Five Hundred Years of Printing

work.

Introduction

Discourse was deemed man’s noblest attribute, And written words the glory of his hand. Then followed printing with enlarged command For thought – dominion vast and absolute For spreading truth and making love expand.

WORDSWORTH

THE history of printing is an integral part of the general history of civilization. The principal vehicle for the conveyance of ideas during the past five hundred years, printing touches upon, and often penetrates, almost every sphere of human activity. Neither political, constitutional, ecclesiastical, and economic events, nor sociological, philosophical, and literary movements can be fully understood without taking into account the influence which the printing press has exerted upon them. As a business proposition the printing trade has its share in the economic development of all other branches of industry and commerce. Being based on a technical process, it is closely linked up with the growth of the applied sciences. The history of printing types is but a side-issue. That is to say, the change of type-faces must be traced back to new needs necessitated, or new possibilities opened, by technical improvements; to commercial considerations on the part of printers or publishers; or, lastly, to sociological changes, including those of taste and fashion, on the part of the reading public.

As ‘adventure and art’ Gutenberg described his epoch-making invention in 1439; and ‘adventure and art’ have ever since remained the characteristic features of the printed book. from its inception in the mind of the author to the finished product in the bookseller’s shop and on the book-lover’s shelves.

The history of printing from movable types can roughly be divided into the following periods: (1) 1450–1550, the creative century, which witnessed the invention and beginnings of practically every single feature that characterizes the modern printing piece; (2) 1550–1800, the era of consolidation which developed and refined the achievements of the preceding period in a predominantly conservative spirit; (3) 1800 to the present, the period of tremendous technical advances, which has radically changed the methods of production and distribution as well as the habits of producers and readers.

Chapter One

THE FIRST CENTURY OF PRINTING

1450–1550

1. THE INCUNABULA PERIOD

ALL historical periods are makeshift expedients: people did not go to bed in the Middle Ages and wake up in modern times. Few of these arbitrary breaks, however, can have been more detrimental to a real understanding of an important section of human progress than the restriction of the term incunabula to the time from Gutenberg’s first production to 31 December 1500. This date cuts right across the most fertile period of the new art, halving the lives of some of its greatest practitioners such as Anton Koberger (1450–1513), Aldus Manutius (1450–1515), Anthoine Vérard (d. 1512), Johannes Froben (1460–1527), Henri Estienne (1460–1520), and Geofroy Tory (1480–1533).

The word incunabula was first used in connexion with printing by Bernard von Mallinckrodt, dean of Münster cathedral, in a tract, De ortu et progressu artis typographicae (Cologne, 1639), which he contributed to the celebration of the second centenary of Gutenberg’s invention. Here he describes the period from Gutenberg to 1500 as ‘prima typographiae incunabula’, the time when typography was in its swaddling-clothes. The French Jesuit, Philippe Labbé, in his Nova bibliotheca librorum manuscriptorum (1653), already equated the word incunabula with ‘period of early printing up to 1500’. In the course of the eighteenth century men whose Latin was considerably shakier applied the term to the books printed during this period, and nineteenth-century writers with no Latin at all eventually coined the singular ‘Inkunabel’, ‘incunable’, ‘incunabulum’, to denote the individual item that emanated from the printing presses of the fifteenth century.

The delimitation of the incunabula period has made research workers everywhere concentrate on the fifteenth century to the grievous neglect of the early sixteenth century. Thus the impression has been created that the turn of the century signified the end of one and the beginning of another era in the history of printing, publishing, and the trade in general. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

The main characteristics which make a unit of the second half of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries are these: the functions of typefounder, printer, publisher, editor, and bookseller are little differentiated; the same man or the same firm usually combines all or most of these crafts or professions. Claude Garamond of Paris (d. 1561) and Jacob Sabon of Lyons and (from 1571) Frankfurt were the first to separate type-designing, punch-cutting, and type-founding from printing, while Robert Estienne (d. 1559) consummated the era of the great printer-scholars. Moreover, by 1540 printing and publishing had barely outgrown the restlessness of the early practitioners to whom knowledge of the craft and an adventurous spirit had sufficed to set up shop anywhere and to move about with the ease permitted by a small equipment and a smaller purse. The number of printers is increasing, but the day of the small, itinerant man is past. Printing, publishing, and bookselling had become established industries requiring stability and capital and foresight. The German Diet of 1570 only tried (in vain, of course) to put into a legal straitjacket what had become an economic fact when it limited the setting up of printing presses to the capitals of princely states, university towns, and the larger imperial cities, and ordered all other printing establishments to be suppressed. For by this time, business concentration had advanced so far that the French book-trade can almost be equated to that of Paris, Lyons, and Geneva; the Italian to that of Venice, Rome, and Florence; that of the Low Countries to Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Leiden, while the edict of the German Diet faithfully reflects the conditions prevailing in the Holy Roman empire.

