Frederick W. Hamilton

“ The early 15th century, then, sees everything prepared for the invention and use of movable types for printing purposes. There is a greater demand for books than the hard working copyists can supply. The idea of making impressions from stamps has become very familiar through long use. Ink and paper suitable for these impressions have been discovered and are obtainable at a reasonable price. The rude presses used for so many other purposes have been adapted to the taking of these impressions. Everything is ready for the invention which is to revolutionize the intellectual life of mankind. ”

“ CHAPTER V Ancient and Mediæval Libraries Books involved libraries. The book is written to preserve a record and this involves the preservation of the book itself. Consequently almost all of the centers of the world’s civilization were at the same time the homes of great collections of books, or libraries. The ancient Egyptians had many such although we have the record of but one. ”

“ What would we not give if we could only find those precious rolls in some of the corners which the archæologists are so busily exploring and which are constantly yielding new stores of information about that ancient civilization?
Some centuries later two of the Assyrian kings, Sennacherib and Assurbanipal, collected a great library which has been in large part recovered. Such a library, as we have seen, consisted of clay tablets and these tablets were kept in large earthenware jars. ”

“ BOOKS BEFORE TYPOGRAPHY CHAPTER I The Origin of the Alphabet The story of printing really begins with the earliest dawn of civilization. As soon as men developed a language, even of the simplest sort, they felt the necessity of a means of communication with those who were not present. This would be needed for the identification of property, the making of records, the sending of orders or information, the making of appointments, and many other purposes which would be developed by the needs of even the most rudimentary civilization. ”

“ PREFACE An attempt has been made in this book to trace briefly the story of the book from the earliest attempts made by mankind to convey a message by marks on some substance down to the invention of movable types. The development of writing is rapidly traced from the earliest known pictures and sign marks to the present day. The discussion covers the subjects of writing materials and how they were made; the evolution of the book; the conditions of manufacture, distribution, and preservation of books before printing, and the conditions out of which sprang the invention of typographic printing. ”

“ Sometimes the entire work on a manuscript would be done by a single man. At other times there was a division of labor. One brother, for example, would pick out the vellum, see to the condition of the skins, arrange the quires, and rule them with compass and stylus. Another, or a group of others, would write the plain text. In the case of a large book, a certain number of quires might be given to each one of a group of copyists. ”

“ In other cases they were written and in some they were even printed, as the use of the block book survived the invention of typographical printing. These block books were exactly like the picture books which we now place in the hands of little children. They were to be looked at rather than read. The meager explanatory text, as in the case of the child’s book, served the double purpose of a simple reading lesson and of an aid to the explanation of the book for the benefit of the owner by some wiser person. One of the most popular of these books was the Biblia Pauperum, or Poor Man’s Bible. ”

“ The library of Constantinople, being later than the others in its formation, probably had more direct effect on the culture of mediæval and modern times than any of the preceding ones.
In addition to these great public or semi-public libraries, there were of course great numbers of private libraries. Wealthy and cultivated men throughout the Roman empire and beyond had their private collections, as wealthy and cultivated men do to-day. ”

“ Paper is said to have been invented by the Chinese at an unknown but very early date. It was introduced to Europe by the Arabs about the 10th century A.D. It was made of linen or rags and did not vary greatly from the rag paper of to-day. As the process of manufacture is fully described in the book on paper (No. 13) of this series, description is not necessary here. Paper was not much used in Europe until the invention of printing. Being much less substantial than vellum it did not commend itself for the making of manuscript books. ”

“ If writing appears on the back of a roll, except in the rare cases where the handwriting is identical with that on the face, the subject matter is of an entirely different character from the original and may safely be regarded as much younger. The title was ordinarily placed at the end of the book although sometimes it appeared at the beginning or in both places. The title was sometimes written on the outside of the roll but more often was written on a tag which was attached to the end of the roll or to the stick upon which the papyrus was rolled. ”

“ The surface of a stone, a bone, or a shell, a flat piece of wood, bark or leaf of a tree, a plate of metal, the facet of a gem, any one of a thousand things can be used and has been used for this purpose. The Egyptians and Greeks were in the habit of using the fragments of broken pottery for their less important records. The materials which have been most used, however, have been the Assyrian clay tablet, which has been already described, papyrus, vellum, and paper. ”

“ Control of the printing press became at last the greatest enemy of civilization, freedom, and enlightenment alike in the old world and in the new and it remained until largely swept away by the movement which culminated in the French Revolution of 1793.
Some of the university libraries early grew to generous size. That of the Sorbonne, for example, numbered 1720 volumes in 1338. This particular library consisted very largely of religious literature, as the main interest of the Sorbonne of that day was theological. Other university libraries were of wider range. ”

