Prof. Dutschke set out a banquet of selections for us to
feast on when we visited the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript
Library collection on November 11, 2013. In showing us a vast sweep of time and
human development in the printed word, we understood how deep and wide this window
into history is; how much more there is to this fascinating subject than can
possibly be digested in a brief visit of touching, seeing and listening.
Nevertheless, we gorged ourselves like early bird buffet eaters, trying to
scarf down as much as we could of the visual, tactile, lingual and abstract
offerings in our short time.
For me, the selection was tantalizing in its physical
evolution and composition, showing a range of beauty that was a doorway into a
different way of life and thinking. This rich sensory stimulus threatened to
overshadow a subtler component: the evolution of thought, and its
representation on a two-dimensional surface. Both of these elements became
intertwined in my appreciation of the experience.
The
physicality of the printed materials, most of them books, took me back to the
great satisfaction I got as a child with books: holding them, feeling them,
smelling them, turning the pages, journeying across its surfaces with my eyes. At
the library, these pleasures were magnified: the touch of animal skin, the
weight of their bindings, the tight lettering. These books seemed to demand a
deeper devotion and attention, in their time, than what we give and receive from
our books now. I considered how few people must have been able to touch these
early versions of writing: one had to be specially educated or trained to use
them.
In the early phase examples, we saw
early block, carved and handwritten letters in Greek and Egyptian stone or papyri
illustrating oratory and legal needs; each painstakingly rendered. A sample of scriptura continua, beautiful and unbroken, looked difficult to read; it was
meant to be spoken aloud, and was often delegated to slave scribes. Peering behind
the letters, I imagined the reclining Greeks, eyes closed, listening intently
as the orator filled the air with his reading, as they “relished the
mellifluous metrical and accentual patterns of pronounced texts…” (Saenger 11).
Hundreds of years later, reading had turned itself inside
out. Whereas the ancients believed scripta
manet, verba volat, where “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes
into air”, designating a higher value to the spirit embodied in spoken language
not found in unspoken words on a page, (Manguel
45),
by the 14th and 15th centuries, solitary, silent reading
was a desirable pursuit attached to social graces and status. Touching the
heavy leather and metal-bound press-printed book of hours owned privately by a
Flemish woman, I could see her at home, alone, quietly turning pages by the
light of a window, reading silently. In these times, it was even possible to
buy “singletons”, which were additional desired pages with illustrations that
were “tipped in”, meaning carefully cut and sliced into the binding of the
book, enhancing its contents, and reflecting an individual’s desires,
customized book-making. In her person,
she represented all the changes wrought over time: she was a private owner (a
woman, no less) of the bulky and impressive book; she had the skills to
decipher all the lettering, which had spaces, vowels, and embellishments to
enhance and support her search for meaning; and the contents, religious texts,
were available for her private and silent consideration.
The Horn Book was a strange anomaly that looked so presumptively
modern, many of us assumed the clear horn plastic window over the papyrus was
plastic; the tiny metal screws reminded us of the hundreds of years since its
creation. In a primer illustration, later, we saw a young person brandishing
the horn book, showing its use for teaching the young. The Italian primer from
the mid- 1500s showed a partial leaf of paper with bad writing repeating the
phrase “when a teacher beats you it’s for your own good” three times, causing
speculation that the writing had been a punishment assignment.
Scribing, much of it religious, was the main form of writing
before the printing press, and continued during the incunable phase between the
1450s until 1501. The reality of scribal life, concentrated on the exact and disciplined
copying of letters, painstakingly rendered, line by line, made the end result
bigger than simply words on a page; there was a hierarchy of skill and
difficulty to scribing, with a knowledge of Greek of the highest value, connecting
the scribe to ancient manuscripts. Seeing the tiny Latin words, perfectly lined
up, written by hand, was particularly breathtaking in the German psalter from
the mid-1300s, as each line began with a decorated capital letter, following to
the end, then dropping off, with the next line starting another decorated
capital of another line of psalm.
The resistance to printing was strongest in Renaissance
Italy, in spite of the pains taken to imitate the bound manuscripts of European
15th C. (Bringhurst 41). The
printing press selections, ranging from the divine to the personal, with the
encyclopedias and dictionaries to the medical recipes and primers for reading,
gave evidence to the blossoming of function and form. The tangible change in
texture from papyrus to linen or paper gave a glimpse into the wider access of
the contents. People outside the church now possessed these modern tools of
expression, and investing them with their own private meanings. More and more
people could gain the skill and tools to learn to read and write, even though
it was the more affluent and socially well-off; it was still a huge shift from
the religious few in pre-Renaissance times.
An Italian book of medical recipes for a household when illness struck, the
alphabetic primers in Latin, French and English, the encyclopedias and
dictionaries that now allowed room on the page for illustrations, all addressed
the more practical purposes that printed books now served.
For me, the most staggering aspect of this branch of
human development was the move from communal, oral use of the written word to
the more elusive and profound symbiosis between reader and book: the beginning
of internal, subjective dialogue made concrete through letters and words on a
page.
Plimpton Hornbook No. 1,
England, s. XVIII. Plimpton MS 258, England, s. XV third quarter, Primer.
Works Cited
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