In the beginning was the Word…So begins the gospel of John, whose opening sentence proclaims the mind-boggling Christian doctrine of the divine Incarnation in Jesus. Don’t worry. I have no intention of writing a blog about that subject. I wouldn’t dare. In fact, I shall quibble a bit with John, for anterior to the Word there must have been the Letter. And though John said that Jesus was the Word, Jesus himself only claimed to be two letters, the Alpha and the Omega. About letters I must write a bit, for the invention of the alphabet lies behind almost everything in our cultural history. It is extraordinary enough that human beings, unique among all animal species, developed the capacity of complex articulate speech. More remarkable yet is that they developed means of preserving the articulations of human speech beyond the moment of its articulation and, indeed, beyond the lives of its speakers. In our language, letters put together make words. But the Word that concerns me here, usually spelled Worde, was likely a place name in Western Europe made vaguely familiar if not exactly famous in British cultural history on account of the achieved fame of a immigrant Fleming to London in the later part of the fifteenth century, one Wynkyn de Worde. (You can modernize the spelling of his first name, but wy would you want to?)
Wynkyn was a journeyman associate of William Caxton, the man credited for introducing into England the craft of printing with moveable cast metal types. Wynkyn became Caxton’s heir, and after Caxton’s death he eventually set up his shop in London’s Fleet Street, which remains to this day at least the symbolic center of Anglophone printing on account of the newspapers headquartered there of old. The history of the fifteenth-century printing revolution in Europe features a considerable number of geniuses in the fields of mechanical fabrication, business vision, and commercial innovation. A German, Johannes Gutenberg, had invented the basic techniques of letterpress about 1450. His famous Bible dates from 1455. It is sometimes called “the forty-two line Bible”, and indeed there was some symbolism in the number, though I shall not allow that to tempt me to digression. William Caxton is called the father of English printing, though his first book printed in the English language actually appeared in Bruges in 1475. But two years later he was printing in London. I have always though it poetically appropriate that the first English language book Caxton printed there (1477) was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: a collaborative achievement involving two kinds of creative genius. But everything about the origins of printing are testimonies to the astonishing brilliance of human abstract thinking and mechanical skill.
Homo sapiens literally means the knowing man. And perhaps the most important thing the species has known is how preserve for their posterity what it is they have known. As Milton put it so beautifully: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” When we think of dramatic moments in the history of human progress, we are likely to invoke the invention of the wheel. On the level of intellection, I should suggest as perhaps the most appropriate analogy the invention of the letter. The achievement of representing in graphic form the vocalizations of a broad suite of conventional signs catalogued in orderly form in an alphabet, even if we can understand what that means, may not seem front-page news; but it most definitely should be.
“Revolutionary” hardly does justice to the development of graphic technology in fifteenth-century Europe. It was achieved not by boffins or theoreticians but by hard-headed practical artisans like Wynken de Worde, men trying to make a buck. Letterpress printing is a very simple technique that almost any intelligent person can easily understand. But to do it involved all sorts of precision engineering in metallurgy, finely tuned carpentry, finely tuned metal carving and casting, and the means of applying great redirected compressive force. And this is just to speak of the basic printing machine itself. The material on which the printing was to be applied, mainly paper made of varying materials, but also animal skins, and the inks to be used in the application—all these were matters of the greatest craft relevance requiring expertise to be gained only through lengthy and robust experimentation.
So the first European printers were businessmen whose business often required expert mechanical knowledge. For many of them it demanded also erudition. That is, they were likely also to be scholars and editors. Neither Caxton nor de Worde was a deeply erudite man, but many others among the early printers were. Classical texts were written in Latin and Greek after all. Among the many famous scholar-printers the Venetian Aldus Manutius (they are known by the Latin form of their vernacular names for obvious reasons) is conspicuous both for his erudition and for commercial innovation. He could be said to have invented the small format of the modern paperback, for example. Most readers know the distinction between a folio and a quarto. A folio is printed on a large sheet of paper intended to be folded once in the middle to make four pages in a printed book. If you fold the sheet a second time you will find you have eight pages, or an octavo sheet. (Octo is Latin for the number eight.) To risk a daring analogy, it is a distinction parallel to that in handkerchiefs between a blower and a shower. Do you use it to blow your nose or to stick out from a breast pocket to look spiffy? A folio is likely to be ensconced on the polished hardwood shelves of a fine library. A quarto, like a modern paperback, is more likely to be carted around in a book-bag or back-pack, bumped and scraped and coffee-stained. It is much more probable that the folio will still be enjoying its ceremonial status fifty years hence than will the quarto.
As Shakespeare gained a popular following, several of his plays were published in relatively cheap individual editions as quartos. They sold like hot cakes, however hot cakes are sold. But relatively few of those copies have survived. They were nearly all read to death, left at the beach, or chewed up by the family pet over the ensuing four hundred years. But the sumptuous folio put together after the playwright’s death was a coffee-table book, a shower, not a blower. Nobody’s going to take a folio to the beach! But the Folger Library in Washington has, I believe, eighty-two of first folios of Shakespeare! Earphones and books on tape? That’s a different matter. Wynkyn de Worde would have been on it like white on rice.
I might sometime in another essay or another life report on my own experiences in London in 1976-1977. What was the bicentennial of the American Declaration of Independence was the quincentenary of the first printing in London. I spent that year as the visiting fellow of the William Morris Society, housed in Morris’s eighteenth-century mansion on the Thames at Hammersmith, Kelmscott House. (This townhouse is not the more famous property in Oxfordshire, Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s summer house.) There was even a little of Morris still around the old London mansion, including one of the beautiful Albion presses that has been used on the famous Kelmscott Chaucer.
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