Trithemius took his monastic vows when he was twenty-one years old. The next year, the head of St. Martin’s had been transferred and the abbacy was offered to the young and ambitious Trithemius. For the next two and a half decades, he helmed the Sponheim Abbey. And life was good. There weren’t any terrible stepfathers around, so Trithemius could spend his time studying and reading. Sure, there weren’t a lot of books to read per se—besides a few copies of the Vulgate Bible, there were only eight volumes at the abbey when he first arrived—but as the new abbot, he could trade and purchase books to his heart’s content—which he did, eventually accumulating a library of two thousand volumes, one of the most impressive and enviable of its day. Is there a better job on earth than creating a library? (That’s a rhetorical question. We know the answer is no.)
Still, even the Garden of Eden had a problem with snakes. Trithemius’s snakes were lazy, blockheaded monks who’d rather take the easy road than engage in God’s true work: making books by hand. That’s right, God wants you to make books. Using only your hands. Within the pages of In Praise of Scribes, Trithemius writes about the infuriating monks at the abbey, who made excuses such as (and this is in Trithemius’s own words), “I cannot write, I am unable to remain in the cell for the entire day, I will gladly go to labors outside, I will not in the least refuse to dig or carry stones, but I pray only that I may not need to suffer distress in those things which are completely against my nature.”
Oh, boo hoo. You can’t sit in a dark cell and copy books by hand? Well, too bad! Life isn’t supposed to be a picnic where you carry stones around all day! Trithemius wrote In Praise of Scribes in order to put his wimpy, whiny monks in their proper place—and this, forty-plus years after Gutenberg should have made hand-copying extinct.
For Trithemius, handwriting a text was a deeply spiritual, meditative act. There’s a compelling point here. Writing cements the words in a copyist’s mind. “[T]he printed work is a thing made of paper . . . but the writer who commends his writings to membranes [parchment or vellum] extends both himself and those things he writes far into the future.”
Handwriting was a means of purifying one’s soul toward Christ and preventing that most pernicious of monastic sins: idleness. By righteously keeping his hands busy in a dim cell each day, the Benedictine monk was said to reap the following rewards: “his most precious time [will be] employed fruitfully,” “while he is writing, his intellect [will be] illuminated,” his “affections [will be] enkindled on behalf of devotion,” and “he will be endowed in the afterlife with a singular reward.”
Then along came the printing press and screwed everything up. Now, sweaty, drunken craftsmen could do in hours what pious, meditative monks used to take weeks to accomplish. How is that the correct order of things? Serving God is supposed to be way harder than normal life. More gratifying, sure, but harder. Without copying books by hand, what would monks do all day? Lounge around on their luxurious rocks? No! By God, no!
The seventh and eighth chapters of In Praise of Scribes (out of sixteen total) do actually contain some notable criticisms about the emerging technology of print. “Handwriting placed on parchment [animal skin] will be able to endure a thousand years. But how long, forsooth, will printing last, which is dependent on paper? For if in its paper volume it lasts for two hundred years that is a long time.” Forsooth, indeed. While this is a bit of an exaggeration, point taken: paper is a weaker material and, therefore, all else being equal, not likely to last as long as parchment. Yet paper’s greatest vice is also its greatest virtue: relative to animal skin, it’s cheap. Because books printed on paper were more cost-effective than parchment, they could be produced on a significantly larger scale. So, yes, a single book printed on paper might not last as long as a book handwritten on parchment, but the “Collective” of printed books has outlasted its animal skin counterparts at a rate of nearly two to one. We are printed books. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
Very similar arguments have been made regarding the evolution from physical books to digital books in the twenty-first century. Trithemius would be appalled that fragile paper books would seem like mighty redwoods next to the immaterial ones and zeros of virtual space. You actually have to burn a physical book to destroy it, but a digital book can be obliterated with a high-powered magnet or a stumble over an electrical cord. It can even be remotely deleted against your will, as happened when Amazon erased illegal editions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from every one of its Kindles in 2009. (The actual term for deleting digital books in this way is “dropping them into the memory hole”—a phrase ironically lifted right from the pages of 1984.)
