So Many Books

When you hear the word “technology” what comes to mind? Computers? The internet? Cell phones? Some other gadget? Very likely whatever you think of is an electronic or digital something or other. But the definition of technology has nothing to do with electronics. According to my dictionary the definition of technology is “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.”

Now think about that for a minute and all the things that fall into the category of technology that we never even consider, especially old things, things that have been around forever before we were born, before our parents and grandparents were born even. Now take a look at the book in your hand or sitting beside you and consider what a technological marvel it is. The book as object is technological perfection, but that’s just my opinion which is kind of a biased one at that.

But consider all the things that go into the making of a book and let’s think back to Gutenberg’s time and consider how all the sciences came together to send the book on its way through history to become the object we know and love today.

Yesterday I talked about Gutenberg and what his real invention was. So we have the press already in existence, a descendent of wine and olive presses. And we have moveable type already in existence thanks to the Chinese, but now we have Gutenberg’s invention for creating metal type. All this is useless unless you have paper and paper has its own long and illustrious history.

We also need ink. Ever stop to wonder what ink is made of? Back then black ink was made of varnish colored with powder made from purifying soot. The black ink in Gutenberg’s Bible, however, is rather shiny and has been discovered to also contain copper, lead and titanium. The inks used for the hand illustrations contained cinnabar for the red color and to achieve the vivid blues required lapis lazuli. No wonder books used to be so expensive! As soon as printing began to spread, specialist ink manufacturers sprang up. The cost of the ink was one-third to one-quarter less than Gutenberg’s ink, but the quality was also not as good either.

Curiously, book binding was not such a big deal. It was not uncommon for books to be sold unbound. The more wealthy book collectors would have the book bound. Books were bound between two wooden boards and then covered with tanned calf or goatskin. The leather covers were then decorated with gold leaf, stamps, and sometimes metal clasps to hold the book closed when it wasn’t being read. Binding a book was a leather worker’s expertise and printers would send books outside their shop to be bound.

Clearly, the creation of a book relied upon a perfect storm of technologies all coming together at the same time. Pretty amazing when you think about it. I hope you aren’t getting bored with all this book history stuff. I will try to have a different topic tomorrow just to mix things up a bit.

First off, the new Star Trek rocks! As much as I love Next Generation and Jean Luc Picard, his quiet intelligence and the way the story develops and unfolds, the new one did keep me on the edge of my seat. In spite of knowing that Kirk and Spock and the crew would be perfectly fine, the movie still managed to make me feel they were in peril and might not survive. My Bookman and I did have to laugh though because in good Star Trek tradition, in one scene the unfortunate guy that beamed down wearing red did not make it. Most excellent!

Now that’s out of my system, let’s move on to something a little more refined, the history of the book. I have now reached Gutenberg’s marvelous invention. Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention was not, in fact, the printing press. There were already printing presses and printed books but these all used wood blocks to print. Nor was it the invention of moveable type. The Chinese had invented that in the eleventh century and used baked clay.

What Gutenberg did that revolutionized printing was invent a method of creating moveable metal type quickly and accurately. More specifically, he invented the method of making punches and molds so each letter was exactly the same and so you could make dozens and dozens of letters, say the letter “a” that looked exactly like every other letter “a” in your set of type. And because Gutenberg was a metallurgist (his father was a coin maker), he was also able to create just the right metal alloy to serve his purposes: lead, tin, and antimony heated to about 600 degrees fahrenheit.

While Gutenberg gets all the credit and fame, he didn’t get to spend many years in the printing business. He lost his presses and most of his type when Johann Fust decided to call in all the money he had leant to Gutenberg. The courts allowed Fust to foreclose and, very suspiciously, Fust then went into the printing business with Peter Schöffer in whose shop Gutenberg had his presses and who happened to be married to Fust’s daughter. Our poor Gutenberg did all the work but never really got to receive any of the profit from is invention.

The Gutenberg Bible was indeed printed by him, he did get some things off the presses before Fust and Schöffer conspired against him. The Bible consists of 641 leaves (equal to 1282 pages) and is divided into two volumes. Each page is 16.5 x 12 inches and the text printed in two columns on each page in a Gothic font. There are 42 lines on each page. A few early copies have only 40 lines and historians suspect that Gutenberg shaved the type down so he could fit more on the page thus saving 30 leaves of paper per copy (paper was expensive!).

The book was not entirely printed on the press. The capital letters that begin each sentence and chapter were done by hand as were all marginal decoration. The original print run is estimated at 180 copies. Of these 140 were printed on paper and 40 on vellum. There are 48 copies extant today, 36 on paper and 12 on vellum.

One of the vellum editions is on permanent display at the Huntington Library in southern California. When I lived there (in California that is, not at the library–how I wish!) I had the pleasure of seeing the Bible multiple times. It really is amazing. Thanks to the magic of the internet and digitization, you can look at volume one compliments of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. It isn’t as great as seeing it in person, but all things considered it is the next best thing.

My information about Gutenberg was gleaned from The Book: The Life Story of a Technology by Nicole Howard.