INTRODUCTION
WHAT DO YOU RECKON THIS IS?
THIS IS AN IRREVERENT HISTORY. Sure, to most of us, a history about the printed word sounds dignified. After all, the printing press has recorded and spread some of the greatest achievements of humankind. But remember, humankind is also full of idiots. Ridiculous decisions, weird coincidences, and absurd stories are no strangers to our species. The history of the printed word reveals our capacity for brilliance, but it also reveals our capacity for blunder. The printing press is a stage upon which the entire drama of human thought and morality is acted out. At times that’s the delight of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit; at others, it’s the adamantine weight of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Sometimes the ideals are as enlightened as John Milton’s Areopagitica, and at other times they’re whatever the hell Fifty Shades of Grey is.
Human civilization is all the richer for the bizarre history of printed books. Our mistakes, our provocations, and our mysteries are all valuable in their own ways. Our predecessors who lived hundreds of years ago are not so different from us, and we can’t help but laugh in recognition of our shared folly. Take the 1631 printing of the Bible in English, the infamous “Sinners’ Bible.” The printer, Robert Barker, owned the exclusive privilege to print Bibles in London. His greatest triumph was the first edition of the King James Bible (1611). If you’re able to find one today, you can expect to pay one hundred to two hundred thousand dollars (or more) for it. Near the end of Barker’s career two decades later, he produced one thousand copies of the Holy Book without a very close proofread. While most typos are innocuous, others lead to trouble with the law. In setting the type for Barker’s sinful Bible, a compositor somehow forgot a key word in the seventh of the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” became “Thou shalt commit adultery.” When this “mistake” was caught, Barker and a colleague were summoned to a legal hearing at the order of King Charles I. They escaped with only a hefty fine, but copies of the Bible were seized wherever they were found, and destroyed. Partially because of the scarcity, today a copy of this “Wicked Bible” can fetch well into the tens of thousands of dollars at auction. Modern collectors appear as amused by the error as the the eighteenth-century owners who went out of their way to save their copies for posterity.
People like to push, to test boundaries. Scandal and amusement are two of the most glorious strands woven into the tapestry of the printed word. Take one of the masterpieces of American children’s literature, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Published in 1885, Twain’s masterpiece has everything a reader could ever want: adventure, humor, controversy, tenderness, the hypocrisy of competing social class structures—and a penis.
Most people agree that exposed adult genitalia are not something you should normally encounter in children’s literature. Yet according to the first printed copies of Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Silas did not agree with most people. Mark Twain didn’t intend his farmer/preacher character to be a sex offender, but in the weird world of print, mistakes (or, in this case, pranks) happen. During the printing, the innocent illustration of Uncle Silas was altered without Twain’s knowledge to appear as if Silas were proudly displaying his erect phallus—a phallus that, in order to pass unnoticed at a casual glance, had to be the size of a mealworm.
THE INFAMOUS UNCLE SILAS ILLUSTRATION IN ITS THREE STAGES: THE “CURVED” FLY (BEFORE), THE DEFACEMENT, AND THE “STRAIGHT” FLY (AFTER). Image used with the kind permission of Kevin Mac Donnell Rare Books.
Despite a five-hundred-dollar reward (more than twelve thousand dollars in today’s currency), we still don’t know exactly which of the fifty pressmen working on Huckleberry Finn vandalized the printing plate. In the original illustration, which depicts Huck Finn presenting himself in Uncle Silas’s home as his distant nephew, Silas stands with his pelvis jutting out in an exclamation of dramatic confusion. Aunt Sally hovers nearby with a half-smile, as if she suspects what’s really going on. And young Huck has his hand on his hip, thinking of how to respond to the old man’s line of questioning.
With a few scratches into a printing plate, however, the scene took on a markedly different feel. In the altered sketch, Aunt Sally has a disturbing grin on her face, Huck appears to be silently processing the obscenity, and Uncle Silas looks an awful lot like he is gesturing to his tiny exposed member over a caption that reads: “Who do you reckon it is?”
One might suppose that the “greatest American humorist” would have seen the lighter side of this little printing debacle. Mark Twain did not. The famed author immediately had the illustration stripped from all copies, and book agents selling subscriptions door-to-door were ordered to tear out the page from their display copy. Although no copies containing the hilariously offensive Uncle Silas illustration made it into the hands of the public at large, some agents inevitably bucked Twain’s orders, and the drawing ended up displayed in the offices of a few publishers.
Fixing the penis debacle cost Twain a tremendous amount of money and delayed the book’s release beyond the 1884 Christmas season. Today we read the phrase “published in 1885” and don’t realize the small shit storm that changed the book’s publication date from 1884. Modern rare book dealers always note the state of Uncle Silas’s fly in their descriptions of the first-edition copies of Huckleberry Finn, which sell for thousands of dollars.
