I did not see any complete Bibles, but I did see a certain number of five-page booklets [signatures] of several of the books of the Bible, with very clear and very proper lettering, and without any faults, which Your Eminence would have been able to read effortlessly with no glasses. Various witnesses told me that 158 copies had been completed, while others say there were 180. I am not certain of the quantity, but about the books’ completion, if people can be trusted, I have no doubts whatsoever. Had I known your wishes, I would certainly have bought a copy. Several of these five-page booklets were sent to the Emperor himself. I shall try, as far as possible, to have one of these Bibles delivered for sale and I will purchase one copy for you. But I am afraid that this may not be possible, both because of the distance and because, so they say, even before the books were finished, there were customers ready to buy them.16
An imaginary portrait of Johann Gutenberg. (photo credit 9.7)
The effects of Gutenberg’s invention were immediate and extraordinarily far-reaching, for almost at once many readers realized its great advantages: speed, uniformity of texts and relative cheapness.17 Barely a few years after the first bible had been printed, printing presses were set up all over Europe: in 1465 in Italy, 1470 in France, 1472 in Spain, 1475 in Holland and England, 1489 in Denmark. (Printing took longer to reach the New World: the first presses were established in 1533 in Mexico City and in 1638 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) It has been calculated that more than 30,000 incunabula (a seventeenth-century Latin word meaning “related to the cradle” and used to describe books printed before 1500) were produced on these presses.18 Considering that fifteenth-century print-runs were usually of fewer than 250 copies and hardly ever reached 1,000, Gutenberg’s feat must be seen as prodigious.19 Suddenly, for the first time since the invention of writing, it was possible to produce reading material quickly and in vast quantities.
It may be useful to bear in mind that printing did not, in spite of the obvious “end-of-the-world” predictions, eradicate the taste for handwritten text. On the contrary, Gutenberg and his followers attempted to emulate the scribe’s craft, and most incunabula have a manuscript appearance. At the end of the fifteenth century, even though printing was by then well established, care for the elegant hand had not died out, and some of the most memorable examples of calligraphy still lay in the future. While books were becoming more easily available and more people were learning to read, more were also learning to write, often stylishly and with great distinction, and the sixteenth century became not only the age of the printed word but also the century of the great manuals of handwriting.20 It is interesting to note how often a technological development — such as Gutenberg’s — promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede, making us aware of old-fashioned virtues we might otherwise have either overlooked or dismissed as of negligible importance. In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected — as far as statistics show — the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form. Those who see computer development as the devil incarnate (as Sven Birkerts portrays it in his dramatically titled Gutenberg Elegies)21 allow nostalgia to hold sway over experience. For example, 359,437 new books (not counting pamphlets, magazines and periodicals), were added in 1995 to the already vast collections of the Library of Congress.
The sudden increase in book production after Gutenberg emphasized the relation between the contents of a book and its physical form. For instance, since Gutenberg’s bible was intended to imitate the expensive handmade volumes of the time, it was bought in gathered sheets and bound by its purchasers into large, imposing tomes — usually quartos measuring about 12 by 16 inches,22 meant to be displayed on a lectern. A bible of this size in vellum would have required the skins of more than two hundred sheep (“a sure cure for insomnia,” commented the antiquarian bookseller Alan G. Thomas).23 But cheap and quick production led to a larger market of people who could afford copies to read privately, and who therefore did not require books in large type and format, and Gutenberg’s successors eventually began producing smaller, pocketable volumes.
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, and many of the Greek scholars who had established schools on the shores of the Bosphorus left for Italy. Venice became the new centre of classical learning. Some forty years later the Italian humanist Aldus Manutius, who had instructed such brilliant students as Pico della Mirandola in Latin and Greek, finding it difficult to teach without scholarly editions of the classics in practical formats, decided to take up Gutenberg’s craft and established a printing-house of his own where he would be able to produce exactly the kind of books he needed for his courses. Aldus chose to establish his press in Venice in order to take advantage of the presence of the displaced Eastern scholars, and probably employed as correctors and compositors other exiles, Cretan refugees who had formerly been scribes.24 In 1494 Aldus began his ambitious publishing program, which was to produce some of the most beautiful volumes in the history of printing: first in Greek — Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides — and then in Latin — Virgil, Horace, Ovid. In Aldus’s view, these illustrious authors were to be read “without intermediaries” — in the original tongue, and mostly without annotations or glosses — and to make it possible for readers to “converse freely with the glorious dead” he published grammar books and dictionaries alongside the classical texts.25 Not only did he seek the services of local experts, he also invited eminent humanists from all over Europe — including such luminaries as Erasmus of Rotterdam — to stay with him in Venice. Once a day these scholars would meet in Aldus’s house to discuss what titles would be printed and what manuscripts would be used as reliable sources, sifting through the collections of classics established in the previous centuries. “Where medieval humanists accumulated,” noted the historian Anthony Grafton, “Renaissance ones discriminated.”26 Aldus discriminated with an unerring eye. To the list of classical writers he added the works of the great Italian poets, Dante and Petrarch among others.
