Books & Overstatement

I realize I have just said that I will be gone for a week, but I see a comment from Tex that deserves a moment's attention. I had said that the influence of Gutenberg is somewhat overstated. Tex replied:
Grim, before I accept the proposition that "the difficulty of acquiring books before the printing press is overstated" I would need to see some sources. Every history of the period I have ever consulted has emphasized the seismic impact of the sudden availability of a vastly greater body of printed material, along with an explosion of literacy and an accompanying market for books. What do you think is overstated about that picture?
I think it's overstated in both directions. For one thing, the idea that Gutenberg produced a 'sudden availability' of 'a vastly greater body' of material is not borne out. Here's a chart of "the number of separately printed items in Britain and by English abroad," from James Raven's The Business of Books, p. 8.


Now Malory's work is right there at the beginning, but as we see the printing press didn't change the world over night -- or in the first hundred years, or hundred and fifty.  It was the kickoff of the industrial revolution that made the printed book the main game.  Even long after Gutenberg's death around 1465 (if I recall correctly) printed books were not the majority of books being produced.

For the most part right through the Renaissance books were made as they were made throughout the Middle Ages.  And this was a substantial business!
Moreover, the universities were the earliest centres of the book trade as we understand it, and the provisions for the multiplication, sale, and rent of standard works helped these at least to travel by their own momentum. In these respects the university life of the later Middle Ages reached a comparatively close approximation to early modern conditions; the chief difference, to use Shaw's phrase, lay in the iconography.
That's from Charles Homer Haskins, "The Spread of Ideas in the Middle Ages," Speculum 1 no. 1 (January 1926). He goes on to point out that there are records of 'vast stores of books' returning from the Fourth Crusade as a favored item of plunder; in fact, the Crusaders had learned early in Spain that there was almost nothing of greater value than the books of Greek learning, and Arabic commentaries or expansions on the same, that they were able to take from the Saracen lands.

A gentleman named Peter Yu, though a lawyer rather than historian by training, composed a fairly careful brief history of books in response to a comment by Justice Breyer that is called "Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen." Michigan St. Law Review 1 (2006)
By the twelfth century, towns emerged, and communities grew in size and wealth. As a result of the spread of literacy, the demand for books increased dramatically, and a large number of new texts appeared. "Monastic libraries soon found it more and more difficult to keep their collections up to date, and they began employing secular scribes and illuminators to collaborate in book production." Meanwhile, schools became independent from cathedrals, to which they were originally attached, and guilds of lecturers and students gathered to form universities. With the changing lifestyle and the emergence of new educational institutions, it became more and more common for people to want to own books themselves, whether students seeking textbooks or noble women desiring to own beautifully illuminated Psalters. By 1200 there is quite good evidence of secular workshops writing and decorating manuscripts for sale to the laity. By 1250 there were certainly bookshops in the big university and commercial towns, arranging the writing out of new manuscripts and trading in second-hand copies. By 1300 it must have been exceptional for a monastery to make its own manuscripts: usually, monks bought their books from shops like anyone else, although this is not quite true of the Carthusians or of some religious communities in the Netherlands....

Ordinances, therefore, were developed "to regulate the work of the copyists, to lay down the minimum requirements of formal presentation and substantial correctness, and to prescribe the selling price of duly certified copies." A notable example of these regulations was the ordinance of Bologna University of 1259, which provided what commentators have considered to be the earliest regulations of sales, loans, and production of books used by the university. Similar regulations were also enacted by the University of Paris in 1275 and by Alphonso X of Castile in Spain sometime between 1252 and 1285. Although England had similar regulations concerning the stationers, "the English book trade . . . developed not around the universities, as on the Continent, but in London, where the stationers formed a guild as early as 1403." This guild was known famously as the Stationers' Company...

As the book trade grew in volume, the number of scribes increased dramatically, and a scribal industry began to emerge as a profession.... [t]he book trade continued to flourish in major European cities, and the number of scribes and illuminators increased substantially as a result. "By the late thirteenth century in Paris (a century later in England), ateliers of scribes and illuminators were known by the name of their master artists," and "the names of scribes, illuminators, parchment-makers and binders . . . [can be found] in tax records, though few names can be linked with surviving books."
He goes on to note that the 'challenge' to traditional manuscripts by printed works was generational, as the traditionally produced works did not drop off in popularity, and printed works were actually more expensive than hand-made works in the first generation. The technology to produce them was new and not an industrial technology; there were very few people who knew how to make or use it, and it still required a very substantial amount of labor. The works were certainly popular, which demand increased their price given the limited supply, but they did not replace the Medieval method for generations -- only supplemented it.

I don't think that Tex is at all wrong about the way the general history is presented, however. It's just that here as so often with the Middle Ages, the Modern age has gotten the truth completely backwards.

13 comments:

Texan99 said...

I see that graph as a dramatic increase. You?

Grim said...

Circa 200 years on from Gutenberg, yes. At first, no: it's almost a flatline until the late 1500s, and a very slight incline until about 1650.

Texan99 said...

No quarrel with you there. Most hockey sticks show a curve if you look closely enough at the discontinuity, but the contrast between the slope before and after is nevertheless so striking that virtually no commentator on the period has ever failed to remark it. The part I didn't understand was how the relatively low availability of books before the printing press has often been overstated. It's true the availability of books in late antiquity wasn't zero, but it was insufficient to support a corps of professionally compensated writers, whereas the development of such a corps after the arrival of the printing press was dramatic.

