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).