From the typographical point of view, too, the first half of the sixteenth century is still part and parcel of the creative ‘incunabula’ period, with its wealth of different types. The italics of Antonio Blado and the roman letters of Claude Garamond – both cut about 1540 – still show the forceful imagination of the pioneer type-designers. From that time onward experiments with new types were rather frowned upon: for instance, the excellent cursive gothic which Joachim Louw cut in Hamburg about 1550 came too late to find acceptance, so that every gothic type-face has been confined to one set of letters – a contributory factor for its disappearance in favour of ‘Latin’ faces with their ‘roman’ and ‘italic’ alternatives.

In the middle of the sixteenth century the geography of printing also underwent a change. Both Germany and Italy ceased to be of much importance in the printing and publishing world. At the same time France entered upon her heyday of fine printing and publishing; and Christophe Plantin, a Frenchman by birth, inaugurated the golden age of Netherlands book production. The Charter granted to the Stationers’ Company in London 1557 may be taken as an outward sign that by then the shades of restrictive planning had fallen across the path of hitherto unfettered expansion.

2. GUTENBERG

THE available evidence about the invention of printing with movable types cast from matrices is unfortunately less conclusive than might be wished; but the following facts may be considered well established.

Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg (born between 1394 and 1399), a Mainz goldsmith of a patrician family, began experimenting with printing work towards 1440 when he was a political exile at Strasbourg. At that time other people too were engaged in discovering some method of producing an ‘artificial script’ as it was called. Avignon, Bruges, and Bologna are mentioned as places where such experiments were carried out, and the names of a goldsmith and a book-illuminator are extant who thus tried their hands. The general climate of the age was undoubtedly propitious for Gutenberg’s achievement. He returned to Mainz between 1444 and 1448 and by 1450 had perfected his invention far enough to exploit it commercially. For this purpose he borrowed 800 guilders from the Mainz lawyer, Johannes Fust. In 1452 Fust advanced another 800 guilders and at the same time secured for himself a partnership in the ‘production of books’. In 1455, however, the financier foreclosed upon the inventor. The bulk of Gutenberg’s presses and types went to Peter Schöffer of Gernsheim, who was in Fust’s service and later married his daughter (and her dowry). Another printer of unknown name obtained a number of inferior types with which he printed calendars, papal bulls, Latin grammars, and the like. Gutenberg himself seems to have saved very little from the wreck of his fortune – perhaps only the type in which the 42-line and 36-line Bibles and the Catholicon were printed.

The Catholicon, compiled by Johannes Balbus of Genoa in the thirteenth century, deserves mention for three reasons. Its type is about a third smaller than that of the 42-line Bible; it is therefore considerably more economical and thus marks an important step towards varying as well as cheapening book-production by the careful choice of type. Secondly, the Catholicon was a popular encyclopaedia, and with its publication Gutenberg pointed the way towards a main achievement of the art of printing, namely the spread of knowledge. Lastly, the book contains a colophon which it is difficult to believe to have been written by anybody but the inventor of printing himself. It therefore affords the solitary, precious glimpse of Gutenberg’s mind; it reads:

With the help of the Most High at whose will the tongues of infants become eloquent and who often reveals to the lowly what he hides from the wise, this noble book Catholicon has been printed and accomplished without the help of reed, stylus or pen but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types, in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 1460 in the notable city of Mainz of the renowned German nation, which God’s grace has deigned to prefer and distinguish above all other nations of the earth with so lofty a genius and liberal gifts. Therefore all praise and honour be offered to thee, holy Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God in three persons; and thou, Catholicon, resound the glory of the church and never cease praising the Holy Virgin. Thanks be to God.

