Throughout
The Written World, Martin Puchner’s insightful narrative also chronicles the inventions – writing technologies, the
printing press, the book itself – that have shaped world religion, global politics,
commerce, people, and history. Here are some excerpts:
1. "Paper
made a difference. Previously, texts in
China were written on bones, strips of bamboo, or silk, all either cumbersome
or expensive. Paper, by contrast, was
cheap yet durable, so that written matter could be efficiently stored and
preserved. Its smooth surface and
thinness allowed much more information to be condensed into a small space,
making it feasible to keep extensive records, which laid the foundation for
sophisticated bureaucracies. It was also
easy to transport; indeed, some of the Chinese texts in the Caves of the Thousand
Buddhas had come from more than a thousand miles away."
2. "Gutenberg
was not the first to think of using movable letters and combining them to form
pages that could be printed. Just as
with the pilgrim’s mirror, others had done so before him. He had long known
about the relatively simple technique of carving images into wood and using
them like stamps to make copies, as was routinely done in making playing
cards. As long as one didn’t care too
much about quality, the same could be done with words. Small booklets had been made this way, with awkward
wooden letters allowing readers to decipher the printed words with some
difficulty.
"This
woodblock technique had come from the Far East via the Silk Road, which
connected China to the Mongols and Uighurs, who in turn maintained trade with
faraway Constantinople and thus indirectly with the rest of Europe. In Mainz, known for long-distance trade,
Gutenberg was also in a good position to hear rumors that the Chinese were now
producing printed books not just by carving text page by page onto whole blocks,
but also by making individual letters and then assembling them to form
sentences. Such letters were sometimes
made of harder, more precise materials, including ceramic and metal alloys."
3. "The
most ferocious reactionary was an Austrian by the name of Adolf Hitler, who
promised to put an end to the red tide sweeping Europe. While imprisoned for a failed coup in 1923,
he wrote an autobiography that was also a campaign biography for his future
political career. Once he had seized
power, he was able to foist this text on his subjects in a gigantic vanity
publishing project. At the height of
Nazi rule, Mein Kampf became the most
widely owned book in Germany, going through 1,031 editions totaling 12.4
million copies; every sixth German possessed a copy of Mein Kampf, with counties required to give a copy to all newlyweds."
4. "Just
as The Communist Manifesto had been
catapulted to the forefront of history by the Russian Revolution, so its
prestige has suffered since the fall of the Soviet Union. Today it is once again considered outdated,
as it was in the 1850s and ‘60s. In the past, the Manifesto has been able to rise again from obscurity, adjusting to
new political realities. Even now, it is finding readers who feel that this
text predicted our current backlash against globalization. Be this as it may, what is certain is that The Communist Manifesto became one of
the most influential texts of the modern era within a few decades of its
emergence. In the first four thousand years of literature, few texts have been
able to shape the history so effectively."
5. "The
beginnings of the Nobel Prize had been much more modest. It had been endowed by
a Swedish weapons manufacturer and inventor of dynamite who was hoping to leave
a legacy in the sciences and the arts. The Swedish Academy, the body
responsible for the prize, at first chose many writers who did not stand the
test of time. But thanks to a generous
endowment and increasing experience, the academy developed ways of avoiding the
more blatant types of favoritism as well as other pitfalls and managed to
establish its prize as the single most important one in the world."
6. "The
most striking feature of literature has always been its ability to project
speech deep into space and time. The
Internet has supercharged the first, enabling us to send writing to any place
on earth within seconds. But what about
time? As I started using the last four thousand
years of literature as a guide to the changes taking place around me, I began
to imagine literary archaeologists of the future. Will they be able to unearth forgotten
masterpieces such as the Epic of
Gilgamesh?
"The
answer is far from certain. The endurance of electronic media over time has
already emerged as a problem because of the rapid obsolescence of computer
programs and formats. If we are lucky,
future historians will be able to transcode outdated data sets or reconstruct
old computers to access otherwise illegible files (must as the cuneiform code
had to be reconstructed in the nineteenth century). Librarians warn that the best way to preserve
writing from the vagaries of future format wars is to print out everything on
paper. Perhaps we should carve our
canons into stone, as Chinese emperors did.
But the most important lesson from the history of literature is that the
only guarantee for survival is continual use:
A text needs to remain relevant enough to be translated, transcribed,
transcoded, and read by each generation in order to persist over time. It is education, not technology, that will
ensure the future of literature."
7. "No
matter what future historians will find, they will understand better than we do
just how transformative our current writing revolution will have been. What we can say for sure is that the world
population has grown even as literacy rates have risen sharply which means that
infinitely more writing is being done by more people, and published and read
more widely, than ever before. We stand
on the verge of a second great explosion – the written world is poised to
change yet again."
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