Blog

The Josephine Ulrick Literature and Poetry prizes offer an eye-popping $20,000 to the winner in each category. Now in its tenth year, this is the first time the twenty grand prize pool has been awa...  >

Elsewhere
Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do >

Other

< Back to Blog
0 Comments

The Book: A Revolutionary Tale

Jane Gleeson-White January 20

Today, the digital continues to shape and change the way we read at an accelerated pace. Yet sometimes looking to the future involves looking back as well. For our December Meanland essay, Jane Gleeson-White considers the history of the book and its many revolutions – from the Gutenberg Bible and the printing presses of Venice where a book was a steal at merely a week’s wage), to the writings of Michel de Montaigne and today’s Church of Google. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full essay on our editions page.



What happens when a new technology threatens to steal the powers of books as we know them? Books are so much more than a medium for communicating stories and ideas. They are symbols, metaphors, physical objects that are almost alive. For the medieval Andalusian mystic Muhammad ibn ’Arabi the universe is an immense book and we are its characters, written ‘with the same ink and transcribed on to the eternal tablet by the divine pen’. For the English poet John Milton books ‘are not absolutely dead things’ but contain the essence of their author’s living intellect. And so for Milton ‘As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.’

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all are founded on books. For more than two thousand years, we have been people of the book. And across the same two millennia the ritual burning of books has been a feature of dictatorial regimes and totalitarian states. The symbolic import of book-burning was plain to German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.’ Such is the equivalence of book and human being. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero’s supernatural powers are sourced in his books. If you wish to eliminate Prospero’s magic, Caliban says, ‘burn but his books’.

The last time the book was subject to an epoch-changing technological innovation the rulers of heaven and hell were invoked, so unnatural did its powers of multiplication appear.

The book as we know it—the codex, made up of leaves bound at the side—was first mentioned by the Latin poet Martial in the first century AD, but it wasn’t popular until the fourth century when Roman jurists took to it for its convenience. It was also adopted as the communication medium of choice by the Christians, to distinguish their writings from those of the pagan Romans, who wrote on scrolls. The codex had other benefits for the Christians: it was economical (both sides of the page were used), portable and easy to hide.

Books were rare in Christian Europe until the fifteenth century, mostly confined to the libraries of the Church and other wealthy rulers. They were ‘manuscripts’ (from the Latin libri manu scripti, ‘books written by hand’) copied by monks and later by secular scholars who from the thirteenth century gathered around universities such as the Sorbonne.

In the mid fifteenth century the manuscript was subject to an epoch-changing technological innovation: a new technique of book making was invented. All evidence suggests the technique was created by Johann Gutenberg, a German metalworker in Mainz. Gutenberg combined and developed several already existing technologies—paper, artists’ oil paints, screw presses used for pressing olives and grapes and printing textiles, types used by bookbinders for stamping letters on bindings—to make the first printed book in 1456, the Latin Bible known as the Gutenberg Bible. The first dated printed work in Europe, however, was a pamphlet published in 1454: an indulgence offered by the pope to any Christian willing to contribute money to the Church’s campaign against the Turks, who had conquered Constantinople the year before. To distribute as many indulgences and raise as much money as possible, the Church enlisted the latest technology: the new art of printing.


 

Our Friends


 

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.