An elegant example of Aldus’s work: the sober beauty of Cicero’s Epistolae Familiares. (photo credit 9.8)
As private libraries grew, readers began to find large volumes not only difficult to handle and uncomfortable to carry, but inconvenient to store. In 1501, confident in the success of his first editions, Aldus responded to readers’ demands and brought out a series of pocket-sized books in octavo — half the size of quarto — elegantly printed and meticulously edited. To keep down the production costs he decided to print a thousand copies at a time, and to use the page more economically he employed a newly designed type, “italic”, created by the Bolognese punch-cutter Francesco Griffo, who also cut the first roman type in which the capitals were shorter than the ascending (full-height) letters of the lower case to ensure a better-balanced line. The result was a book that appeared much plainer than the ornate manuscript editions popular throughout the Middle Ages, a volume of elegant sobriety. What counted above all, for the owner of an Aldine pocket-book, was the text, clearly and eruditely printed — not a preciously decorated object.27 Griffo’s italic type (first used in a woodcut illustrating a collection of letters of Saint Catherine of Siena, printed in 1500) gracefully drew the reader’s attention to the delicate relationship between letters; according to the modern English critic Sir Francis Meynell, italics slowed down the reader’s eye, “increasing his capacity to absorb the beauty of the text”.28
On the open book and on the heart held by Saint Catherine, the earliest use of Griffo’s italics, in an Aldine edition of the Saint’s letters. (photo credit 9.9)
Since these books were cheaper than manuscripts, especially illuminated ones, and since an identical replacement could be purchased if a copy was lost or damaged, they became, in the eyes of the new readers, less symbols of wealth than of intellectual aristocracy, and essential tools for study. Booksellers and stationers had produced, both in the days of ancient Rome and in the early Middle Ages, books as
merchandise to be traded, but the cost and pace of their production weighed upon the readers with a sense of privilege in owning something unique. After Gutenberg, for the first time in history, hundreds of readers possessed identical copies of the same book, and (until a reader gave a volume private markings and a personal history) the book read by someone in Madrid was the same book read by someone in Montpellier. So successful was Aldus’s enterprise that his editions were soon being imitated throughout Europe: in France by Gryphius in Lyons, as well as Colines and Robert Estienne in Paris, and in The Netherlands by Plantin in Antwerp and Elzevir in Leiden, The Hague, Utrecht and Amsterdam. When Aldus died in 1515, the humanists who attended his funeral erected all around his coffin, like erudite sentinels, the books he had so lovingly chosen to print.
The example of Aldus and others like him set the standard for at least a hundred years of printing in Europe. But in the next couple of centuries the readers’ demands once again changed. The numerous editions of books of every kind offered too large a choice; competition between publishers, which up to then had merely encouraged better editions and greater public interest, began producing books of vastly impoverished quality. By the mid-sixteenth century, a reader would have been able to choose from well over eight million printed books, “more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in AD 330.”29 Obviously these changes were neither sudden nor all-pervasive, but in general, from the end of the sixteenth century, “publisher-booksellers were no longer concerned with patronizing the world of letters, but merely sought to publish books whose sale was guaranteed. The richest made their fortune on books with a guaranteed market, reprints of old best-sellers, traditional religious works and, above all, the Church Fathers.”30 Others cornered the school market with glosses of scholarly lectures, grammar manuals and sheets for hornbooks.
The hornbook, in use from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, was generally the first book put in a student’s hand. Very few have survived to our time. The hornbook consisted of a thin board of wood, usually oak, about nine inches long and five or six inches wide, bearing a sheet on which were printed the alphabet, and sometimes the nine digits and the Lord’s Prayer. It had a handle, and was covered in front by a transparent layer of horn to prevent it from becoming dirty; the board and the sheet of horn were then held together by a thin brass frame. The English landscape gardener and doubtful poet William Shenstone describes the principle in The Schoolmistress, in these words:
An Elizabethan hornbook which miraculously survived four centuries of children’s hands. (photo credit 9.10)
Its nineteenth-century Nigerian counterpart. (photo credit 9.11)
Their books of stature small they took in hand,
Which with pellucid horn securèd are,
To save from finger wet the letter fair.31
Similar books, known as “prayer boards”, were used in Nigeria in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to teach the Koran. They were made of polished wood, with a handle at the top; the verses were written on a sheet of paper pasted directly onto the board.32
Books one could slip into one’s pocket; books in a companionable shape; books that the reader felt could be read in any number of places; books that would not be judged awkward outside a library or a cloister: these books appeared under all kinds of guises. Throughout the seventeenth century, hawkers sold little booklets and ballads (described in The Winter’s Tale as suitable “for man, or woman, of all sizes”)33 which became known as chap-books34 in the following century. The preferred size of popular books had been the octavo, since a single sheet could produce a booklet of sixteen pages. In the eighteenth century, perhaps because readers now demanded fuller accounts of the events narrated in tales and ballads, the sheets were folded in twelve parts and the booklets were fattened to twenty-four paperback pages.35 The classic series produced by Elzevir of Holland in this format achieved such popularity among less well-off readers that the snobbish Earl of Chesterfield was led to comment, “If you happen to have an Elzevir classic in your pocket, neither show it nor mention it.”36
