The Book as Content

Most important of all, this period gave rise to that feature we most associate with the book: print. When the codex moved beyond the monastery, notions of authorship gradually changed as well, since monastic scribes were not seen as originators of the ideas they put on the page, but workmen transcribing cultural knowledge. With the rise of universities and humanist inquiry into Latin and Greek literature and rhetoric, a picture of the author as an originator began to take shape. This shift, coupled with mechanization, would prove instrumental to reframing the book as content rather than object—its form a mere vessel for the information it contained.

Starting the Presses

As codex books became private items, rather than shared objects experienced publicly, copyists simply couldn’t keep up with demand. Woodblock printing, which appears to have developed in the West to produce playing cards, initially met some of the needs of readers. Block-books, composed of religious images with captions, served a devotional audience through the fifteenth century.² Much as in China, whose xylographic printing techniques predate these and are discussed in chapter 1, a folio could be printed from a relief, with both image and text carved into wood. The woodcut technique used to produce block-books played an important role in both influencing and illustrating books produced with the print technology that would set the standard and remain largely unchanged through the twentieth century: movable type.

When you think of early books, chances are the name Johannes Gutenberg comes to mind. One of the few celebrities in the history of the book, his name has become synonymous with the invention of the printing press and with the production of a 42-line Bible that has been widely exhibited and praised as the first Western book printed with movable type. Despite the ubiquity of squares and statues dedicated to him across Germany, a 1952 U.S. postage stamp celebrating his achievements, numerous engravings of him (none of them verifiable portraits), and an initiative to digitize the world’s public domain books that bears his name, Gutenberg almost didn’t get the credit for the innovations that made that feat possible.

Much of what we know about Gutenberg’s work comes from accounts of a 1455 trial with Johann Fust, the press’s financier whose 2,026 gulden investment (including interest) Gutenberg failed to repay.³ As a result of the suit, Gutenberg was forced to forfeit his print shop, retaining only the work and equipment he had completed before 1448 (when the loan was made). Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schöffer—who had served as Gutenberg’s assistant—took control of his shop, half of the completed bibles, and much of the credit for the printing press itself, and Gutenberg died twelve years later, never having profited from his invention or his clean, standardized Bible. Gutenberg’s celebrity is all the more improbable, given that he did not write a word of the text, design it, or print his name in the completed codex.⁴ To make printing possible, Gutenberg had to develop a wooden screw press based on those used for olive oil and wine, movable type created from molds, and an oil-based ink that could adhere to metal. Though popularly considered the “inventor” of printing, many of the technologies Gutenberg used were already in existence by the time he set up shop. His great achievement lay in bringing these technologies together, perfecting them, and persuading others to fund his vision.

We have already moved far enough beyond the book that we find ourselves, for the first time in centuries, able to see the book as unnatural, as a near-miraculous technological innovation and not as something intrinsically and inevitably human.

—George P. Landow, “Twenty Minutes into the Future”

What little we know of Gutenberg’s life establishes him as an enterprising young man from early on. Born around 1400 into a wealthy family in Mainz, Germany, he lived for a time in Strasburg, where his ventures included gem-polishing, producing and selling mirrors to pilgrims, and perhaps beginning work on type and the press.⁵ In 1448, Gutenberg returned to Mainz and soon thereafter convinced Fust to invest in his newest scheme: printing. For the next seven years he worked to develop typecasting and printing techniques that would endure for centuries.

Type’s Founding

To begin with, printers needed type. In later years, this could be purchased, but Gutenberg and his contemporaries each had to design and cast their own fonts, or collections of interchangeable type, from molten metal. Brass stamps had been used to decorate pewter ware and deboss leather, but these were too soft to withstand the pressure of the press.⁶ Gutenberg had to formulate his own alloy of tin and lead that was strong but could melt at a low temperatures so as not to destroy the molds, known as matrices (from mater/mother), into which it was poured. These matrices produced backward characters (or patrices, from pater/father) that, when printed, produced small, even letters of exceptional clarity.

