Printing: Technology Leap

Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany is widely credited with introducing commercial letterpress printing into the European world in the mid 15th century. The sweeping story of commercialization thereafter is told in the greatest of detail, maybe more than any casual reader wants, by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in “The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450 - 1800” (2010). The Febvre/Martin book appeared originally in 1958 in French.

It is a story linked necessarily to another technology development. “It would have been impossible to invent printing had it not been for the impetus given by paper, which had arrived in Europe from China via the Arabs two centuries earlier and came into general use by the late 14th century.” The making of this paper, one of the “indispensable preconditions of the printed book,” was based on the pulverizing of rags.

The “manuscript” that preceded the printed book relied on parchment, a thin prepared animal skin, not suitable for letterpress but acceptable for manually applied script. For a time, rag paper was considered disadvantaged relative to parchment: to be lacking enough integrity for important documentation; so, parchment held on. And the lettered style of the manuscript did not disappear quickly either with the onset of printing on paper; it was emulated for some time in the printed book, such that the printed book as we know its appearance today did not become settled until the mid-16th century.

This was technological and commercial leap in its own time, which time spans centuries. We of the 20th century now take paper and letterpress printing for granted. We take for granted daily paper newspapers, which were enabled by letterpress printing, as commonplace, and only sometimes recycle the maybe not so precious paper. The Penn-Franklin News in which you are reading this article is just such a product of Gutenberg and all who followed close behind.

A leap over centuries. Today, leaps may occur in much smaller moments of time. The printed book is now also an e-book. You can buy one or get a free download, if the copyright has expired, from Project Gutenberg no less (https://www.gutenberg.org), a Library of over 70,000 free e-books. How ironic. You can borrow e-books from your local Library, of course, just as you borrow printed books. Both are available still, because, perhaps, the leap is still in progress, teasing us with the old and the new as it happens. Centuries? Could be, but not likely. More likely to be done within a human lifetime, as youth displaces age.

After all, as I have been informed by my grandchildren, even college textbooks, once trafficked new along with other expensive college costs, only to be sold at a pittance at semester’s end, are now to be found online, and used for courses just that way. And the fact is that even older readers have migrated to e-resources, especially for the news of the day.

“The advent of the printing press did not mean a sudden change in the appearance of the book. It was the first phase in an evolution….” It was also a lesson in how technology drives social change. We are in the midst of another - printed book to electronic book - or maybe more appropriately, more broadly, an electronic information boom that is displacing the whole idea of what a “book” looks like. One has to pause to consider the leap before our very eyes. That gets to the whole idea of what a Library is, and must become.