Part 4

The civilization of ancient Rome did not require printing. If all the processes of typography had been revealed to its scholars the art would not have been used. The wants of readers and writers were abundantly supplied by the pen. Papyrus paper was cheap, and scribes were numerous; Rome had more booksellers than it needed, and books were made faster than they could be sold. The professional scribes were educated slaves, who, fed and clothed at nominal expense, and organized under the direction of wealthy publishers, were made so efficient in the production of books, that typography, in an open competition, could have offered few advantages.

Our knowledge of the Roman organization of labor in the field of book-making is not as precise as could be wished; but the frequent notices of books, copyists and publishers, made by many authors during the first century, teach us that [p043] books were plentiful. Horace, the elegant and fastidious man of letters, complained that his books were too common, and that they were sometimes found in the hands of vulgar snobs for whose entertainment they were not written. Martial, the jovial man of the world, boasted that his books of stinging epigrams were to be found in everybody’s hands or pockets. Books were read not only in the libraries, but at the baths, in the porticoes of houses, at private dinners and in mixed assemblies. The business of book-making was practised by too many people, and some were incompetent. Lucian, who had a keen perception of pretense in every form, ridicules the publishers as ignoramuses. Strabo, who probably wrote illegibly, says that the books of booksellers were incorrect.

The prices of books made by slave labor were necessarily low. Martial says that his first book of epigrams was sold in plain binding for six sesterces, about twenty-four cents of American money; the same book in sumptuous binding was valued at five denarii, about eighty cents. He subsequently complained that his thirteenth book was sold for only four sesterces, about sixteen cents. He frankly admits that half of this sum was profit, but intimates, somewhat ungraciously, that the publisher Tryphon gave him too small a share. Of the merits of this old disagreement between the author and publisher, we have not enough of facts to justify an opinion. We learn that some publishers, like Tryphon and the brothers [p044] Sosii, acquired wealth, but there are many indications that publishing was then, as it is now, one of the most speculative kinds of business. One writer chuckles over the unkind fate that sent so many of the unsold books of rival authors from the warehouses of the publisher, to the shops of grocers and bakers, where they were used to wrap up pastry and spices; another writer says that the unsold stock of a bookseller was sometimes bought by butchers and trunk-makers.

The Romans not only had plenty of books but they had a manuscript daily newspaper, the _Acta Diurna_, which seems to have been a record of the proceedings of the senate. We do not know how it was written, nor how it was published, but it was frequently mentioned by contemporary writers as the regular official medium for transmitting intelligence. It was sent to subscribers in distant cities, and was, sometimes, read to an assembled army. Cicero mentions the _Acta_ as a sheet in which he expected to find the city news and gossip about marriages and divorces.

In the sixth century the business of book-making had fallen into hopeless decay. Ignorance pervaded all ranks of society.[7] The books that had been written were neglected, and the number of readers and scholars diminished with every succeeding generation.[8] The treasures of literature at Rome, Constantinople and Alexandria which were destroyed by fire or by barbaric invasion were not replaced. Books were so scarce at the close of the seventh century, that Pope Martin requested one of his bishops to supply them, if possible, from Germany. The ignorance of ecclesiastics in high station was [p045] alarming. During this century, and for centuries afterward, there were many bishops and archbishops of the church who could not sign their names. It was asserted at a council of the church held in the year 992, that scarcely a single person was to be found in Rome itself who knew the first element of letters. Hallam says, “To sum up the account of ignorance in a word, it was rare for a layman of any rank to know how to sign his name.” Charlemagne could not write, and Frederic Barbarossa could not read; John, king of Bohemia, and Philip the Hardy, king of France, were ignorant of both accomplishments.[9] The graces of literature were tolerated only in the ranks of the clergy; the layman who preferred letters to arms was regarded as a man of mean spirit. When the crusaders took Constantinople, in 1204, they exposed to public ridicule the pens and inkstands that they found in the conquered city as the ignoble arms of a contemptible race of students.

During this period of intellectual darkness, which lasted from the fifth until the fifteenth century, a period sometimes described, and not improperly, as the dark ages, there was no need for any improvement in the old method of making books. The world was not then ready for typography. The invention waited for readers more than it did for types; the multitude of book-buyers upon which its success depended had to be created. Books were needed as well as readers. The treatises of the old Roman sophists and rhetoricians, the dialectics of Aristotle and the schoolmen, and the commentaries on ecclesiastical law of the fathers of the church, were the works which engrossed the attention of men of letters for many centuries before the invention of typography. Useful as these books may have been to the small class of readers for whose benefit they were written, they were of no benefit to a people who required the elements of knowledge.