Though Gutenberg cut his own types, as printing became more specialized these matrices were created by punchcutters who carved entire alphabets of uniform letters and matching punctuation, always in mirror image, on the tips of steel bars. Each punch was then pressed into a small bar of copper to create a right-reading indented mold. The type founder fitted this mold into one end of a small rectangular chamber, poured in molten alloy, and spun it rapidly (using a pair of tongs, since it would be quite hot) to distribute the liquid evenly. When the form cooled, he unlatched and opened it, releasing a single piece of type: a short metal bar with a raised, backward character on the end. Its rectangular metal shaft enabled this piece of type to fit snugly next to its neighbors generating tight, legible printed text (see figure 5).

Figure 5 1878 depiction of contemporary typecasting: (a) punch; (b) matrix; (c) type mold with matrix removed; (d) finished type in side and top view. Though a later iteration, the fundamentals of typecasting in the nineteenth century were the same as in Gutenberg’s day. These engravings appear in Theodore Low De Vinne’s *The Invention of Printing* (New York: F. Hart, 1878).

Scholars analyzing the letterforms in Gutenberg’s Bible have discovered minor differences in recurring letters on a single page (say two M’s or two G’s), suggesting that he used a less precise approach, sand-casting, rather than punching in copper, and that he composed each matrix from partial letters he combined.⁷ His molds were likely made from an amalgam of sand and clay, which meant he had to break them to remove the finished type. This would have made for a far more laborious process, since every matrix had to be recreated each time a piece of type was cast. Given that a single page of the Gutenberg Bible uses roughly 2,600 pieces of type, and two pages were printed at a time, with several others waiting in the wings for their turn on the press, the process of making Gutenberg’s font would have been a significant undertaking.

Finished type was sorted into tall storage cases with a cubby for each letter, mark, and space, lending the pieces the name sorts. Such cases had to be kept tidy, or a printer might find himself “out of sorts” and unable to complete a given job—an irritating situation. Typesetters, also known as compositors, worked from a manuscript, setting sorts line by line in a composing stick, a frame whose width could be adjusted depending on the desired line length. They arranged letters upside down and from right to left, with spacers between words and lines to hold them tightly in columns, creating a mirror image of the text. A completed column, known as a forme or form, was then tied with string and transferred to a galley—a metal tray—for temporary storage and proofing to ensure no words were misspelled or missing. Unlike block-books, in which the design of the page was fixed once the wood had been carved, with movable type the same set of letters could be rearranged to produce an infinite variety of texts. They could also be combined with woodblocks to print word and image simultaneously. Yet while wood carving allowed for all sorts of arrangements of words on the page, including curves and diagonal lines, hand-set type adheres to a rigid grid, making such shapes difficult to replicate.

The Press Itself

Gutenberg’s large wooden press required several pressmen to operate. It consisted of a bed in which the type forms were tightly secured, or “locked up,” in a frame known as a chase. The chase held two forms at a time, which would be printed on a single sheet, creating a folio once both sides had been printed. A pressman called a beater applied ink evenly to the surface of the type using handled leather ink balls, and another secured a moistened sheet of paper in a hinged frame, consisting of a tympan to hold the paper in back and a protective frame called a frisket in front to keep its margins clean.⁸ The tympan was then lowered onto the type, and the whole bed slid under the press’s platen, a large flat surface at the end of a wooden screw. A puller turned the long bar that lowered this platen onto the tympan (much as winemakers used the force of a screw to crush grapes), applying even pressure to the page and the type below (see figure 6). This made the type bite into the moistened surface of the paper, leaving behind an inked impression.

Figure 6 An etching of an eighteenth-century print shop: a compositor at left sets type from a manuscript page while a beater inks the forms and a pressman removes a quarto from the tympan. Daniel Chodowiecki, “Die Arbeit in der Buchdruckerei,” in *J. B. Basedows Elementarwerk* (Liepzig: Ernst Wiegand, 1909). *Source:* Wikimedia Commons, scanned by A. Wagner.

