The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [52]
In the earliest printed books the scribal style of lettering was maintained. This conservative approach was in part dictated by the demands of the market. A buyer was less likely to be put off by the new product if he saw familiar manuscript abbreviations and punctuation. It was only when the new printed books were well established in the next century that printers began to spell words in full and standardise punctuation.
The print shop was one of the first truly capitalist ventures. The printer or his partner was often a successful merchant who was responsible for finding investors, organising supplies and labour, setting up production schedules, coping with strikes, hiring academically qualified assistants and analysing the market for printed texts. He was also in intense competition with others who were doing the same, and was obliged to risk capital on expensive equipment.
Aldus’ mark, the anchor and dolphin.
It should not come as a surprise that these men pioneered the skills of advertising. They issued book lists and circulars bearing the name and address of their shop. They put the firm’s name and emblem on the first page of the book, thus moving the title page from the back, where it had traditionally been placed, to the front, where it was more visible. The shops printed announcements of university lectures together with synopses of course textbooks and lectures, also printed by them.
In the early years each printer adopted the script most common in his area, but before long print type was standardised. By 1480, when the scribal writing styles had disappeared, texts were being printed in cancelleria (chancery script) style, the classical letter shape favoured by the Italian humanists who were the intellectual leaders of Europe at the time. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, in Venice, at the print shop of the great Italian printer Aldus Manutius, one of his assistants, Francesco Griffo of Bologna, invented a small cursive form of cancelleria. The style was designed to save space, and gave Aldus a monopoly on the market in books of a size which could be carried easily in a pocket or saddlebag. The new style of type was called ‘italic’.
The handwriting style used by Chancery lawyers (above left) became the standard type chosen by the new printers (right).
Initially the market for texts was limited. The first texts produced after the invention of printing fell into the following categories: sacred (Bibles and prayer books), academic (the grammar of Donatus, used in schools), bureaucratic (papal indulgences and decrees) and vernacular (few, mostly German).
Thereafter the content of the books became rapidly more diverse. By the end of the century there were guide-books and maps, phrase books and conversion tables for foreign exchange, ABCs, catechisms, calendars, devotional literature of all sorts, primers, dictionaries - all the literary paraphernalia of living that we in the modern world take for granted and which influences the shape and style of every aspect of our lives.
Almost immediately after its invention print began to affect the lives of Europeans in the fifteenth century. The effect was not always for the better. Along with the proliferation of knowledge came the diffusion of many of the old scriptural inaccuracies. Mystic Hermetic writings, astrologies and books of necromancy were reproduced in large numbers, as were collections of prophecies, hieroglyphics and magic practices. The standardisation made possible by print meant that errors were perpetuated on a major scale.
Apart from the Latin and Greek classics, all of which were reproduced within a hundred years, and the Bible, the greatest number of new books sold were of the ‘how to’ variety. The European economy had desperate need of craftsmen, whose numbers had been reduced by the Black Death, the effects of restrictive practices