software
engineering has placed typesetting capability – and even typefounding capability – into the hands of any
author who desires it. Freedom to publish is also now, in many countries,
almost absolute. Yet in the English-speaking world, the printing,
publishing and marketing of books is largely in the hands of a few gigantic
firms. Oddly, these are not firms for whom books and publishing as such
are primary interests. The companies most prominent in publishing are
owned by other companies and managed as a consequence by persons whose
profession is not publishing but managing. A publisher’s goals are, as a rule,
to contribute to the culture by publishing good books, to enjoy the many
pleasures of a literary life, and to make a little money in the process.
A manager’s goals, as a rule, are maximum market penetration, maximum market
share, and maximum profit. These aims are not quite diametrically opposed, but
they are different enough that, through their interaction, the face of publishing
has changed.
To publish has traditionally meant – and to most publishers still
means – to make public, on
the simple understanding that what is openly known and valued has its own life
and its own chance for a future. That is all the immortality culture can
provide. To publish is not to preach, nor even to publicize, though both
those things may also be involved. But when its public spirit is withdrawn, publishing becomes
another enterprise and needs another name.
Great books still come from the largest houses, but there is ample
proof that publishing, like writing, is done best by those for whom a book is
something more than just a marketable product, and by those for whom the
beating of the heart and the singing of ideas are sweeter than the sweetest purr
of money. As larger publishers have lost their independence, smaller publishers
have grown substantially in cultural importance. Many of the finest trade
books issued in North America in the past quarter century have come from very
modest operations.
To learn more on how to promote books, read my greatest blog posts from the past five years and 2,000 posts:
2016 Book Marketing & Book Publicity Toolkit
2015 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit
2014 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit
Book Marketing & Book PR Toolkit: 2013
Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016.
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