After 1460 Gutenberg seems to have abandoned printing – possibly because of blindness. He suffered further loss in the sack of Mainz in 1462 but received a kind of pension from the archbishop in 1465. He died on 3 February 1468 and was buried in the Franciscan church which was pulled down in 1742. A humanist relation later dedicated an epitaph ‘to the immortal memory of Johannes Gensfleisch, the inventor of the art of printing, who has deserved well of every nation and language’.

Only one major work can confidently be called a product of Gutenberg’s own workshop – the 42-line Bible which was set up from 1452 and published before August 1456. Moreover, there is no doubt that Peter Schöffer was superior to Gutenberg as a typographer and printer; the quality of his work made amends for the equivocal practices which made him reap where he had not sown.

What is perhaps Gutenberg’s greatest claim to fame is the fact that, after the early experimental stage of which we know nothing, he reached a state of technical efficiency not materially surpassed until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Punch-cutting, matrix-fitting, type-casting, composing, and printing remained, in principle, for more than three centuries where they were in Gutenberg’s time. Some remarkable technical improvements of the press made by Leonardo da Vinci remained in the drawing-board stage and were never put to the test. The only advance of any significance was made about 1620 by the Dutchman, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, who somewhat extended the efficiency and printing area of the screw-and-lever press; but no journeyman of Gutenberg and Schöffer would have found any difficulty in operating Blaeu’s press which, moreover, never became widely known. Until the end of the eighteenth century Gutenberg’s original design was still regarded as the ‘common’ press.

To nine out of every ten readers the sentence that ‘Gutenberg invented printing’ is a shortened form of ‘Gutenberg invented the printing of books’. The inevitable association of Gutenberg’s name with the 42-line Bible tends to strengthen this fallacy. For it is not – certainly not primarily – the mechanical production of books which has made Gutenberg’s invention a turning point in the history of civilization.

Books were printed before Gutenberg, and there is no reason why printing from wood-blocks, engraved metal plates, drawings or photographs on stone, and other media should not have gone on with ever greater refinement – as it has actually done. The books ‘printed’ by William Blake and photo-composition come readily to mind as examples of printing without movable types. What was epoch-making in Gutenberg’s process was the possibility of editing, sub-editing, and correcting a text which was identical in every copy: in other words, the uniform edition preceded by critical proof-reading. The identity of each copy of each edition extends even to the misprints which, in turn, can be atoned for by identical ‘errata’ slips.

Moreover, it was not the production of books that was revolutionized by the use of movable types or its application to the machine-made edition. In fact, printed books were at first hardly distinguishable from manuscripts, and the title-page is virtually the one feature which printers have added to the products of the scribes – and one which scribes, too, would sooner or later have hit upon, as did Vespasiano da Bisticci. It is in two vastly different spheres that Gutenberg has changed the aspect of reading matter in its widest sense. When he and Fust preceded and accompanied their great adventure of book-printing with the issue of indulgences, calendars, and pamphlets on ephemeral topics, the proto-typographers created what came to be known as job-printing. With it they laid the foundations of modern publicity through the printed word, which is dependent on the identical mass-production of freely combinable letter-units in almost infinite variety of composition – the very characteristics of Gutenberg’s invention.

At the same time, when Gutenberg made it feasible to put on the market a large number of identical copies at any given time, he thereby foreshadowed the possibility of ever increasing the number of copies and ever reducing the length of time needed for their issue. The principle once established, it was a matter of technical progress to develop the turning out of ten thousand identical indulgences within a month into the turning out of a million identical newspapers within a few hours. Thus Gutenberg can also be acclaimed as the progenitor of the periodical press.

Again, while it is easy to say that ‘Gutenberg invented printing’, it requires a long treatise to say what actually constituted Gutenberg’s ‘invention’. Down to Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, that is to say, for 250 years, the literary allusions to the ‘mystery’ are vague or ambiguous, and the representations of printers at work are pictorial rather than technical. The only tangible sources therefore are the products of Gutenberg’s press, from which the process by which he achieved them must be inferred.

In order to remove popular misunderstandings, we may perhaps proceed by a series of negative propositions.

