2011/09/20

The Greatest Blessing or the Greatest Curse of Modern Times

...sometimes one forgets which. James Barrie, as in Peter Pan, on the printing press. I believe Belloc said, possibly in reply, that no, the pulping machine was the greatest blessing, and it kept the printing press from being the greatest curse.

Anyway, I saw a thing about self-publishing, and the author mentioned how, yes, it can be a hassle, but then she thought of Gutenberg, and of Luther and his opponents trading polemics. Good thing to keep in mind, but I must call a technical foul.

Because Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press, he invented a method of printing capital letters in a different color. That, of course, is from Pierce Butler's "Origin of Printing in Europe", published by the U of Chicago press in 1940—but of course nobody's ever heard it. I mean, imagine the anarchy if the popular folklore were challenged by some uppity scholar!

In actual fact, all of Western Europe fully utilized the printing press from the early 1400s on—when Gutenberg was a child. And before that, despite books having to be copied by hand, copied they were: hundreds upon hundreds of prayerbooks and missals, for instance, poured from every scriptorium in Europe. And remember, most of them were bought by women, who (for the first time in the history of the human race) were taught to read just as often as men.

As for the old canard about the Bibles being chained to the pulpits to keep the common people from reading them, snerk. The Bibles were chained to the pulpits because they were massive, incredibly expensive pieces of equipment representing years of painstaking work, and the simplest way to keep them safe (and unstolen) was to make sure they were always in one place. You'll find supercomputers are pretty closely watched, too, genius.

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