“PEOPLE NEED BOOKS,” CHRISTOPHER MORLEY says, “But they don’t know that they need them. Generally, they are not aware that the books they need are in existence.” With so little space and so much to say, we’ve written this book as the academic equivalent of a tailgate party. We are the booze-soaked, hot wing–stained bash before the big event—which in this case would be sipping a cup of tea while quietly reading a biography of Thomas More.
In the world of books there are endless roads to explore. There are curiosities and triumphs, comforts and provocations. The twists and turns are as endless as the peculiarities of the human mind, for we have translated our inner universes onto the printed page. The single artifact that best captures the human spirit is the book—which means that it inevitably captures both our glory and our frailties.
While writing this book, we came across a 1593 painting of Thomas More, our Tree of Truth villain from the English Bible chapter, sitting with his family. This painting is a copy of a lost work by Hans Holbein, one of the great portraitists of the Renaissance. The original is missing, but Holbein’s prepainting sketch did survive. It shows More’s wife and two other women kneeling on the floor in front of the famed British statesman. This did not sit right with More. As in, his wife was literally not sitting right. Rather than kneeling on the floor like a servant girl, she should be seated on a chair like a normal human being. Even More’s jester is sitting on a chair, for heaven’s sake. Shouldn’t the lady of the house have at least as many rights as a professional fool? The 1593 copy of the finished Holbein oil portrait shows that, in the end, More got his way. His wife is indeed seated next to him. Well, seated a foot lower than him, but still, very PC for the day.
“There’s nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” Sherlock Holmes once observed. Thomas More was more than a snarling, frothing attack dog obsessively tearing at Protestants during the early upheavals of what became known as the Reformation. He did all that, no doubt, but Rottweilers can have cuddly feminist sides, too. Rottweilers can be loyal. Rottweilers can be protective. Rottweilers are more complex than one might believe if all one knew about them was their proclivity for removing the skin from trespassers’ skulls. Or burning people alive.
In less metaphorical terms, Thomas More was human, with complex motivations and inner contradictions. We’d say he was just like us, but we expect a bit more from our statesmen (and Catholic saints) today. So let’s say he was like other people from his time (who were white, and male, and wielded a staggering degree of political power). Actually, he was one of the better people of his time. Did he say someone should shit and piss into Martin Luther’s mouth? Yes. Technically he wrote and published this all over Europe. Was More also forward thinking when it came to women? Did he love his children? Was he well regarded by friends? Was he a master politician? Was he pious within his own code? Was he an exemplary husband? A brilliant author? A formidable philosopher? The greatest mind of English humanism? A tragic martyr? Yes, to every one of those. He was even considered an exceptionally funny guy for the Renaissance; one scholar calls humor “integral to More’s purpose” in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies (the same work in which, we can’t help but note, he uses a parable of Jesus to justify burning heretics). Could a historian write a chapter on Thomas More that made him the hero of the story? More was canonized in 1935 and declared the Patron of Statesmen and Politicians by the Vatican in 2000, so yes. Absolutely.
When choosing the subtitle for this book, we elected to use Irreverent Stories from Book History, rather than The History of the Book. After writing a work that attempts to highlight a few events (so very few) from half a millennium of history, and knowing firsthand the ocean of material that could never be included, we find that this distinction has proved crucial. While we hold profound respect for Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it’s technically not accurate. Gibbon’s prolific volumes are a history of the Roman Empire’s fall, as told by Edward Gibbon. Thomas More’s depiction in the “Trees of Truth” chapter is a depiction: as factually accurate as we can make it, but certainly not exhaustive with regard to the nuances of More’s conflicted and endlessly fascinating personality.
The writer and philosopher George Santayana coined the historian’s favorite aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It may seem at times that people living three, four, five centuries removed from us have little to contribute to the issues of our day. Yet, in many ways, the problems we face now are iterations of the past. Especially as the human race blazes its way through the technological advancements of the digital age.
From the Benedictine monk Trithemius, we observe the futility of resisting innovation. Bibliophiles are, perhaps, some of the most egregious offenders. In the same way that Trithemius clung to the power and majesty of handwritten manuscripts, many book lovers today resist the shift to electronic books. Ones and zeros may seem fragile next to paper and cardboard and leather, but Trithemius thought the same thing about the delicate creations of Gutenberg’s printing press.
