Book history for non-historians

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, book history, history of printing

When I saw the title, Printer's Error: Irreverent Stories From Book History, I thought a moment, then opened the book to confirm an immediate surmise. You'd be tickled to do the same. Authors J.P. Romney and Rebecca Romney give us eleven very enjoyable narratives that cover the history of Western printing, from Gutenberg (practically sued out of existence a decade after printing the famous Gutenberg Bible) to the demise of the "dollar book" in the 1930's, brought about by P.R. agents on behalf of the publishers (I wonder what the authors may write later on about the "influence" of electronic publishing).

Much of the chapter on Gutenberg and incunabula (material printed before 1500 AD) dwells on an opponent of printing, named Trithemius, who in 1492 printed (!) a diatribe against the impending demise of calligraphy, In Praise of Scribes. I am sure all the wonderful people who practice calligraphy either as a hobby (Neil DeGrasse Tyson) or professionally (Mark Van Stone) would find Trithemius's book both gratifying and amusing. So would the twenty-odd calligraphers and illuminators who worked with Donald Jackson to produce the Saint John's Bible. I was privileged to see certain folios that toured the U.S. last year. This is one of my photos from that exhibit.

But Gutenberg the unknown inventor, and Trithemius the well-known opponent of his legacy, are the subjects of Chapter 2. Chapter 1 is about a famous forgery, of a proof copy of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius from 1610. The chapter illuminates just how very difficult it is to perfect the paper, the ink, the typeface, the sewing, the binding, and a myriad of other details needed to truly fool the experts. Nobody, but nobody can do everything, and while many experts were indeed fooled from 2005 to some time in 2012, eventually a number of details (such as cotton rather than linen in the "rag" content of the paper) revealed the forgery.

This brings to mind an allied subject. I am not sure why anyone would wish to forge an "early" computer tape, say a magnetic tape from the 1950's. If they did, they would encounter a similar level of difficulty. I worked for an oil company in the 1980's and was involved in security and contingency planning. An oil company's most valuable possession is the seismic data from all the "shoots" they have carried out or commissioned over many years. Until recently (the past decade), however, they have been unable to afford to keep all that data totally online. The 9-track tapes used in the 1980's would seem "small" in capacity today, but at that time 150 Mbytes was a lot of data, and a 150 Mby disk drive cost hundreds of times as much as a tape. A seismic "shoot" could generate a dozen tapes full of data. Earlier generations of the same sort of 10-inch reel of tape held either 20 or 40 Mby. Prior to that there were 7-track tapes, and further back yet, analog recordings on various sizes of tape. But the plastic composition changed over the years, and after the early 1990's various tape cassettes (we called them "black square tapes") replaced 9-track. Each format requires a different machine to read it and write it, so "forging" a data tape, purportedly from some era of interest, would require locating, and probably repairing, a machine that hadn't been used for decades. I found it amusing that the oil company diligently stored old tapes in a dozen obsolete formats in a salt mine in Kansas, but hadn't thought to store appropriate machinery to be able to read those tapes.

Back to printed books. My favorite chapter is Chapter 6 on Ben Franklin, who created a publishing empire that became the 18^th Century version of the Internet, at least for the American colonies and the new nation they became. He was also a cutthroat businessman. When he had to, he went half-and-half with another printer to publish a psalter because of a paper shortage. Thereafter he started his own paper mill, and eventually established 18 of them. Once he had sufficient paper, he produced a quality product that drove the other publisher out of business. The many details in this chapter (as in all the others) bring to life the printing business of the mid-1700's.

And then the prior chapter tells of William Shakespeare and the early editions of certain of his plays that are called "the bad quartos". Did old Bill really have Hamlet saying, "To be, or not to be, Aye there's the point, / To Die, to sleepe, is that all? Aye all."? I grew up with the proverb that Shakespeare never edited; what he wrote was what was printed. Not so? Very likely!! The chapter doesn't dwell long on the bad quartos, though, being occupied with the risky venture four men carried out to produce the "First Folio" edition. They succeeded well enough, and today a First Folio, where it can be found, is worth a pretty penny: the most recently-auctioned one went for $5 million a decade ago.

Despite the title, few "errors" are seen. The subtitle is the real title, and the "irreverent" (I'd have said, "cheeky") stories are, as Mary Poppins sang, the "spoonful of honey" that "makes the medicine go down."