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By Root 2152 0

be organized, conducted, and regulated so as to take their place in an orderly commonwealth. The practitioners of the press, therefore-ranging from the great scholarprinters of Renaissance Italy to the first denizens of Grub Streetorganized themselves into communities large and small, along lines familiar from existing crafts. They established "chapels" of journeymen in their houses, and formed guilds or companies to handle the affairs of the book trades as awhole in particular cities. At the same time, ecclesiastical, academic, and royal authorities devised their own systems to render these communities safe and responsible. To an extent, these too tended to be built on prior experiences. A 1547 French law decreeing that the author and printer be named on the title page of every religious book, for example, was modeled on the long-standing tradition of craftsmen's marks in such trades as silversmithing.9 Other measures were more original- there was little precedent for the practice of licensing books before they could legitimately be published, and none for the Vatican's Index of Prohibited Books. At each level, and at places ranging from the printing house and bookshop to the bishop's palace and scholar's study, skills came into being and accreted into customs. They took on moral force. In those first generations, as printers, booksellers, writers, and readers jockeyed for position and developed conventions of proper conduct, so the character of printing itself-what printing was-emerged. 10

Uncertainty and the need to make choices dogged this process, to an extent that has tended to be forgotten. To many people of the early modern period the press looked like it should be an engine of progress and providence, certainly, and Protestants of the later sixteenth century largely came to believe that it had been one in the days of the Reformation. But when it came to their own time and place, they had reason to be less sanguine. There was no guarantee that printers and booksellers, left to themselves, would let the printed book realize what others took to be its potential. Unauthorized reprinting was only one of the problems. There is ample evidence that laypeople's experience of printing included, alongside wonder at its virtues, exasperation at the proliferation of spurious claims to authorship, authenticity, and authority to which it gave rise. The realm of print was one in which the bogus could easily crowd out the genuine, and in which credibility vied with credulousness. Telling the authorized and authentic from the unauthorized and spurious was only one necessary art for thriving in the world of print, but necessary it was. Being a good reader demanded this kind of critical expertise. Writ large, the possibility that print itself might uphold some kind of rational public depended on it too.

The first and greatest of all novels provides powerful testimony to this effect. The entire second volume ofDon yixote amounts to a sharp satire on the nature of print a century and a half after Gutenberg. It delights in a recursive humor based on the conditions oflife as an author, editor, reader, and even character in a realm of print riddled with such problems. Produced after a spurious sequel had been published inTarragona, Cervantes' volume has its hero repeatedly encounter readers of the spurious volume and characters from it. Indeed, the plot itself turns on this. Don Quixote alters his course, heading to Barcelona rather than Zaragoza, solely in order to depart from the story of the unauthorized book and therefore prove it inauthentic. Once in Barcelona, he enters a printing house and finds the workers engaged in correcting the impostor book itself. And at the end of the tale Don Quixote dies, just (or so Cervantes says) to make certain that no more bogus sequels can be foisted on the public.

The premise of Cervantes' novel, of course, is that Don Quixote is a naively literal reader of popular print, in the form of chivalric romances. So it is all the more important to acknowledge that the knight-errant is not quite straightforwardly