During Mercator’s day, vast amounts of information were becoming widely available for the first time. The printing presses of Europe were flooding the continent with accounts of circumnavigations, newly -discovered manuscripts, original treatises, and probably drawings of “Keyboard Cat.” Humanity struggled to find a way to process this deluge of information—with all the foibles and dangers that accompanied it—in a way not so different from the advent of websites such as Wikipedia.
From Tyndale’s day we see the true power of the words we use. By changing the word church to congregation, an entire religious sect can be spawned. Pious people can burn their fellow citizens for printing the word love, and feel justified for doing it. Words are narrative-defining tools, especially during conflict. In modern times, we needn’t look any further than advanced interrogation techniques versus torture.
As with language, so with history: context matters. It was something William Blake knew all too well as he combined the printed word and the printed illustration into one “composite art.” When context is left out, important meanings can get lost in translation. If the scholars who first authenticated De Caro’s Sidereus Nuncius, for example, had been informed of other known Galileo forgeries, they might have been more primed for doubt and thus have uncovered the counterfeit earlier.
The “bad” plays of Shakespeare challenge the way we perceive the dominant narratives we take for granted. When we put Shakespeare on such a high pedestal, he becomes more statue than human. So it is with his work. The great Bard’s plays are richer and more meaningful because he was an actual human. Other actual humans helped bring those plays to the printing presses of the world. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but apparently it also takes a village to create King Lear.
The rise and fall and rise of Mary Wollstonecraft makes us question what it means to be an author when people are treated differently not for what they say, but for who they are. Considering that gender equality is not a problem today—sorry, that should read “considering that gender equality is still a problem today”—Wollstonecraft’s fate is just as relevant in 2017 as it was in 1800.
The network of printing and its influence that spread across the American colonies in Benjamin Franklin’s day did so on a river of currency. If you want to trace the corridors of power, you need only follow that money. And when Dickens followed that money right to the doorsteps of American publishers in New York and Massachusetts, the United States promptly said, Bugger off, Charles Dickens. America steals things. But before we gasp in horror at the wholesale stealing of another’s work, it’s worth taking a quick look at how flippantly we post original quotes, photos, designs, and illustrations on the Internet without giving credit.
We might also want to cast a more critical eye on those “nobody reads anymore!” essays online. Recall that in 1921, only 4 percent of Americans visited a bookstore. Book-loving folks who claim everything was better in the old days must have a very limited perception of the word old. Many of our assumptions about what book culture “should” be were formed only in the twentieth century, by men such as Eddie Bernays, using clever marketing techniques we don’t even notice. “We live in an expanding culture,” the historian Raymond Williams has said, “yet we spend much of our energy regretting the fact, rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions.”
T. J. Cobden-Sanderson understood the power of beauty, in his own way. Ironically, his disdain for technological innovation led him to create some of the most innovative books of his time. When he hurled his Doves Type into the Thames, he was expressing a fear that people still harbor: that advancements have the potential to rob books of their essence. But what is a book? Is it a codex? Is it a scroll? A handwritten manuscript? Is a true book the result of a single-pull printing press? Or a double-pull? Or a Linotype machine? Does it have to be physically printed at all? Can the letters on a screen match the power and resonance of wood, cloth, and leather?
We exist in a time that is not as unique as it first appears. Many of the issues we face in the digital age have been faced before. History is a window that lets us look backward for answers. It’s a window we should be constantly revisiting. The historian Randolph G. Adams said, “Each generation has to rewrite history for itself—and sometimes from the same sources used by previous generations.” How do we resolve disputes over public domain or Net neutrality in 2017? Just ask Mr. Dickens. He has firsthand experience trying to change American minds about copyright. In 1867 he declined even to talk about the issue, “on the grounds that he felt the case to be a hopeless one.” Okay then, fine, don’t ask Mr. Dickens.
If history is that glorious window to our past, remember that this book is the tailgate party. In the parking lot. Of the building down the street from the house in which said glorious window resides. So pull yourself up from the pavement, wipe away the vomit in your hair, and crack open that biography of Thomas More.