We love exploring the darkly comic lining to history. Admittedly, this can sometimes be a challenge. For example, here is an iconic line from Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Notes from Underground: “I’m certain that man will never renounce real suffering . . . why, this is the sole cause of consciousness.” Russia is not a funny place. Just ask the Soviet-born comedian, Yakov Smirnoff: “Many people are surprised to hear that we have comedians in Russia, but they are there. They are dead, but they are there.” If Smirnoff can find humor in the USSR, we figure finding humor in the history of the printed word can’t be that hard, right? Whether it’s a fifteenth-century German inventor short on money or a London engraver talking to ghosts three centuries later, people are people, and part of being people is doing bat-shit crazy things.
Take that inventor from Mainz. Nearly everyone recognizes the name Gutenberg, but what do we really know about him? Shockingly little. Gutenberg may have invented the printing press in the West, but he didn’t print anything about himself. In fact, for hundreds of years, the European inventor of one of mankind’s greatest innovations was unknown to the world. In contrast to these painful gaps in the historical record, we have a wealth of material about one Johannes Trithemius, a Benedictine monk who campaigned against the new invention of printing three decades after Gutenberg. Ironically, we know so much about this obstinate monk because others printed his arguments against printing. Who gets to determine how we are remembered after we are dust?
Contradictions like this come alive in the history of books. Gerardus Mercator, a sixteenth-century Flemish mapmaker who coined the term atlas, is the man responsible for making it possible to use a flat map to circumnavigate a round globe. Yet he’s also responsible for generations of Europeans believing the Arctic was dominated by a ring of four super islands inhabited by “Little People.” Mercator added that tidbit on good authority, or so he believed.
When faced with a flood of information, misinformation, and conflicting sources, how do you know what to trust? The books in front of us seem so pure and pristine, but like the surface of a quiet lake, underneath those printed words are murky depths. As with Gutenberg, most people know Shakespeare, but most people don’t know that there are “bad” versions of his plays out there. Hamlet may be one of the most eloquent characters of Western literature, but the earliest printed version of Hamlet makes the Danish prince sound like a drunken pirate at an English Christmas party: “To be, or not to be, Aye there’s the point.” When you dive deeper, you start to wonder if we really know Shakespeare after all.
The world of print is full of ironies, too. Take the greatest translator of the English Bible, William Tyndale, whose work made the Holy Book accessible to countless worshipers for the first time—and who was burned at the stake for heresy. Or think of the husband of the protofeminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who published a devoted memoir thinking it would ensure his wife’s reputation—only to see it push her into public shame and obscurity for the next hundred years. Who is allowed to speak as an authority when the printing press democratizes power and encourages the widespread discussion of ideas?
The passions and foibles of human nature are exemplified in what we print and why. Benjamin Franklin formed an empire of print that would go on to help unite an emerging nation. (This empire also made him an ungodly amount of money.) When the British Parliament levied a now-infamous tax on paper, they didn’t realize that printers, with their ready-at-hand soapboxes, are the last people you want to piss off. One adage was as true then as it is today: follow the money.
Through it all, we’ve made some exquisite books. Yet even in the best of them, our flaws cannot be separated from our triumphs. William Blake was a visionary artist and engraver as well as a poet, responsible for a clever new illustration technique—an innovation he claimed to have learned from communicating with the dead. The bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson helped create the Doves typeface, considered (by us) to be the most beautiful font in the world, then plotted to destroy it by sinking his masterpiece into the Thames.
Make no mistake, books are a reflection of us. Just watch the wild battle unfold between Charles Dickens and the entire United States of America as we declared in no uncertain terms our right to plunder other people’s work. In the nineteenth century, to err may have been human, but to steal was as American as apple pie, or baseball, or the Statue of Liberty. (Actually, none of these things were considered “American,” at the time, so just the stealing, then.)
Books printed one hundred years ago or more still have much to teach us about our own world. By the 1920s mass consumerism had cemented itself in the United States with the help of ad men who took the momentum of selling tobacco to women as a form of weight loss and turned it toward convincing Americans to buy more books. How do we reconcile our respect for books, those powerful symbols of our intellectual heritage, with our less virtuous predilections?
The flawed history of humankind can be found in books, and the questions books provoke still drive us today. The printed word is glorious, but it’s also nuts—because we are gloriously nuts.
If you’re reading this, you love that fact as much as we do. The book historian Richard Altick once wrote, “There has always been a popular belief that more than casual attention to books is either a symptom or a cause of madness.” That means what the Cheshire Cat said to Alice could well be said of the reader who picks up this book:
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that . . . we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Welcome to the madness of printed books. Let us show you around.