The first printed books came with a question: What do you do with these things?

Cover story

Thefirst printed books came with a question: What do you do with these things?

(courtesy of Alan Richardson)

By Tom Scocca

August 29, 2010

In the beginning, before there was such a thing as aGutenberg Bible, Johannes Gutenberg laid out his rows of metal type and brushedthem with ink and, using the mechanism that would change the world, produced anordinary little schoolbook. It was probably an edition of a fourth-centurygrammar text by Aelius Donatus, some 28 pages long. Only a few fragments of theprinted sheets survive, because no one thought the book was worth keeping.

 “Now had he keptto that, doing grammars...it probably would all have been well,” said AndrewPettegree, a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews andauthor of “The Book in the Renaissance,” the story of the birth of print.Instead, Gutenberg was bent on making a grand statement, an edition ofScripture that would cost half as much as a house and would live through theages. “And it was a towering success, as a cultural artifact, but it washorribly expensive,” Pettegree said. In the end, struggling for capital tosupport the Bible project, Gutenberg was forced out of his own print shop byhis business partner, Johann Fust.

Inventing the printing press was not the same thing asinventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready tofollow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe.But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particularneed to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items andwere copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printerhad decided to publish was an alien one.

Nor was print clearly destined to replace manuscript,from the point of view of the book owners of the day. A few fussycolor-printing experiments aside, the new books were monochrome, dull incomparison to illuminated manuscripts. Many books left blank spaces for addinghand decoration, and collectors frequently bound printed pages together withmanuscript ones.

“It’s a great mistake to think of an absolute disjunctionbetween a manuscript world of the Middle Ages and a print world of the 16thcentury,” Pettegree said.

As in our own Internet era, culture and commerce wentthrough upheaval as Europe tried to figure outwhat to make of the new medium and its possibilities. Should it serve to spreadfamiliar Latin texts, or to promote new ideas, written in the vernacular? Wasprint a vessel for great and serious works, or for quick and sloppy ones? Aswith the iPad (or the Newtonbefore it), who would want to buy a printed book, and why?

Pettegree explores this time of cultural change bylooking at the actual published matter it produced. Drawing on the power of21st century information technology, he and a team of researchers pulledtogether the catalogs of thousands of small, scattered libraries, assemblingthe broadest picture to date of the earliest publications.

What made print viable, Pettegree found, was not theearth-shaking impact of mighty tomes, but the rustle of countless little pages:almanacs, calendars, municipal announcements. Indulgence certificates, thedocuments showing that sinners had paid the Catholic church for reduced time inpurgatory, were especially popular. These ephemeral jobs were what madeprinting a viable business through the long decades while book publishers — andthe public — struggled to find what else this new technology might be good for.

Pettegree spoke to Ideas by phone from Scotland.

IDEAS: Peoplehadn’t really figured out how to find customers and sell books.

PETTEGREE: Whatyou’ve got to do once you’ve got 300 identical copies of a book is you’ve gotto sell it to people who don’t even yet know they want it. And that’s a very,very different way of selling.

And whereas the printers were taking advice from15th-century humanist scholars, who said, “Wouldn’t it be good to have this?Wouldn’t it be good to have that?” they weren’t in any position to give themany advice on how to dispose of these 300 copies. And in due course they foundthat the only way to do this is to create a market which is trans-European.

It’s this classic example of how you get technologicalinnovation without people really being aware of the commercial implications, ofhow you can make money from it. There’s quite a little similarity in the firstgeneration of print with the dot-com boom and bust of the ’90s, where peoplehave this fantastic new innovation, a lot of creative energy is put into it, alot of development capital is put into it, and then people say, “Well, yeah,but how are we going to make money from the Internet?” And that takes another10 years to work out.

IDEAS: Theone thing that most early printers seemed to do was to go out of business.

PETTEGREE: Andthe ones who didn’t were the ones who tended to have a close relationship withofficial customers. And this really I think is the new part of the story thatwe’ve been able to put together.

