How have material changes effected the way we read? As one of the events that gave rise to modern times, two perspectives on the development of printing technology can be roughly summarized; the position that mass production of books has resulted in the democratization of knowledge or that the rule of power was strengthened through the means of the dissemination of knowledge. I would like to discuss the change in the way we read as a result of the critical insist, which is closed to the second one, that the development and diffusion of printing technology was possible by particularly meeting the contemporary context of capitalism.

Initially, Gutenberg’s famous ‘42-line Bible’ was widely produced by theologians for the religious purpose of distributing the Bible. Historically, however, it has only been able to continue and spread as the demands have been met within the system of private markets, at the same time, the abundance of supplies and the consumer-oriented societal ambience due to the declining population after the Black Death. In addition, when it was regarded that the Reformation had risen by the fact that Martin Luther’s ‘Ninety-five Theses’ were quickly printed and distributed, it is important to note that the Reformation, which emphasized ‘individuals’ who can directly face God, led to Calvin’s Protestant outbreak and was very friendly with the capitalist spirit. In short, printing technology was able to develop and disseminate in the process of forming the capitalist structure that was born at the time, and was also a catalyst for opening a new epoch.

By being part of the capitalist system, printing technology has made it possible for everyone to be subjective readers, but at the same time it makes us all consumers of equally mass-produced knowledge. Thus, the material change of printing technology does not simply change the way we read, but the content what we read. In the form of printing, knowledge exists as a commodity, and texts that do not conform to the logic of the market do not survive or cannot enter at all. Therefore, in this macro capitalist logic we might also ask: How do we change what we read?

The readings and the documentary showed us the story of printing has changed over the years. New technology, different ways of getting information, methods and our perceptions have influenced the way we read today. The chapter from Abbot and Williams, take us on the initial process of a “text”, from the author’s original idea, to its stages of revision, and eventually publication. The process of printing started before Gutenberg’s invention. Centuries before the Chinese had a way to print text from symbols on discrete blocks and bound books. Studying Early Books, explained the processes hand press, which were extremely complex and took a lot of precision and coordination to operate.     

I liked how the book and the reading “the Prints and the Pauper” divide the printing periods. Making it possible for us to understand that technological, social and even economic influences, do in fact change the role that authors, publishers, and printers in have in the process of production. For example, film explains how Gutenberg needed the right material to print and where he would get the investment to do so. It was interesting to learn that Gutenberg’s printing the text but the illustrations were added later, now a days, those two components can be created and added together. Today, traditional books are still arranged and organize in almost the same way. Aside from the technology of printing, the way we access them is the most notable difference. The book says that new technology has given authors more control over their creations, and I agree, authors can publish their material electronically making it accessible to almost everyone. The digital age has enabled folks to use their prefer way to read, and even alter a text if they choose to.

“THE quality of mercy …
is twice bless’d;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.”
– Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare

When the prints were about to come to the world in the late-medieval Europe, paper and paint oil had already been invented. So did the manuscripts, the wine-press and jeweler’s punches or punches used at the mint. But when Johannes Gutenberg was about to actualize his scheme of putting printing to work during his self-imposed exile, he was in need of several things. As Keith Houston, the author of The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, pointed out, what Gutenberg needed are a set of mixed “skilled goldsmiths”, “a wealth church”, “a pious population” and “an injection of capital from a willing investor” (Houston, 2016). In 1448 Gutenberg’s returning to his howntown Mainz allowed him to secure the first three. Two years later, Johann Fust, a Mainzer goldsmith and guildsman, loaned Gutenberg 800 Rheingulden (at 6 percent interest), a large amount of money that allowed Gutenberg to run his printing workshop. In 1452, another 800 Rheingulden from Fust was invested in this new workshop. However, Gutenberg “defaulted upon the interest payments” (Houston, 2016). In the end, he had to give his finished system of moving types and the final products (i.e., the 42-line Bibles) away to Fust in order to “repay” the large debt.  

Despite of that, while explicitly drawing an analogy between the story of Gutenberg and Mark Twain’s historical fiction, The Prince and the Pauper, it is not Fust who borrowed Gutenberg money at least twice but the prints themselves that are compared to the prince in Mark Twain’s tale by Houston. Gutenberg is as the pauper even though he is “of respectable if not noble birth” and had a disposable income before coming back to the city of Mainz (Houston, 2016). In a way, the anthropomorphic prints stress the holiness of the books – both those made through printing by means of the movable types and those that we are reading today. The analogy between the two stories signifies the complementarity or mutuality of the prints and the pauper, as well as the duality of the identity of a book. For instance, the Gutenberg Bible embodies not only the life of the text or data but also how this text or data is distributed. 

While composing the novel of The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain once wrote to another American writer William Dean Howells,

“My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the King himself and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others—all of which is to account for a certain mildness which distinguished Edward VI’s reign from those that preceded and followed it”.

(Cope & Cope, 1996)

Similarly, Houston’s narrative of the prints and Gutenberg in part also provides us a realizing sense of the severity of the laws that regulated the making of books of Gutenberg’s day. When the penalties are imposed both upon the prints and the man who made “movable print” work in the fifteenth century Europe, Houston makes the reciprocal relationship between the prints and the commoner conspicuous. We see how the prints and Gutenberg suffered the consequences together and how both are transformed in the process. In a word, this reciprocity between the prints and Gutenberg mildens the suffering of humanity as a whole through its reinforcement of “the quality of mercy” that is shared by both. This quality of mercy, according to Shakespeare, “is not strained”. “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath” and, in the end, it was injected into a printing press that had changed and is still influencing the way in which information is distributed. 

