What particularly struck me in the readings and the documentary were the discussions of how the printing press is considered to be an agent of change. Following Gutenberg’s invention, the creation and dispersion of the printing press led to the beginning of mass communication and changed the structure of society. The mass production of books led to a democratization of knowledge, and the flood of printed materials established an ever expanding reading public as well as changed the way that people read. In the current digital age, this democratization has expanded exponentially. As a reader, I often find the sheer amount of available content overwhelming. This mass quantity has an effect on how closely we read texts. I personally tend to skim many texts because I feel pressured to read as much as possible. When looking for material on any particular subject, it can make it difficult to determine where to focus your search. Too much choice can be paralyzing. 

Another aspect discussed in the texts and which I have not given much thought to was the author’s role in the process of publishing. As mentioned by Abbott & Williams, in both the handpress as well as machine-press period textual variations were common and in many cases out of the authors’ control. New technologies offer authors control over the way their work is produced, how it appears and who sees it. For example, a freelance journalist could submit an article to a newspaper, have it rejected, and then choose to publish it in a blog, as a twitter post or through other forms of social media. Additionally, these various formats shape the way we find and consume texts. That same article might find audiences in these alternative formats which might not have read it in the original source in which the author intended it to be published.

One similarity that endures today is the acknowledgement that people have preferences with regard to how they consume a work. Werner states that some customers of books may have wanted their books bound, but others would be content to have them stab-stitched, which mirrors people’s tendency in modern times to choose to consume a work in varied forms including a bound book, an e-book, and even an audio book. Also, even though they were created in the 17^th century as a way for publishers to balance income and expenses, subscriptions have endured as a very popular means of consuming a work today.

            With regard to changes, mass production of works created many changes that transformed the printing process and endure to the present day. Hand-pressed books were overwhelmingly printed on paper but as Werner states, “some early books were printed on parchment” which is referred to as vellum. We no longer read on vellum because it could shrink or expand depending on the humidity, and was not convenient for mass production.

            Also with regard to mass production, the practice of the compositor being responsible for spelling and punctuation according to his custom no longer exists, and today when people read a work, the grammar and spelling is standardized according to the language. Mass production also led to paginated pages as opposed to foliated ones, because paper had to begin to be used more economically.

            Lastly, because any single book in the hand-press era couldn’t be sold until every copy of that book was printed, the life of a book would seem to be shortened, which is obviously different from today’s printing process where a work from the 19^th Century can be bought today and in essence has it’s life and legacy prolonged by continuously having its place within a culture constantly maintained and made relevant by virtue of it’s physical presence.

What has struck more interest for me was how things have changed. Starting with the way a book was made, which as we saw started with a long process that required a lot of expertise. Gutenberg’s machine press was the start of it all. However, it did not allow for just anyone to be able to make a book like today. Starting with the first book he made, which was the bible, he restricted what was being produced to a certain group of people who could afford it and could read it. On the other hand, he opened up the opportunity for more work to be produced and at a faster scale. Nowadays, it seems like relatively anyone can have access to a book of their liking. Also, anyone can write a book and get it published without having to invest a lot of time or money on it. There is a good side to this which is the expansion topics that are being studied, and the universality of sharing a book with someone who does not live in the same place or does not speak the same language.
I also kept thinking about all the mistakes that can be made and get replicated during both the hand press and machine-press periods. If there was a mistake on whether spelling or material it was not easy to correct it. However, today, mistakes are being corrected by our machines all the time. Just as I am writing this, I get a red underline below all the words I misspell. There are even some online websites like Grammarly that will allow us to correct our grammatical mistakes. There has truly been an advancement in how technology has impacted the way we read and write. But it is important and compelling to know how it all started.

In pondering on how the history of print has impacted the way we read what strikes me most is how, as the world constantly changes, books have remained stubbornly the same. We still have front and back covers, (typically) we still read the page from top to bottom, and flip the pages from right to left. Much of the anatomy of the book, developed at the inception of print, persists even in online versions. What has changed the most has been the result of a relinquishing control in the publishing industry. Printing and distribution has historically been enacted by a specialized few. For words to be made available to wider readership they had to be reviewed, vetted and distributed by a (patriarchal) elite. Similar to how a lifted patent allows for a branded drug to be manufactured in a generic format, ironically, the Internet and the communities on it, have provided us with platforms to bypass publishers and print our own work.

I experienced this first-hand last year when the collective I work with ventured from digital to. Utilizing an online vendor we had total control over the printing process: We chose the works and photos, the layout, colours, paper quality & size, number of books printed and price per copy – we were the producers and contributors, designers and imaginers. The result of this shift in power is not on how we read, but what we can read. Printing and publishing is no longer controlled by the gatekeepers of books. Now, anyone can print a book, or a magazine or a zine. The content available is more obscure, more radical and more innovative than ever. The print industry has given way to a more localized, democratized version of printing. So whilst I still might flip pages from back to front and read pages from top to bottom, the words, authors and collectives that I have access to have evolved and multiplied as the opportunity to print has expanded.

In the latter moments of The Machine that Made Us, a BBC documentary briefly detailing how the Gutenberg Press came to be, host Stephen Fry remarks that he can imagine the modern world without airplanes, cars, or telephones, but not the printed word. It’s a statement I couldn’t agree with more. Without the contributions of Gutenberg, the Renaissance and Enlightenment would’ve never occurred, meaning the historical development of capitalism and the liberal democracies it spawned would be the content of fantasies. As noted in “Out of Sorts: Typesetting Meets the Industrial Revolution,” chapter seven of Keith Houston’s The Book, “…the printing press—blew apart the insular world of Europe’s scholars, scribes, and clergy” (128).