Most narratives of print have relied on looking at themost eye-catching products — whether it’s Gutenberg’s Bible or Copernicus orthe polyglot Bible of Plantin — these are the ones which seem to pushcivilization forward. In fact, these are very untypical productions of the16th-century press.

I’ve done a specific study of the Low Countries, and there, something like 40 percent of all the bookspublished before 1600 would have taken less than two days to print. That’s aphenomenal market, and it’s a very productive one for the printers. These arethe sort of books they want to produce, tiny books. Very often they’re not eventrying to sell them retail. They’re a commissioned book for a particularcustomer, who might be the town council or a local church, and they get paidfor the whole edition. And those are the people who tended to stay in businessin the first age of print.

IDEAS: Andit’s these smaller books that there’s been this perceptual bias against.

PETTIGREE: Themost astonishing single fact that’s emerged from the work we’ve done: We’vedocumented I think now about 350,000 editions published throughout Europe before 1600. Of those, around 40 percent of thoseitems survive in only one copy.

Many of the books that are best known are actually not atall rare. Because they were collected near the time, they survived in a greatnumber of copies. The famous Nuremberg Chronicle, one of the great 15th-centurybooks — I think something like 500 copies of that survive.

But these little books, they weren’t collectible. Theywere pragmatic announcements by the town council that bread prices would go up,or they were indulgence certificates, or they were almanacs for the followingyear, which would lose currency, or they were little schoolbooks which theschool kid would be only too pleased to throw away when they got out of theclass.

IDEAS: Wethink of the book as this tremendous force for innovation, but you write thatbooks were confronting a customer base that was conservative in its tastes,both in what sort of texts they wanted to read and in the typography. Romantype showed up and then people didn’t like it —

PETTEGREE: Sothey went back to the black letter. I mean, people could be trained to treatthe book, the printed book, as a different thing and not inferior. That was, Ithink, the work of about 40 years.

But the conservatism in terms of choice of texts seems tobe an enduring phenomenon. The result is that for authors, it’s a very, veryhard period. Contemporary authors clearly think that print is an opportunityfor them. What they find, though, of course, is that the printers are lookingfor surefire winners.

And first of all, they think this is going to be thetexts humanists admire, editions of the classics, and they flood the marketwith those. When they get their fingers burned with that, what they reach backfor is medieval medical textbooks, medieval scientific works, and medievalliterature, so the opportunity for living authors is very restricted. And inthe first instance is mostly for celebrity preachers, who manage to get volumesof their sermons printed and circulated.

IDEAS: There’sthe case of Martin Luther, and his effect on the industry, where he both tookaway a huge part of what their business depended on, in the indulgences, butthen became a prolific source of small books.

PETTEGREE: It’sreally not been remarked before, that when Luther was attacking indulgences, hewas actually attacking a mainstay of the press. But he really was. I mean, thequantities that were published of these indulgences is quite phenomenal andoften in very large editions. And this is the absolute dream commission for aprinter, when they’re asked to produce a very large quantity of a single sheetitem, a broadsheet, printed on only one side, which is what an indulgence is.

But the speed with which Luther’s works take off as apopular phenomenon is quite extraordinary. It’s fair to say that by 1530, 1540,Wittenberg wasessentially a one-industry town. If you put together the printing that wasgoing out and the students who were coming in to study in the university there,drawn by Luther, it has a phenomenal impact on Wittenberg.

Have you ever been to Wittenberg? It’s wonderful. I was there againlast week. You can still visit all of the stages of his life, you can make thewalk that he did up the street from his house at one end of the city to theSchloss at the other so as to post the 95 Theses. It is a very deeplyatmospheric place.

But you can see how the people who lived off Luther spenttheir loot. Lucas Cranach, the famous painter, also had a monopoly on woodcutsfor these Reformation [religious pamphlets]. And you can stand in front of thetown hall and see the two houses he built with the money he made.

Tom Scocca writes the blog ”Scocca” for Slate.com.His first book, ”BeijingWelcomes You,” will be published by Riverhead in 2011.