Gutenberg was not the first to grasp the need for, and the potentialities of, large-scale production of literature. On the contrary, his invention was largely prompted by the fact that the multiplication of texts was not only a general want but had, by the middle of the fifteenth century, become a recognized and lucrative trade. Professional scribes catered for the wealthy collector of classical manuscripts as well as for the poor student who needed his legal and theological handbooks. The Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci employed up to fifty scribes at a time; in the university towns, of which Paris was the most important, the copyists of learned texts were numerous enough to form themselves into guilds. The religious congregation of the Brethren of the Common Life in Deventer specialized in copying philosophical and theological books for which they established a market all over northern Europe. Diebold Lauber ran a veritable ‘book factory’ in the Alsatian town of Hagenau; he, like any later publisher, produced books for the open market; ‘light reading’ was Lauber’s speciality, and illustrations, also produced by rote, added to the popular appeal.

Nor was ‘printing’ from a negative relief a new invention. The Chinese had practised it for about a thousand years (the legendary date of its inception is A.D. 594), and their method of rubbing off impressions from a wood-block had spread along the caravan routes to the west, where block-prints and block-books were well known at the time of Gutenberg.

From China, too, had come the invention of paper, which was to prove the ideal surface for printing. Vellum, it is true, was and still is occasionally used for luxury printing; but paper had, and has, the advantage over vellum of being available in virtually unlimited quantities and thus allows mass-production which is the distinguishing feature of printing.

Again, Gutenberg followed precedent when he replaced wood by metal, and the block by the individual letter. In this respect he stood in the tradition of his own trade of goldsmith, for goldsmiths and kindred artisans had always cut punches for their trade-marks or the lettering with which they struck inscriptions on cups, bells, and other metalware.

Gutenberg also found at hand an instrument suitable for compressing and flattening a moist and pliable substance (such as printing paper), namely the winepress which the Romans had introduced in his native Rhineland a thousand years earlier.

Gutenberg’s achievement, then, lies first in the scientific synthesis of all these different trends and trials. He fulfilled the need of the age for more and cheaper reading matter by substituting machinery for handicraft. Drawing upon the technical experience of the writing-master, the wood-engraver, and the metal-worker, he produced movable types which could be combined at will. Here at last comes the point where we can speak of at least two genuine ‘inventions’ made by Gutenberg. Types had to be available in large numbers even for the setting of a single sheet; they would be required by the thousand for the composition of a whole book. How could they be multiplied from the one model produced by the letter-designer and punch-cutter? Gutenberg overcame this difficulty by applying the principle of replica-casting. A single letter, engraved in relief and struck or sunk into a slab of brass, would provide the intaglio or ‘matrix’ (female die) of that letter in reverse; from this matrix any number of mechanical replicas of that letter could be cast by pouring molten lead into it. The replica-letters, the types, had to be cast with a long enough shank to permit finger and thumb to grasp them securely while they were being fitted together into words and lines. Whatever character was being cast, this shank or ‘body’ had to be of precisely the same length so that the composed lines and columns of type, standing on the level bed of the press, would present a uniformly flat printing surface. It is not certain how far Gutenberg himself developed the principle of the typecaster’s ‘mould’ – the instrument of which the two interlocking parts provide an orifice roughly an inch deep, sealed at one end by the intaglio matrix, open at the other end for the molten metal, and adjustable to any specific width of letter from broad W to narrow 1. Tradition assigns its invention to Schöffer. But Gutenberg, before he arrived in Mainz and joined forces with Fust and Schöffer, must have worked out some practicable method of replica-casting from matrices unlimited quantities of metal types that would combine in optical alignment to create a flat composite printing surface. In doing so he had not only established the main principle of letterpress printing but also introduced to Europe, more than three centuries ahead of its general adoption by industry, the ‘theory of interchangeable parts’ which is the basis of modern mass-manufacturing technique.

Gutenberg’s second invention, without which printing as we understand it would have been impossible, was the preparation of an ink which would adhere to the metal types and therefore had to have chemical properties very different from those of the ink with which impressions were taken from wood-blocks.