We may imagine the probable fate of a premature and unappreciated invention of typography by thinking of results that might have been and have not been accomplished by printing among a people who were not prepared to use it as [p046] it should be used. Printing has been practised in China for many centuries, but there can be no comparison between the fruits of printing in China and in Europe. The remarkable inefficiency of the Chinese method is the result not so much of clumsiness of the process, as of the perverseness of a people who are unable to improve it, and unwilling to accept the improvements of Europeans. The first printing press brought to the New World was set up in the City of Mexico about one hundred years before a printing office was established in Massachusetts. Books were printed in Constantinople, perhaps as early as 1490, certainly before types were thought of in Scotland. And now Scotland sends types and books to Turkey, and Boston sends printing paper and presses to Mexico. If the people of Turkey and Mexico are receiving benefits from printing, the benefits have been derived from the practice of the art abroad and not at home.

In making an estimate of the service that printing has done for the world, we frequently overlook the supports by which it has been upheld. It is a common belief that the diffusion of knowledge which was so clearly manifested in the fifteenth century was due to the invention of printing. This belief reverses the proper order, and substitutes the effect for the cause. It was the broader diffusion of knowledge that made smooth the way for the development of typography. In its infancy, the invention was indebted for its existence to improvements in liberal and mechanical arts; in its maturity, it is largely indebted for its success to discoveries in science, and to reforms in government.

The magnetic telegraph is the most recent discovery, and of the most importance, in its services to the daily newspaper press. The circulation of leading American daily newspapers has more than trebled since the invention of the telegraph.

The free public schools of America have done much to promote the growth of printing. If the State did not offer free books and free education, a large portion of the people would grow up in ignorance. Every scholar in a public school [p047] becomes for life a reader, and to some extent, a purchaser of books. The value of the school-books manufactured in the United States annually, has been estimated at fifteen million dollars. Of Webster’s Spelling-Book alone, thirty-five million copies have been sold, and a million copies are printed every year. If printing were deprived of the support it receives from public schools, there would at once follow a noticeable decrease in the production of printed matter, and a corresponding decrease in the number of readers and book-buyers.

To foster the tastes which have been cultivated by public schools and newspapers, some States have established public libraries in every school district. There are, also, a great many valuable libraries which have been established by voluntary association or by individual bequest. These libraries create books as well as readers.

Railroads, steamboats and package expresses are aids of as great importance. The New-York daily newspaper, printed early in the morning, is sold within a radius of three hundred miles before sunset of the same day. Newspapers now find hundreds of eager purchasers in places where they would not have found one in the days of stage-coaches. The benefits of cheap and quick transportation are also favorable to the sale of books. A bookseller’s package, weighing one hundred pounds, will be carried from New York to St. Louis, on the Mississippi, within sixty-five hours, at an average expense of three dollars. When there was no railroad from St. Louis to San Francisco, the overland charges on one hundred pounds of books were one hundred dollars. The long delays and great expenses of stage-coach transportation would operate almost as a prohibition to the sale of periodicals and new books.

The greatest legislative aid that printing has received is through the facilities which are furnished by post-offices and mails. They create readers. Weekly newspapers are now sent, for one year, for twenty cents, to subscribers in the most remote corner of the Union. Books are sent three thousand miles at the rate of one cent per ounce. The improvement [p048] of postal facilities has increased the number of readers and purchasers of newspapers to an amount unforeseen by the most sanguine projector.

All these aids are, comparatively, of recent introduction. The beginnings of the telegraph, the railroad and the express are within the memory of the men of the present generation. The systematic establishment of free schools and libraries is the work of the present century. Public mails and post-offices were introduced in 1530, but it is only within the past forty years that their management has been more liberal for the benefit of the people. It is by aids like these, and not by its intrinsic merits alone, that printing has received its recent development. It was for the want of these aids that printing languished for many years after its invention. One has but to consider the many supports printing has received to see that its premature invention would have been fruitless.