The poor availability of printed books in the fifteenth century was another point of criticism for Trithemius. Unlike manuscripts that had been in demand for three centuries, printing was still in its infancy. There were notably fewer printed books in circulation than hand-copied books. While this seemed like a big deal to Trithemius in 1492 (just like the limited availability of digital books might have seemed to someone in 2008), history has shown that after the initial start-up, the new technology will quickly surpass its predecessors. (Except for laserdiscs. And Betamax. And PDAs and Zip drives and QR codes. Okay, most innovative technology outpaces its predecessors.)
Not that the new technology necessarily kills the older ones. If print was supposed to kill manuscripts, it did a sadistically slow job of it. For hundreds of years after the invention of the printing press, works such as the poems of John Donne were produced specifically for circulation in manuscript form. Manuscripts didn’t (and for that matter, printed books won’t) suffer the quick and painless demise that many assumed.
There were copyists, Trithemius boldly declared, “who applied such a precise diligence to copying that they wrote not only correctly but also artfully, distinguishing their beautiful volumes by variation in notations, punctuation, and figures.” In other words, manuscripts are prettier than print. Oh yes, there are some gorgeous hand-copied books out there. We fully agree on that. We’re trying very hard not to begin rhapsodizing about the Book of Kells. But to use the aesthetic qualities of one technology to discount the value of another is where our roads fork.
The same argument could be made (and absolutely is) by people who mourn the transition to digital books. There’s a different sensory quality to a printed book than a digital one: the feel of the pages, the sound of the spine cracking upon being opened, the smell of the paper. These are truly joyful—and addictive—pleasures of a printed book. Still, those sensations are not enough to wholly discount the virtues of the digital book. One of those unique virtues, for example, is discretion. No longer do you have to sit on a train, bending your book covers to prevent anyone from seeing your copy of Twilight or The Da Vinci Code or Fifty Shades of Grey. Now you can sit back and, with reckless abandon, enjoy some of the most embarrassing books humanity has to offer.
One literary scholar has summed up this knee-jerk resistance to technology by stating, “As we rationalize our resistance to digitalization, we reveal the fetishism of our relationship to the book. We are all too much like a toddler with a favorite, old blanket; the book comforts us because it feels good and we can carry it around.” This is not to say that a physical book shouldn’t be treasured, or isn’t ineffably beautiful. A few favorites spring to mind right away. (We have a whole chapter on some of those.) But digital books can be beautiful in their way, too. There are coders, for example, who find algorithms “sexy.” To quote Seinfeld, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Sexiness, of the leather, paper, or digital variety, is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
But of one thing we can be certain: resistance to technology is futile. For those who define themselves as against the tide, know that your struggle is centuries old. The objects to which you (and we) cling were once vilified by those who came before. Surely there’s an ancient Egyptian out there somewhere turning up his
nose at the thought of replacing his clean and elegant papyrus with processed animal carcasses. As the old saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—“the more things change, the more things stay the same.”
Trithemius knew that his resistance to print was unpopular and, truthfully, impractical. Outside this conflict with the literarily lethargic monks of St. Martin’s, Trithemius’s regard for print was a “highly favorable one.” Of the two thousand volumes in the Sponheim Abbey collection, twelve hundred were printed books. That means for every two spiritually endowed and lovingly created manuscripts in Trithemius’s collection, he owned three that had been printed. He was able to create such an enormous medieval library because printed books made copies cheaper and more accessible. Very few book lovers would turn that deal down.