The details by which the Rhenish vintners’ winepress was transformed into a printing press cannot be reconstructed with certainty. The first circumstantial report on the art of printing, which Koelhoff embodied in his Chronicle of Cologne (1499), pays scant attention to technicalities. Dürer’s drawing of 1511, one of the earliest views, is not considered by technical experts to be quite accurate. In any case, a description of the primitive printing press would be of little interest to the layman. For while the productions of the early presses are still living objects of pleasure and instruction, the wooden screw-and-lever press has become a museum piece. Suffice it to say that Gutenberg’s kind of press remained in use without any very radical improvement for more than three centuries. To modern eyes, accustomed to the sight of power-driven printing machines, it seems a slow and cumbersome instrument. Its working required a great amount of muscular force; the pull and weight of the machine made presswork toilsome; the area of the forme was very small and so necessitated repeated readjustments of the sheets. But it sufficed for its day, and for the then limited section of the public that could read its product.

However, as these very products continuously enlarged the number of literate people, the old press eventually became incapable of coping with the demand it had created. It thus was the principal agent in superseding itself.

3. TYPE-DESIGN

WITHIN fifteen years after Gutenberg’s death in 1468 printing presses had been set up in every country of western Christendom from Sweden to Sicily and from Spain to Poland and Hungary. A generation later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the western comity of nations had made up their minds as to the outward form in which they wanted to have printing matter presented to them. Whereas it is possible to examine country by country the intellectual contributions made to European civilization by the printers of each nation, the development of type-design was intrinsically a supra-national affair and shall therefore be surveyed briefly in chronological order.

It was the penetration of western Europe by the spirit of humanism that brought about the victory of ‘roman’ and ‘italic’ types; and it was the resistance to the spirit of humanism that made the Germans, Russians, and Turks cling to the isolationism of the Fraktur, Cyrillic, and Arabic types. The recent transition to the ‘Latin’ alphabet by the Germans and Turks is a major step towards the unity of world civilization; just as the refusal of post-Lenin Russia to abandon the Cyrillic letter – nay, its progressive imposition on the Soviet colonials – is a significant omen of the deep cleavage between East and West.

In outward appearance the books printed between 1450 and 1480 are almost indistinguishable from contemporary manuscripts. The printers took over virtually the whole range of scripts used in mid-fifteenth-century Europe: the textura of liturgical works, the bastarda of legal texts, the rotunda and gothico-antiqua, both Italian compromises between Carolingian and late-medieval scripts, the formal lettera antica and the cursive cancelleresca favoured by Italian humanists, and so on. Neither manuscript nor printed book had a title-page or page-numbers; when coloured initials and other illustrations were wanted, they had to be inserted by a specialist other than the scribe or printer. The same material, from the roughest to the finest paper and from the coarsest to the smoothest parchment, was used for the same sizes which had become fairly settled, with quarto and folio easily leading.

Why did the printers thus follow so closely the scribes? It is sometimes said that they wished to deceive the public by making their ‘substitute’ look as near as possible like the ‘real’ thing. The true explanation, however, is to be found in the attitude of the consumer rather than the producer. Extreme conservatism as to the presentation of reading matter has always been the outstanding characteristic of the reading public. ‘The typography of books requires an obedience to convention which is almost absolute’; and ‘for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty’ – these are amongst the ‘first principles of typography’ as abstracted by Stanley Morison from the study of five centuries of printing. The same rules apply to the shape of individual letters and to the look of a whole page or an opening. William Morris would have been deeply mortified, had he but known it, that a contemporary of Gutenberg or Caxton would hardly have recognized a product of the Kelmscott Press as a ‘book’ but more likely have marvelled at it as a kind of purposeless curio. A book which, in some way or other, is ‘different’, ceases to be a book and becomes a collector’s piece or museum exhibit, to be looked at, perhaps admired, but certainly left unread: the fate of virtually all productions of ‘private presses’.

The incunabula printers were artisans and craftsmen, without any of the arty-crafty ambitions or illusions that haunted English, French, and German ‘reformers’ from 1880 to 1910. In other words, while they were proud – and justifiably proud – of the quality of their handiwork, they had to make their living by it and therefore sell goods which their customers would be willing to buy. The regularity of each letter, the compactness of each line, the closely woven pattern of each page, comparable to a latticed gothic window or an oriental carpet – these rather than clarity and legibility were the effects a well-trained scribe sought to produce. The printer unhesitatingly accepted this convention. The lawyer who needed a copy of the Decretals knew exactly what the Decretals ought to look like because he had handled it all his life. Richel’s, Wenssler’s, Koberger’s, or Griininger’s editions, with the commentary printed on the margins round the text, without