If, even now, when books and readers and literary tastes are as common as they were infrequent, it is necessary to the success of printing that there shall be schools and libraries, cheap and rapid methods of travel, generous postal facilities, a liberal government and a broad toleration of the greatest differences in opinion, what but failure could have been expected when the world was destitute of nearly all? Printing not only had to wait many centuries for improvements in mechanical appliances, without which it would have been worthless; it had to wait for a greater number of readers, for liberal governments, for instructive writers, for suitable books. It came at the proper time, not too soon, not too late. “Not the man, the age invents.”

[p049]

III

The Key to the Invention of Typography.

Conflicting Theories about the Invention of Typography . . . Was it an Invention or a Combination? . . . Errors of Superficial Observers . . . Merit of the Invention is not in Impression . . . Not altogether in Types or Composition . . . Types of no value unless they are Accurate . . . Hand-made Types Impracticable . . . Merit of Invention is in the Method of Making Types . . . Is but One Method . . . Description . . . Counter-Punch . . . Punch . . . Matrix . . . Mould . . . Illustrations . . . Type-Making as Illustrated by Moxon in 1683 . . . As Illustrated by Amman in 1564 . . . Notices of Type-Making by Earlier Authors . . . Type-Mould the Symbol of Typography . . . Inventor of the Type-Mould the Inventor of Typography . . . A Great Invention, but Original only in the Type-Mould.

* * * * *

The character of typography is not pressing and printing but mobilization. The winged A is its symbol. The elements unchained, the letters freed from every bond in which the pen or chisel of calligrapher or xylographer held them entangled; the cut character risen from the tomb of the solitary tablet into the substantive life of the cast types—that is the invention of printing.

_Van der Linde._

* * * * *

There is a wide-spread belief that typography was, in all its details, a purely original invention. A popular version of its origin, hereafter to be related, says that it was the result of an accidental discovery; a conflicting version says that it was the result of more than thirteen years of secret experiment. Each version teaches us that there was no perceptible unfolding of the invention; that the alleged inventor created all that he needed, that he made his types, ink and presses, that he derived nothing of value from the labors of earlier printers. If typography was invented by Gutenberg, it was fitly introduced by the sudden appearance of the printed Bible in two folio volumes; if invented by Coster, by the unheralded publication of a thin folio of large [p050] wood-cuts with descriptive text of type. If either of these versions is accepted in the form in which it is usually told, we must also believe that printing, in the form of perfected typography, leaped, Minerva-like, fully equipped, from the brain of the inventor.

There is another belief, which is strongly maintained by a few scholars, that typography was not an original invention, that it was nothing more than a new application of the old theories and methods of impression which have already been described. According to this view, the practice of engraving is at least as old as the oldest Egyptian seal; the publication of written language can be traced to the Babylonish bricks; printing with ink, as indicated by old Roman hand stamps, was practised as early as the fifth century; the combinations of movable letters were suggested by Cicero and St. Jerome. All that was needed for the full development of typography was the invention of paper. Supplied with paper, the so-called inventor of typography did no more than combine the old theories and processes, and give them a new application. He really invented nothing.

In this conflict of opinion, the critical reader will note an inability to perceive the difference between impression and typography. Those who believe in the entire originality of typography ascribe its merit to the mind that first thought of the combinations of types; those who deny its originality find its vital element in pressure. With one class, the merit of the invention is in the idea of types; with the other, it is in the impression of types. Neither view is entirely correct.

A printer may see how these errors could be developed. The unreflecting observer, who, for the first time, surveys the operations of a printing office, finds in the fast presses the true vital principle of printing. With him, presswork is printing; type-setting and type-making are only adjuncts. He was the inventor of the modern art of printing who built the first press, and printed the first book. The conclusion is illogical, as will be shown on another page. If a radical [p051] improvement had not been made in the earliest method of printing books, the art would have been as unproductive in Europe as it has been in China. The fast press may do its work admirably, but its only functions are those of inking and impressing, and impression is not typography.

The thoughtful observer will perceive that the merit of modern printing is not in impression; that there would be neither fast presses, nor great books, nor daily newspapers, if there were no types. With him, whatever of greatness there is in printing is due to the mind that first imagined the utility of types. The grandness of the results that have been achieved by typography seem all the grander when he thinks that these results have been accomplished with such simple tools as little cubes of metal. The making of these tools he regards as a matter of minor importance. For in these types are visible no intricacy of mechanism as in the power loom, no indications of a mysterious agency as in the magnetic telegraph, no evidences of scientific skill as in photographic apparatus. There are in types, apparently, no more evidences of genius or science than there are in pins or needles. The grotesque types of the fifteenth century are rated by him, and even by many mechanics, as rude workmanship which could have been done by a carver in wood or a founder in metal. He who could imagine them could make them. To think was to do. The merit of the invention of typography is accordingly adjudged, not to the inventive spirit which constructed the mould by which the types were made, but to the genius which first thought of the utility of types. This is a grave error.