“ The general term, however, for this type of writing material, which was made from a variety of skins, is vellum. Vellum, of course, came in sheets, and while a single sheet might be rolled as diplomas are to this day rolled for delivery, it was ordinarily used in the sheet form and played an important part in the development of the book.
In the manufacture of vellum the skins of a variety of the smaller animals were used. For example, the famous Alexandrian codex, one of the oldest known copies of the Bible, is written on antelope skin. ”

“ This fact throws an interesting light on the extent of the world’s literature so recently as 500 years ago. Among the earliest of the libraries formed outside of monasteries were those collected by the Arabs of North Africa and Spain. Although some of the early Mohammedan conquerors were ignorant and bigoted fanatics like the destroyer of Alexandria, the Arabs, or Saracens as they are sometimes called, as a whole were a highly civilized people of great culture in art, science, and literature. ”

“ The beautiful products of the modern bookbinding art are familiar to us all. Beautiful and costly as they are, they are commonplace as compared with the decoration of the early bookbinders. It must be remembered that these books were never intended to be crowded in serried ranks into shelves from which they should present only their backs to the world. ”

“ The classic civilization, with its great development of literary activity, of course involved the formation of libraries in all the more important cities, as such places were the natural centers of culture. ”

“ Manifestly the Gothic does not lend itself to a cursive form so that the two types which appear are the set or upright, similar in its characteristics to the corresponding book hand, and the ornamental or calligraphic which, as its name implies, was an ornamental type of the set hand. The third type was the letter hand, used by [Pg 43] persons who were not professional penmen in correspondence and the ordinary uses to which handwriting is applied. The fourth was the court or charter hand. This hand was used for court records, deeds, charters, and all sorts of legal documents. ”

“ The university libraries grew by purchase, by copies made on the spot, and by bequests. Then, as now, there were in every university a good number of men “working their way.” The copying of manuscripts was their great resource.
Naturally all this demand caused the production of many very badly executed manuscripts. This and other abuses were, however, controlled to a great extent by the university authorities who assumed control over the publication and sale of books. Old books, of course, could be freely sold, subject only to careful checking up of the correctness of the copy. ”

“ The revival of learning in the 14th century, as might be expected, gave a great stimulus to the production of manuscripts and at the time of the invention of printing from movable types in the middle of the 15th century the manufacture of manuscripts was going on rapidly and there were many great libraries in existence. ”

“ In society as constituted after the fall of the empire and far into the mediæval ages the monks were the only educated people in the community. The nobles were rough unlettered soldiers. Even kings were unable to read and write. ”

“ Each publication has been compiled by a competent author or group of authors, and carefully edited, the purpose being to provide the printers of the United States—employers, journeymen, and apprentices—with a comprehensive series of handy and inexpensive compendiums of reliable, up-to-date information upon the various branches and specialties of the printing craft, all arranged in orderly fashion for progressive study. ”

“ It has been observed that certain manuscripts of the 12th century show initials so uniform as to appear to be stamp or die impressions. It can hardly be regarded as clearly established, however, that this is the case. As early as the first half of the 15th century bookbinders used dies both in relief and in intaglio, that is having the design cut into the surface of the die. None of these devices, however, appears to have been used for the purpose of multiplying impressions as is now done with the printing press. ”

“ When the vellum book took the place of the papyrus roll consideration was at once given to the peculiarities of the material. The hair side and the flesh side of the skin are different in color and texture. Care was taken to arrange the sheets in quires in such way that the two pages which were under the eye together should be made on the same side of the skin. The outside page of a Latin codex was ordinarily the skin side. ”

“ In many places it never got to the point of an alphabet, and this arrest of development is not inconsistent with a high degree of civilization. The Chinese and Japanese script, for example, are to this day combinations of ideograms and phonograms. ”

“ The ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and other peoples of remote antiquity used inks made of charcoal or soot mixed with gum, glue, or varnish. Similar compositions were used to a late date. The Romans made extensive use of sepia, the coloring substance obtained from the cuttlefish. Irongall inks, inks that consist of an iron salt and tannin, were invented by an 11th century monk named Theophilus. Of course these inks were mixed with coloring matter, and other paints and pigments were used in the preparation of manuscripts. The earlier printing inks were made of lampblack and linseed oil. ”

“ Building material of typography: paper, types, ink, decorations and illustrations. Handling of shapes. Design of complete book, treating each part. Design of commercial forms and single units. Illustrations; review questions, glossary; bibliography.
[Pg vi]
Use of color: for decoration of black and white, for broad poster effect, in combinations of two, three, or more printings with process engravings. Scientific nature of color, physical and chemical. Terms in which color may be discussed: hue, value, intensity. Diagrams in color, scales and combinations. Color theory of process engraving. ”

“ We accordingly find evidences of devices to accomplish these ends associated with the earliest human remains. While the cave man was disputing food and shelter with the cave bear, the sabre-tooth tiger, and the mammoth in those places which are now the seats of the most advanced civilizations, he scratched or painted outline sketches of the animals he fought, and perhaps worshipped, on the wall of a cave or on the flat surface of a spreading antler or a piece of bone. ”