I think your point about Mallory is right on target, from Ms. Le Guin's point of view. When there's scarcely any such thing as making an ordinary living by writing for a mass-publishing house, books will be written by people who have the means and leisure to concentrate their efforts in that direction without starving, and sometimes by highly educated people who, being confined in a relatively privileged style (not starved to death or deprived of writing implements), have difficulty in finding any other way to fill their time. Those circumstances produce a different approach to literature than our present workaday attitude--but then it's odd to hear the present methods complained of by someone who's been able to make an ordinary living writing. Does she really wish she'd been able to write only if she had an independent income or the spur of incarceration?

Gringo said...

Re flatline and hockey stick: if you change the graph to books published per capita, you will get less discontinuity.

Texan99 said...

Good stats here:

http://vkc.library.uu.nl/vkc/seh/research/Lists/Research%20Desk/Attachments/14/Charting%20the%20'Rise%20of%20the%20West'.pdf

Grim said...

Leaving the methodology aside for the moment -- woah. In the Twefth Century, more than three quarters of a million books. In the Thirteenth, on top of that, another 1.76 million. In the Fourteenth Century, which is the 1300s, they think nearly three million books were produced in Europe. In the 1400s, which begins to include printed books in the second half, it's another five million.

So we're not talking about a specialist trade at all. If those figures are right, this was a major focus of the pre-Industrial Age economy. At a time when this was very hard (including the early printed books), they were doing a ton of it.

Texan99 said...

Well, they weren't doing zero, and they weren't doing anything like the volume that came later.

Grim said...

There were a lot more people later, though, as Gringo says.

Still, the point of the story is: the printing press itself didn't change the game all that much. It was the industrial revolution that made book publishing a huge deal, and that was centuries later. Nor have we examined the quality of the books: I would wager that it has declined as numbers have gone up. The King James Bible might account for a lot of the expansion of printed titles in its era, and still today; but we're making a lot more today that adds nothing to human knowledge, and indeed detracts from it by pushing terrible ideas it would be better not to push. Or no ideas, as seems to be the most of what gets written. The average novel never gets published, Raymond Chandler wrote in 'The Simple Art of Murder,' but the average mystery does.

Texan99 said...

"There were a lot more people later"--per capita figures still show a sharp inflection point near 1440.

"the printing press itself didn't change the game all that much. It was the industrial revolution"--if you like. I suppose there would have been little impetus to build a printing press if people hadn't already started using block printing while experiencing a slow but growing pressure for greater output. The innovation process reached a critical point as books penetrated more lives more fully, and took off like wildfire, with increased supply and demand feeding each other.

Or, in terms of the OP, it was the changeover from a small, relatively low-volume (though growing) activity dominated by volunteers with independent means, to a widespread commercial activity at which a significant portion of the population could earn a living for the first time in history, much to the cognitive dissonance of socialist writers.

Artists traditionally have had love-hate relationships with their patrons, if they weren't wealthy enough to serve as their own patrons. The modern patron tends to be the great unwashed commercial public.

Grim said...

...dominated by volunteers with independent means...

You're talking about who authored books, but notice the difference in who wrote them. The shift was from institutional actors supported by their institution (i.e., Catholic monks in the early Middle Ages) to a vibrant industry (the scribes, who took over the work of the monks for pay, made universities possible, and then began to form guilds and booksellers in major cities, supporting a trade in books).

People didn't write novels or make a living doing that, but lots more people made a living telling oral stories. There were whole classes of oral storytellers we don't have today (skalds, bards, scops, jongleurs, troubadours) because we shifted that effort to books. That's a change, and maybe for good or for ill, but it's not really a change in the output of stories. What evidence we have suggests that there was a very large class of professional storytellers -- they just weren't authors in our sense.

Texan99 said...

Then no doubt what Ms. LeGuin should be upset about is that modern publishers are interested in making money, whereas the people who paid oral storytellers millions in signing bonuses cared only about the art.

Grim said...

I have been ignoring the LeGuin aspect of this discussion, since her opinions aren't so important to me as the history is. Nevertheless, it is clearly true that the oral poets were motivated to a degree by money. That is one reason that they built up the importance of generosity and liberality as lordly virtues to be praised in their poetry! "Generous prince," "breaker of rings," "hater of the dragon's bed" -- all these point to how awesome it is for the lord to give the poet more in the way of gifts and treasures.

Texan99 said...

Well, as you know, I believe people in general are motivated by the need to satisfy material wants. That's why I'm amused by artists who decry materialism while expecting to earn a living by producing art. Ms. LeGuin is like a musician who wants the artistic freedom of playing before small live audiences on handmade instruments, while enjoying the income available to someone who taps into a mass market via recording and broadcasting. "But . . . the crass commercialism of it all!" The best gig always has been to glom onto a rich guy who will give you your artistic head, but that's not quite the same thing as disinterested highmindedness.

I'll listen all day to an ascetic who argues for ascetisim, but I'm not about to buy the same schtick from someone on a comfy sofa in the air conditioning.

Nevertheless, oddly enough, I just love LeGuin's novels.