The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [55]
This English translation of Aesop's Fables, printed by William Caxton, was one of the earliest non-religious books to appear.
Art in general began increasingly to portray individual states of emotion, personal interpretations of the world. It was art for art’s sake. Printing removed the need for a common share of images and in doing so destroyed the collective memory that had sustained the pre-literate communities. There also began a new genre of printed illustrated books for children, such as Comeius’ picture book and Luther’s catechism. These and others served to continue the old images in new form.
One major result of printing was the emergence of a more efficient system of filing. With more than a thousand editions reproduced from the same original, book-collecting became fashionable. These collections needed to be catalogued. Moreover, printers had begun to identify their books by title, as well as author, so it was easier to know what a book was about.
Cataloguing involved yet another new ability. People began to learn the alphabet, which until the advent of printing had had little use. Early printers found that their books sold better if they included an index. In scribal times indexing, when used at all, had been achieved by the use of small tabs attached to the side of the parchment leaf. Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, produced the first indexed catalogue in Basel, in 1494: Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis (The Book of Ecclesiastical Writings).
His successor, Conrad Gesner, went further. His idea was to produce a comprehensive, universal bibliography listing all Latin, Greek and Hebrew works in their first printing, using as a source publishers’ lists and booksellers’ catalogues. In 1545 he published the Bibliotheca Universalis (The Universal Collection) of 10,000 titles and 3000 authors. He followed this in 1548 with the Pandectae, a catalogue with nineteen separate headings dedicated to a different scholarly discipline. Each one contained topical entries cross-referencing author and title, with dedications that craftily included the publishers’ lists. The work contained more than 30,000 entries.
The new interest in indexing led to a more factual analysis of the older texts. Machiavelli’s father was asked to index Livy’s Decades for Vespasiano da Bisticci, and in doing so he made comprehensive lists of flora and fauna, place names and other such factual data, rather than taking the scribal approach of listing everything according to moral principles. The new availability of data and the novel concept of information as a science in itself made the collation and use of data easier than before.
The principal contribution to knowledge by the presses, however, lay in the establishment of accurate reproduction. When books came to be written by men whose identity was known, writers became more painstaking. After all, the text might be read by people who knew more of the subject than the author himself. Moreover, each writer could now build on the work of a previous expert in his field. Scholarship benefited from not having to return to first principles every time, so ideas progressed and proliferated.
Texts could be compared and corrected by readers with specialised or local knowledge. Information became more trustworthy. More books encouraged more inter-disciplinary activity, new combinations of knowledge and new disciplines. Among the earliest texts were tables of mathematical and navigational material, eagerly sought by an increasing number of ships’ captains.
Ready-reckoners made technical and business life easier. Above all, the fact that identical images could be viewed simultaneously by many readers was a revolution in itself. Now the world was open to analysis by the community at large. The mystery of ‘essence’ and intangible God-given substance gave way to realistic drawings which took advantage of the new science of perspective to measure and describe nature mathematically. Not