tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post8974000398568632939..comments2024-03-28T13:37:26.314-04:00Comments on Grim's Hall: Books & OverstatementGrimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-29413556896431166402015-06-18T14:34:57.514-04:002015-06-18T14:34:57.514-04:00Well, as you know, I believe people in general are...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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Nevertheless, oddly enough, I just love LeGuin's novels.Texan99https://www.blogger.com/profile/10479561573903660086noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-82444020418910864432015-06-18T12:48:32.309-04:002015-06-18T12:48:32.309-04:00I have been ignoring the LeGuin aspect of this dis...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. Grimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-27043714671317517922015-06-18T11:57:01.662-04:002015-06-18T11:57:01.662-04:00Then no doubt what Ms. LeGuin should be upset abou...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.Texan99https://www.blogger.com/profile/10479561573903660086noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-84975668868517602242015-06-18T11:50:45.101-04:002015-06-18T11:50:45.101-04:00...dominated by volunteers with independent means....<i>...dominated by volunteers with independent means...</i><br /><br />You're talking about who authored books, but notice the difference in who <i>wrote</i> 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). <br /><br />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. Grimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-28578228350369283312015-06-18T09:20:29.093-04:002015-06-18T09:20:29.093-04:00"There were a lot more people later"--pe..."There were a lot more people later"--per capita figures still show a sharp inflection point near 1440.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Texan99https://www.blogger.com/profile/10479561573903660086noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-46702093003266556622015-06-17T23:31:58.399-04:002015-06-17T23:31:58.399-04:00There were a lot more people later, though, as Gri...There were a lot more people later, though, as Gringo says. <br /><br />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. Grimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-43654922133113885592015-06-17T22:16:35.975-04:002015-06-17T22:16:35.975-04:00Well, they weren't doing zero, and they weren&...Well, they weren't doing zero, and they weren't doing anything like the volume that came later.Texan99https://www.blogger.com/profile/10479561573903660086noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-75895699505582516732015-06-17T21:49:55.187-04:002015-06-17T21:49:55.187-04:00Leaving the methodology aside for the moment -- wo...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. <br /><br />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. Grimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-76011424628864606852015-06-11T14:48:25.027-04:002015-06-11T14:48:25.027-04:00Good stats here:
http://vkc.library.uu.nl/vkc/seh...Good stats here:<br /><br />http://vkc.library.uu.nl/vkc/seh/research/Lists/Research%20Desk/Attachments/14/Charting%20the%20'Rise%20of%20the%20West'.pdfTexan99https://www.blogger.com/profile/10479561573903660086noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-68095778323468247372015-06-11T13:33:04.416-04:002015-06-11T13:33:04.416-04:00Re flatline and hockey stick: if you change the gr...Re flatline and hockey stick: if you change the graph to books published per capita, you will get less discontinuity.Gringonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-54856936855761979552015-06-11T09:02:53.500-04:002015-06-11T09:02:53.500-04:00No quarrel with you there. Most hockey sticks sho...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.<br /><br />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?Texan99https://www.blogger.com/profile/10479561573903660086noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-78247117538225901202015-06-10T22:58:32.078-04:002015-06-10T22:58:32.078-04:00Circa 200 years on from Gutenberg, yes. At first, ...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.Grimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5173950.post-2431911206693615262015-06-10T22:51:11.755-04:002015-06-10T22:51:11.755-04:00I see that graph as a dramatic increase. You?I see that graph as a dramatic increase. You?Texan99https://www.blogger.com/profile/10479561573903660086noreply@blogger.com