Speculations like these, which assign all the merit of the invention of typography to him who first conceived the idea of types, are opposed to many facts and probabilities. Cicero and Jerome could not have been the only men who thought of the combinations of engraved letters; nor were the old Roman lamp-makers and branders of cattle the only men who used types. The idea of stamping with detached letters [p052] could have been entertained, and practised, by hundreds of experimenters of whom there is no tradition. It is probable that there was such a practice, but the stamping of single types by hand pressure was not typography, nor did it lead to its subsequent invention. Experimental types like these, which had been cut by hand, were of no practical value, for they could not have been used on any extensive scale.

There is something more in types than is apparent at the first glance. Simple as they may seem, they are evidences of notable mechanical skill in the matter of accuracy. The page before the reader was composed with more than 2,000 pieces of metal; the large page of a daily paper may contain more than 150,000 of these little pieces. Whether the page is large or small, the types are always closely fitted to each other; they stand accurately in line, and the page is truly square. If the types of one character, as of the letter a, should be made the merest trifle larger or smaller than its fellows in the same font, all the types, when composed, will show the consequences of the defect. The irregularity of line that is scarcely perceptible in the first row will be offensively distinct in the second. It will increase with each succeeding row, until the types become a heap of confusion which cannot be handled by the printer. Advantages which might be secured from movable types are made of no effect by an irregularity so slight that it would be passed unnoticed in the workmanship of ordinary trades. The illustration proves that it is not enough for types to be movable; they must be accurate as to body; they must fit each other with geometrical precision.

The accuracy of modern printing types is due more to the nice mechanisms employed by the type-founder than to his personal skill. He could cut types by hand, but the cost of hand-cut types would be enormous, and they would be vastly [p053] inferior to types made by the type-casting machine. He could make types by a variety of mechanical methods, but they would be imperfect and unsatisfactory. A careful survey of the impracticable inventions in type-founding, recorded in the patent offices of this country and Great Britain, proves that there is, virtually, but one method of making types. The requirements of accuracy and cheapness can be met only by making them of metal, and casting them in a mould of metal.[10]

Although it is clearly understood, by all persons who have a practical knowledge of the subject, that practical types can be made only by casting, many popular books repeat the old story that the first typographic books were printed with types which had been cut by hand out of wood or metal. Whether the mechanics of the middle ages could have done what modern mechanics cannot do,—cut types with bodies of satisfactory accuracy—need not now be considered. The stories about hand-made types—about types that were sawed out of wood blocks—about types that were cut out of wooden rods, and skewered together with iron wires—about types that were engraved on the ends of cubes of metal—will be examined at greater length on an advanced page. Even if these doubtful stories were verified, it would still remain to be proved that the cut types had advantages over letters engraved on wood. It would be difficult to give reasons for their introduction. Books composed with cut types could not be neatly printed; they would be inferior to good manuscripts in appearance, but not inferior in price. Cut types [p054] were as impracticable in the infancy of the art as they are now. There is no trustworthy evidence that they were ever used for any other purpose than that of experiment.

Every method for making merchantable types, save that of casting, is a failure. Typography would be a great failure, if its types were not cast by scientific methods. This understood, we can see that the most meritorious feature in the invention does not belong to him who first thought of the advantages of types, nor even to him who first made them by impracticable methods. Its honors are really due to the man to whose sagacity and patience in experiment we are indebted for the type-mould, for he was the first to make types which could be used with advantage.

It will now be necessary to explain the scientific method of making types which is practised by every type-founder. The first process is the making of model letters. The work begins with the cutting on steel of a tool which is known as the Counter-punch. The illustration represents the face of a counter-punch for the letter H, of the size usually known among type-founders as Double-English. This counter-punch is an engraving, in high relief, of the hollow or the counter of that interior part of the letter H which does not show black in the printed impression. It has apparently, no resemblance to the letter for which it is made. When the proportions of the counter-punch have been duly approved, it is stamped or impressed to a proper depth on the end of a short bar of soft steel. Properly stamped, the counter-punch finishes by one quick stroke the interior part of the model letter, and does it more quickly and neatly than it could be done by cutting tools.