Thoughts on Five Hundred Years of Printing - S. H. Steinberg

 Thoughts on the book
Five Hundred Years of Printing by S. H. Steinberg


I'll start with a quote.  Call me Captain Obvious, but I find so little recognition of history that this one speaks to me.


All historical periods are makeshift expedients : people did not go to bed in the Middle Ages and wake up in modern times.


Five Hundred Years of Printing
S. H. Steinberg
Chapter One
The First Century of Printing
1961 p.15
(What's the deal with the spaces before and after the colon?)





Surprise! The absence of a concern for authorship and titles was not a characteristic of ancient texts.  It bugs me when people say that Moses didn't write the first five books of the Bible.  Of course Moses didn't write the first five books of the Bible.  Who says he did?  Well, the text kind of says it, but nobody, absolutely nobody for millenia cared a hoot about that.  Yes, I would like to know who wrote and who compiled ancient texts, but it didn't bother the ancients.

The lack of noting an author extended right up through the Middle Ages. Apparently the times that I call modern are the only ones we know of to want to know who wrote what. So here's another reason to think that modern times began with Martin Luther.  Until someone was successful in dividing the power of the church, we can't look back and call it modern.

Of course if you follow my blog, you know already that my other candidate for the bringer of modern times is Alexander, who paved the way for Christ's mission.  Most people today would find that ridiculous, so we'll go with Luther as the first modern man.

It's possible before printing, that since not many things were written, authorship was assumed, and it was only in places where texts were assembled from many places that author's names became more necessary to note. But this idea seems too neat and tidy to be true.  Even texts in Alexandria's Library and Museum and up to the Reformation were identified by their first words, rather than having titles. And I think it was assumed that if it was worth printing, it was considered worth reading, without regard to authorship.  People weren't for the most part choosing what to read, but choosing if to read.  Did people really just read without thinking about who wrote?  This is inconceivable to me, but I live after the scientific method and the Renaissance.

There is a nice long quote, with facsimile of Gutenberg's printed page about the wonder of printing and how it is a gift from God that is as a marvel of His grace. I always thought of him more as an artist or craftsman or businessman, but apparently his association with the word Bible is more than a characteristic of the times. He wanted to get the Word out and he did.    p.19

 With the help of the Most High at whose will the tongues of infants become eloquent and who often reveals to the lowly what he hides from the wise, this noble book Catholicon has been printed and accomplished without the help of reed, stylus or pen but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types, in the year of the Lord's incarnation 1460 in the noble city of Mainz of the renowned German nation, which God's grace has deigned to prefer and distinguish above all other nations of the earth with so lofty a genius and liberal gifts.  Therefore all praise and honour be offered to thee, holy Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God in three persons...

The second most popular printed book is Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis.   p.141

Maximilian I was the first ruler to make use of printing.   p. 54

The first Koran in Latin contained a preface by Martin Luther.   p. 50

Printing was divided into mainly Roman fonts, called founts, that weren't really Roman; and Gothic or Fraktur fonts that weren't really Gothic. The typography followed the general pattern of the word origins. In languages that were mostly Germanic, the fonts that ended up superseded by the Roman ones lasted awhile, and provided think blackletter reading that must have taken a lot of ink.  But English, a mixture of Germanic and Latin tipped the scales and even Hitler championed the Roman fonts.  p.289    I enjoyed looking at the font example that combined the Roman and Frankish, and I didn't find it ridiculous at all.  p. 289 C. G. Schoppe's Centralschift.   Perhaps Erasmus put the triumph of Roman fonts into the path of inevitability since he could have leaned toward the older Germanic ones but was printed in Roman ones. 


p. 341  Longfellow's Hiawatha is the most popular poem in printing.

p. 337  Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is the most popular work of fiction.

I enjoyed the discussion of the Semitic/Phoenician alphabet becoming Hellenized and then Anglicized, but I feel that the history is one we all should know better.  I also remain perplexed at how many different letters can be used for similar pronunciations across languages.  Why can't a name stay the same when it changes languages and how come a sound's representation be more specific?

p. 363

The peaceful coexistence of print, sound, and vision is to a large extent guaranteed by the psycho-physiological make-up of the human race.  The basic division into visual, auditory, and motorial types means that the primary and strongest impulses are conveyed through the eyes, the ears, and the muscles respectively.  

At the end of the paperback, there's a little penguin and the following sentence:

Some other books published by Penguins are described on the following pages.



The most helpful section of the book is the foreword by Beatrice Warde who tries to compare the age of sound's replication- radio, tv and movies to the age of printing that the book is about.  She makes the case that reading is more helpful to the skeptic because the honesty and unchanging unflinching nature of the printed word is different than the personal appeal of the voice.  She's really on to something here.  When people listen to something, it lasts a certain time, but when they read, the medium supports stopping and meditating, referring back to previous passages, comparing and questioning, and I would add.... skipping things you don't want to read.

Yes, we can come into a television program halfway through and leave early, but the program is designed to take up a certain amount of space in time.  A book can be skimmed in five minutes or studied for a lifetime.

It's easy to go back and see what someone wrote, exactly, and more difficult to go back and hear what they've said before.

Printing is on the side of the people who still have the courage to say 'Stop, I want to think about that', or 'Surely what wasn't what you said before?' or 'What are you getting at?'  It does take courage to say such things, even to the amenable printed page, let alone to the vocal spellbinder : and there is no way whatever of saying such things to the reproduced-voice that comes to us through the loudspeaker.  But the future of any form of democratic government depends on keeping that sort of courage alive.    p. 9

I believe that all this listening is more consequential than government, although whoever is in power can use these tools to their great advantage.  Reading has changed the human mind.  We see things from left to right in this culture.  Before reading, left would not have been seen as happening before right.  Photography has changed the human mind.  Instead of knowing which direction something is, we think in terms of left and right, which is a direct result of the change in perspective that flat images have done to reality's three dimensions.  We don't say that the castle is off about three miles to the East, we say that the Jiffy Mart is to the left at the intersection.

Listening to people speak has made us gullible and surface-oriented.  We no longer study because we want answers on bumper stickers.   Although it is true that you don't understand something unless you can state it simply, how can you state something simply with any integrity if you haven't looked below the surface at the underlying beliefs and assumptions?