While watching Fry’s authentic amazement in the face of Gutenberg Bibles and replica Presses, I began to think of Gutenberg’s invention in relation to the canon of (what I’ve deemed) the Pillars of Decentralization. Within this canon lie the ideas of Copernicus (decentralized our planet’s position in the galaxy), Darwin (decentralized our species’ place in the Animal Kingdom), Nietzsche (decentralized our species’ metaphysical positioning in the universe), and Gutenberg, whose printing press decentralized knowledge, which hitherto had been concentrated in the hands of an elite class, and thus helped to give birth to a civically engaged citizen. Gutenberg’s invention predates the work of these scholars, and it’d be difficult to imagine the masses having a basic understanding of the solar system or Darwinism without the mass production of books.

Philosophically speaking, there have been thinkers who have dwelled on the pitfalls of the democratization of knowledge via the printing press and the changing ways in which we read. In particular, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard feared that the widespread distribution of newspapers would create a citizen satisfied in simply being aware of the political issues of their day. One might imagine Kierkegaard having strong opinions on the way civically engaged citizens read today, receiving their news from an infinite amount of online publications and social media behemoths such as Facebook and Twitter. The docile holder of opinions aside, the mass distribution of text has also led to inundation of the market with material cultural critic Dwight Macdonald would label “Masscult,” mediocre works of folly meant to do the thinking for the intended audience. These lamentations on the way we read have existed for as long as Gutenberg’s Press. Houston notes that in the early days of printing, Europe’s intelligentsia placed a high moral value in the “patient copying-out of texts” (128). They must’ve viewed the mass dissemination of books as a vulgar activity, just as today’s critic would scoff at the notion that anyone and everyone, within certain capabilities, could publish their own book.

The way in which we read, and the way in which books are disseminated, have simultaneously changed and remained roughly the same since the time of Gutenberg. As mentioned above, several generations have pivoted away from the printed word towards e-books and websites. While a hundred years ago, one might have done their day’s reading in the form of a newspaper or novel, today one receives their “prose” in the form of Tweets and Instagram captions, reading hundreds of “short stories” a day. Censorship remains an issue, as displayed in the book burnings which permeated the Third Reich and other parts of the world in the Twentieth Century (and which continue today), which ties the evolution of political systems with that of the book. We all read what we want today, for the internet provides as much “evidence” for Darwinism as it does for the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the hands of Castro-allied extraterrestrials. It is no surprise that our current socio-political epoch is marred by “fake news” and “alternative facts,” as the way we read, and what we read, is democratizing at an unstoppable rate.  

Author’s note: Forgive my incessant quoting of white male intellectuals, it is these figures who have shaped the way I read. I blame the academy for my Eurocentric inclinations.

A few years ago, I purchased some prints from the Stele Forest (or The Beilin Museum) in Xi’an. The texts were written by ancient Chinese calligraphers onto soft rice paper with ink that was made of animal glue and pine oil, and transformed to the stone steles, and copied to new paper through a process called ink rubbing. The background is black, and the characters are white. This was printing in China before Bi Sheng, who invented movable type. However, it is Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press that revolutionarily changed the way we read. More printing machines were invented after him to increase the efficiency and quality of printing.

Without Gutenberg, texts may exist on stone steles, bamboo, and silk for readers, but the printing processes after his printing press all demanded paper (not soft paper) until texts began to exist as digital texts. I learned from the documentary and the readings that the quality of the paper is essential to the success of Gutenberg’s invention. Vellum was proved to be unsuitable for printing. The soft paper became one of the obstacles to the development of movable type in ancient China. Now, environment protection leads many to switch to eBook to save trees. The eBook seems to further “separate” the book from the text: the book appears on a screen, while the text lives in the storage of a Kindle or a server far away.

The section in William and Abbott’s book demonstrates different stages in which a text is altered. The roles of authors, editors, compositors, printers, publishers, booksellers all affect the text and the book which the reader obtains. It is unsure whether the digital text makes the process simple or more complicated. Digital tools and media enable some straightforward and high-fidelity channels for readers to interact with the text but may downgrade or lose the text.

I was especially interested in the discussion in Keith about attempts to create movable type printing in China, and the combination of factors—ink viscosity, paper-making methods/materials, a much larger and thus exorbitantly more expensive number of characters needed—that prevented it from taking off in the same way that Gutenberg’s press did, despite attempts being made up to 4000 earlier. The Stephen Fry documentary also pointed out that Gutenberg grew up among vineyards, where he would have been familiar with wine-presses, on which he may have based his prototype printing press. He was funded by “proto-venture-capitalists” like Fust, but it was his winning-over of the Catholic church through the printing of mass-produced indulgence letters and eventually his full Bible that really convinced anyone of the viability of his invention.

Because we currently live in an age where everything under the sun appears in print, we tend to think of the invention of printing as value-neutral and all-encompassing, but what the readings this week show is that it was actually a very particular and context-specific process, and that the fact that it happened in the way it did—in German wine country, printing books in the Roman alphabet, printing leaves between covers at all as opposed to more flexible, rollable broadsheets or scrolls—wasn’t inevitable, but a product of Gutenberg having access to the appropriate methods and materials and leveraging the right connections. 

Mass-market printing is seen as a democratization of knowledge, and to some degree it definitely was, but the physical form that knowledge is conveyed in is inextricably linked to the content of the knowledge itself. In the Gutenberg documentary Stephen Fry calls books “the building blocks of civilization” and Gutenberg’s press “the most revolutionary advance in technology since the wheel.” But it’s interesting to examine what kind of civilization is built with those blocks, what that wheel advances, and what could have been otherwise if other cultures had had the material and linguistic advantages that Gutenberg did.