The pocket paperback as we now know it did not come into being until much later. The Victorian age, which saw the formation in England of the Publishers’ Association, the Booksellers’ Association, the first commercial agencies, the Society of Authors, the royalty system and the one-volume, six-shilling new novel, also witnessed the birth of the pocket-book series.37 Large-format books, however, continued to encumber the shelves. In the nineteenth century, so many books were being published in huge formats that a Gustave Doré cartoon depicted a poor clerk at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris trying to move a single one of these huge tomes. Binding cloth replaced the costly leather (the English publisher Pickering was the first to use it, in his Diamond Classics of 1822) and, since the cloth could be printed upon, it was soon employed to carry advertising. The object that the reader now held in his hand — a popular novel or science manual in a comfortable octavo bound in blue cloth, sometimes protected with paper wrappers on which ads might also be printed — was very different from the morocco-bound volumes of the preceding century. Now the book was a less aristocratic object, less forbidding, less grand. It shared with the reader a certain middle-class elegance that was economical and yet pleasing — a style which the designer William Morris would turn into a popular industry but which ultimately — in Morris’s case — became a new luxury: a style based on the conventional beauty of everyday things. (Morris in fact modelled his ideal book on one of Aldus’s volumes.) In the new books which the mid-nineteenth-century reader expected, the measure of excellence was not rarity but an alliance of pleasure and sober practicality. Private libraries were now appearing in bed-sitters and semi-detached homes, and their books suited the social standing of the rest of the furnishings.
The booklet hawker, a sixteenth-century walking bookshop. (photo credit 9.12)
A Gustave Doré caricature satirizing the new European fad for large-sized books. (photo credit 9.13)
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, it had been assumed that books were meant to be read indoors, within the secluding walls of a private or public library. Now publishers were producing books meant to be taken out into the open, books made specifically to travel. In nineteenth-century England, the newly leisured bourgeoisie and the expansion of the railway combined to create a sudden urge for long journeys, and literate travellers found that they required reading material of specific content and size. (A century later, my father was still making a distinction between the green leather-bound books of his library, which no one was allowed to remove from that sanctuary, and the “ordinary paperbacks” which he left to yellow and wither on the wicker table on the patio, and which I would sometimes rescue and bring into my room as if they were stray cats.)
In 1792, Henry Walton Smith and his wife, Anna, opened a small news-vendor’s shop in Little Grosvenor Street in London. Fifty-six years later W.H. Smith & Son opened the first railway bookstall, at Euston Station in London. It was soon stocking such series as Routledge’s Railway Library, the Travellers’ Library, the Run & Read Library and the Illustrated Novels and Celebrated Works series. The format of these books varied slightly, but they were mainly octavos, with a few (Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, for example) issued as smaller demi-octavo, and bound in cardboard. The bookstalls (to judge by a photograph of W.H. Smith’s stall at Blackpool North, taken in 1896) sold not only these books but magazines and newspapers, so that travellers would have ample choice of reading material.
The W.H. Smith railway bookstall at Blackpool North Station, London, 1896. (photo credit 9.14)
In 1841, Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz of Leipzig had launched one of the most ambitious of all paperback series; at an average of one title a week it published more than five thousand volumes in its first hundred years, bringing its circulation to somewhere between fifty and sixty million copies. While the choice of titles was excellent, the production was not equal
to their content. The books were squarish, set in tiny type, with identical typographical covers that appealed neither to the hand nor to the eye.38
Seventeen years later, Reclam Publishers in Leipzig published a twelve-volume edition of Shakespeare in translation. It was an immediate success, which Reclam followed by subdividing the edition into twenty-five little volumes of the plays in pink paper covers at the sensational price of one decimal pfennig each. All works by German writers dead for thirty years came into the public domain in 1867, and this allowed Reclam to continue the series under the title Universal-Bibliothek. The company began with Goethe’s Faust, and continued with Gogol, Pushkin, Bjørnson, Ibsen, Plato and Kant. In England, imitative reprint series of “the classics” — Nelson’s New Century Library, Grant Richards’s World’s Classics, Collins’s Pocket Classics, Dent’s Everyman’s Library — rivalled but did not overshadow the success of the Universal-Bibliothek,39 which remained for years the standard paperback series.
Until 1935. One year earlier, after a weekend spent with Agatha Christie and her second husband in their house in Devon, the English publisher Allen Lane, waiting for his train back to London, looked through the bookstalls at the station for something to read. He found nothing that appealed to him among the popular magazines, the expensive hardbacks and the pulp fiction, and it occurred to him that what was needed was a line of cheap but good pocket-sized books. Back at The Bodley Head, where Lane worked with his two brothers, he put forward his scheme. They would publish a series of brightly coloured paperback reprints of the best authors. They would not merely appeal to the common reader; they would tempt everyone who could read, highbrows and lowbrows alike. They would sell books not only in bookstores and bookstalls, but also at tea-shops, stationers and tobacconists.
A History of Reading Page 15