Thirteen years after he wrote In Praise of Scribes, the conflict with his monks became so contentious that Trithemius left St. Martin’s and took up the abbacy of St. Jacob in Würzburg. It was the loss of his books from that move that affected him the most, the “library of two-thousand books which I assembled . . . and without which it sometimes seemed that I could not live.” We feel for you, sir. Despite his tribulations, Trithemius found comfort in the printing press for its ability to restore at least a portion of his lost books. “The world today is abounding with volumes . . . For the art which they call printing . . . daily produces an almost countless number of texts by old and recent authors alike.” It is human nature to hold on to your ideals with fists clenched, at least until the object of your indignation can benefit you personally. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
IT’S FAIRLY easy to track Trithemius, who wrote, and printed, dozens of treatises, from his “anti-printing” days at the Sponheim Abbey through to St. Jacob in Würzburg where he spent the remainder of his life. Gutenberg, on the other hand, is an entirely different can of kerscheblotzer. Gutenberg never wrote anything that survived. Not a description of his work, not a letter to a friend, not even a passing note throwing shade at Fust and Schöffer for the lawsuit. For hundreds of years we weren’t even sure what the first printed book was.
In the three centuries after Gutenberg died, there was only one trustworthy near-contemporary description of the first book printed in Europe. In the Cologne Chronicle of 1499, the printer Ulrich Zell named Gutenberg the inventor of the printing press and claimed to have seen his first book: a Latin Bible with an abnormally large font. (A 1455 document, one discovered only in the twentieth century, described it as possible to read “without effort, and indeed without glasses.”) So all someone had to do to discover the first book was to follow Zell’s description and look through all the known books from the fifteenth century, setting aside any unattributed Bibles printed with unusually large type.
That should have been easy enough. How many books could Europe really print in fifty years? Well, it turns out about twenty-nine thousand editions have been documented. And that’s twenty-nine thousand distinct editions on record. The number actually printed is probably much higher: recent scholarship suggests, not without significant pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, that around 30 percent of editions from this period have been lost entirely. Even taking only the number of documented editions and using a very conservative estimate for each print run (say, around one hundred fifty individual books per edition), you’re looking at a number of single volumes that reaches well into the millions. It’s kind of like someone from 2041 asking, “C’mon, how many Web pages could realistically have been created in the first fifty years of the Internet?”
Books printed before 1501, within the first fifty years(ish) of Gutenberg’s invention, are called “incunabula.” This comes from a Latin term coined in 1640 meaning “in the cradle.” In other words, the babies of print. Incunabula are essentially the only books considered rare and collectible simply because of their age. A book from 1830 might seem old from our modern perspective, but in the collecting world, it’s not. Books have been printed for hundreds of years, and the nineteenth century was hardly that long ago in comparison.
Incunabula (and its singular, incunabulum) is a bit difficult to say, so these days many specialists refers to such books in conversation as “incunables.” If you think that doesn’t sound quite fancy enough, you’re not alone. This Anglicizing of Latin is relatively new, and has been frowned upon by the more snobbish of the rare book community. Here’s a delightful statement from a book on collecting published in 1982: “The Englished forms ‘incunable’ and ‘incunables,’ though a century old, are to be spat at.” I guess we all have our silly lines to draw in the sand. For example, it is an irrefutable fact that the term fifteeners, another modern coinage for incunabula, is an inexcusable abomination before all that is holy and good in this world. That’s just a fact.
Naturally, some of our earliest sources about the first printed book are incunables themselves, and they can be spotty, garbled, and contradictory. The aforementioned Ulrich Zell had been printing since at least the early 1460s, and was probably trained in Mainz. As far as patchy historical records go, his mention of Gutenberg’s Bible was one of the firmest leads a historian could ask for. Scholars delved into their stacks of surviving printed books, triangulating requirements: Bible, large type, no printer information. Eventually, in the 1760s, the thousands of incunabula candidates were reduced to just two. Two unattributed fifteenth-century Latin Bibles with large type, each seemingly excellent candidates for the title of first printed book. One of these Bibles was nicknamed B42 (the font size allowed forty-two lines of text to be printed on each page), and the other was B36 (obviously for a similar reason).