Reference

Cope, W. P., & Cope, W. P. (1996). A teacher’s guide to the Signet Classic edition of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the pauper. Penguin USA.

Houston, K. (2016). The book: A cover-to-cover exploration of the most powerful object of our time (First edition). W.W. Norton & Company.

I was struck after reading Houston’s account of Gutenberg’s invention of the press, and Fry’s documentary, how the basic structure of books hasn’t changed all that much. Although the methods of printmaking have changed (from mechanical press, Linotype, to word processing software), the codex as a way of structuring writing has remained largely unchanged. It’s striking how instantly recognizable the Gutenberg Bible is as a modern book (it could easily be formatted into a PDF, or interactive eBook). 

Texts are certainly produced and printed at an exponentially faster rate today. Warner writes that printers in the early modern period produced an “average of 2,500 impressions” (or pages), a day. Furthermore, pages could not be printed sequentially, meaning that books could not be sold until the last unit was complete. The process of drying printed pages could also take weeks. (Warner, 18, 23). 

In the years following Gutenberg’s invention, reading (for those who were able), must have been a very utilitarian, religious or ritual practice reserved for the privileged few. The main purchasers of books would have been monasteries or universities. The way we read today seems quite different from the early modern period. The transmission of texts online involves parsing through huge amounts of continually updating information. Our internal repertoire of references, connections and linkages are much broader. We’re attuned to fast changing ideas and aware of changing notions of authorship (automated text programs further complicate this).

Learning about the history of print is valuable for better understanding the material ways in which knowledge is codified and disseminated. The ability to endlessly reproduce writing was clearly central to the development of the protestant reformation, renaissance, the European Enlightenment, and liberalism more broadly. The ability of scholars (restricted of course to white, male, European individuals) to develop and circulate ideas (or exercise their “reason”) in the “public sphere” required a robust and increasingly expanding print industry. Printing technologies created a greater democratization of knowledge, but also (maybe) increasing standardization, and the separation of the text from a religious context. It seems like there are numerous philosophical and political  consequences resulting from the development of the printing press (for instance the ways political power produces “subjects” through increasingly writing about them, or the way philosophical systems develop out of this print culture – i.e. structuralism — pulling this last question from Giorgio Agamben’s fascinating book, Infancy and History). 

As the estimates of book production in Keith Houston’s The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time and Stephen Fry’s documentary The Machine that Made Us make clear, the technology of hand press printing that emerged in Germany around 1450 enabled the proliferation of written communication to an increasing number of people in Europe and its colonies. This proliferation of books was accompanied by an increase in population in Europe from 80 million in 1500 to 450 million in 1800 and an increase in the world’s population from 200 million to 1 billion during the same period. Looking back at five hundred years of printing as a whole, it is hard to imagine how the spread of libraries and bookstores (and even schools) into urban areas throughout the world would have occurred without mass printing, and in so doing printing delivered books and literacy to millions of individuals even as the absolute numbers of people living on less than $5 a day increased (quadrupling in the last 50 years) within the midst of degrees of wealth and abundance the world has never before witnessed.

The spread of printing arguably democratized institutions by giving new social classes access to the benefits of learning, literature, and education through an expansion of reading and literacy. Yet there is also an interesting correlation between the domination of the “West”, where written communications through printing to some extent scaled with the increase in population, and the subordination of other global regions, where written communications were constrained by traditional block printing and manuscripts. While it is clearly an exaggeration to claim that Gutenberg’s movable type and type mold printing was responsible for Western Imperialism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, or capitalism itself, there might still be some room for conjecture regarding the impact of printing on both the Protestant Reformation and as Robert Darnton argued in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History the spread of Enlightenment thought through growing networks of publishers, book shops, and readers. Additionally world literacy stood at around 10% in 1800 when hand press printing gave way to mechanized printing and in the space of two hundred years world literacy as a whole increased to 85%, an average inversion rate of 3.75% per decade.

We might also wonder about the extent to which we could attribute printing to the emergence of the “public” and the “public sphere” as Jurgen Habermas theorized in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. We could equally consider printing as one of the key enablers along with other communications technologies such as audio and (motion picture) video technologies of the integration of world cultures and the popularization of the notion of the “global village”. Finally, it would not be entirely unreasonable perhaps to consider that most of world’s written literatures would not have developed along the lines with which we are familiar through the evolution of literary genres such as poetry, the short story, the novel, and perhaps even history and our sense and understanding of the past.

Despite the increase in democratizing access to written communications, printing has along with other complex technologies created a minority of makers of culture and a majority of consumers of culture, resulting in the rise in social status of authors and writers as an elite intelligentsia of intellectuals, experts, and technocrats. As Sarah Werner shows in Studying Early Printed Books, the technology of early modern book making in Europe involved a team of specialists involved in a “series of decisions driven to both small and large degrees by production demands and economic pressures”. As a result, printing has allowed all of us to be readers of books but only some of us to be the makers of books. It could be argued that a social division between culture makers and culture consumers has emerged as community based traditions of story telling, music, singing, oral verse, and popular theater diminished. It remains to be seen whether the next sea change, reflected in the convergence of increasingly accessible digital media authoring tools and internet-based social media, will return to society the culture making capabilities that the market based application of printing took away.