With these two Bibles in hand, it still took the world’s best print scholars more than a century to determine which had come first. Not until 1890 did Karl Dziatzko demonstrate in a cool bit of biblio-sleuthing that certain textual elements in B36 could have come only from a compositor who made copyediting errors while using B42. This definitively proved that B42 was older, and the rightful heir to the title: the Gutenberg Bible.
To think, until the end of the nineteenth century, scholars (or any Johann Doe, really) could have been reading the B42 Bible completely unaware that he was holding one of the first books ever printed in the Western world. Yet even if a reader never realized the importance of the book in front of him, he still would have been struck by the absolute beauty of it.
The first time you see a Gutenberg Bible is a spellbinding experience. Yes, you know you’re going to be impressed because you know how historically important it is. That doesn’t prepare you, however, for the impact of actually standing in front of the thing. This is one of those moments in life you’ll always remember.
Why is Gutenberg’s Bible so beautiful? Part of the answer can be traced to the competition he was facing. He had to compete with a manuscript book market that was already well established and thriving. If his new product were to succeed, it had to spring into life fully formed and flawless, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Gutenberg was trying to cut into the robust market of handwritten books, many of which were richly decorated and illuminated in an aesthetic tradition developed over a thousand years.
The Gutenberg Bible was printed as a double folio, fairly large by today’s standards—each page measured roughly a foot wide and a foot and a half tall. It’s partially the book’s size that first strikes the viewer, conveying a sense of dignity and splendor. That size wasn’t just for decoration, though. Gutenberg Bibles were characteristically large because they were meant to be used as pulpit or refectory books, practical volumes “that could be produced relatively inexpensively and purchased without great sacrifice by churches or monasteries.” Gutenberg isn’t often given credit as a savvy entrepreneur, but he knew his audience, and he created the perfect product for it. Monasteries were one of the largest consumers of books, and thus, large-format Bibles were the safer bet. Many of the B42 Bibles that exist today have a long history of ownership (called provenance) within monasteries, attesting to
Gutenberg’s success in targeting that demographic.
Current estimates suggest that around 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible were printed, a third of which were printed on vellum—which is impressive when you consider that there are about 1,300 pages in these Bibles. At four printed pages per folio-size sheet, and one animal yielding between two and four sheets, each single copy of a vellum Gutenberg Bible would have required a whopping 170 calves or 300 sheep. For a modern comparison, consider that the largest herd of cattle in the United States exists on a ranch spread out over three counties in central Florida. Deseret Ranch, owned by the Mormon Church, counts 44,000 head of cattle—or roughly enough vellum to make only 250 Gutenberg Bibles. So a tip of the hat to paper. You rock. Europe’s cattle industry never could have supported book production on the scale necessitated by the printing press. But paper could.
Public sales of the Gutenberg Bible have become some of the biggest events in bookselling history. One of the most famous of these sales occurred in London in 1847, resulting in the first Gutenberg Bible brought to the United States, entirely by mistake. James Lenox, a millionaire from New York, had authorized an agent to bid on his behalf at the March 12, 1847, sale of the library of one James Wilks. Because sending letters back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean would have made the auction last forever, Lenox’s agent, the awkwardly named David Davidson, had to use his best judgment when placing bids. It turns out that Davey-squared got a bit excited. It was an auction. It was the Gutenberg Bible. Who are we to judge? This agent fell into a bidding war with the famed bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps and the result was not cheap.
Before the Wilks sale, the record price for a Gutenberg Bible was £215. Sir Thomas planned to bid up to an astounding £300. When Davidson outbid him, Sir Thomas was not pleased. Caught in the urgency of the moment, Sir Thomas started placing bids way beyond his carefully planned limit. Between the two, the price just kept galloping toward the horizon like some gorgeous, financially unconcerned unicorn. The bids ping-ponged back and forth until Sir Thomas’s agent finally stepped in to “arrest [Sir Thomas’s] mad career” at £495. Davidson placed the winning bid at a mind-boggling £500, more than doubling the previous Gutenberg record. This “mad price” became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.
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