Once enough copies of the forms had been printed, the type was cleaned and the compositor distributed the sorts into the type case again. By the Renaissance, type cases had developed from an upright series of cubbyholes into a system of drawers divided into small compartments for each letter. These were arranged to provide more of the most common letters, like e, and fewer of those used less frequently, like z.⁹ Our terms uppercase and lowercase come from this system, in which majuscules were kept in the upper drawer and minuscules below. Typographic history also gives us the term stereotype. Because typesetters had a limited supply of sorts and had to distribute them for reuse after a page was finished, reprinting texts was a laborious prospect. In the eighteenth century, printers developed a technique for keeping and reusing typeset pages by creating papier-mâché impressions of the finished formes. They used these molds to cast whole pages of type at a single go, enabling them to more easily reprint books whose popularity called for it. The problem with a stereotype, of course, is that it is fixed. Any errors in spelling, spacing, punctuation, or language remain in place, making it difficult to revise both our text and our biases.

It is likely that 180 copies of Gutenberg’s Latin Bible were produced, 135 of them on paper and the rest on vellum.¹⁰ Intended primarily for sale to churches and monasteries, each two-volume set included both the Old and New Testament and was printed in two columns with wide margins to allow later illumination. Each volume weighed about fourteen pounds and measured around 17 × 24.5 in. when opened, making these most appropriate for altar use, where the illuminations and rubrication would have helped readers find the requisite texts within them.¹¹ Of the copies produced, around fifty are currently held in library and museum collections—almost half of them incomplete. And while Gutenberg’s Bible is tethered to the advent of the printing press, it was not, in fact, the first text he printed with movable type. Evidence suggests that Gutenberg printed Latin schoolbooks and papal indulgences (receipts forgiving a Catholic person’s sins, acquired through prayer or charitable donation) before completing his Bible as a means of supporting his press and currying favor with the Church.¹²

Much as we laud Gutenberg, he was not, in fact, the first person to print with movable type. We can trace it as early as 1041 to the Chinese engineer Bí Sheng who developed a technique for printing from clay type he carved by hand. Chinese printers developed clay, tin, copper, and wood type from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and the technology spread to Korea, where printers cast copper type to produce Jikji, a two-volume anthology of Zen Buddhist teachings, in 1377. Even after the advent of movable type, most printing in China was done from woodblock carvings through the nineteenth century, partly because of its cost-effectiveness and partly because of the fine quality of Chinese paper, which did not require pressure to transfer ink.¹³ Not only was he not type’s inventor, Gutenberg may not have been the first European to print with movable type, but without an explicit first-hand account he stands at the forefront of printers in Holland, Avignon, and likely elsewhere who were experimenting with type around the same time.¹⁴

The printing press vastly accelerated the speed of book production by allowing hundreds of identical copies of a single text to be printed. Thanks to its immediately recognized value as a tool of both commerce and communication, the printing press quickly spread throughout Germany and into Europe, ushering in the first era of printing. Book historians refer to books printed in Europe before 1501 as incunabula (or incunables), a term from the Latin that refers to the infancy of the printed codex—its “cradle” period. During this time, printers largely emulated the look of illuminated manuscripts, falling back on the aesthetic with which their audience was already familiar. As they developed the codex for a nonliturgical, literate reader (and customer), punctuation and spacing were gradually standardized, subject indexes were added at the back of books, and “registers” at the front of the book, listing the first word of each section, helped the binder assemble the printed quires in order, providing a precursor to our table of contents.

The Body of the Book

Incunabula inaugurate the form of the book with which we are most familiar: the printed codex. But that object was not at all uniform in the way today’s mass-produced volumes are. Scholars of early modern books make a distinction between a “book” and a “book copy,” since each codex produced from a given print run will be unique in its circulation, history, and materiality.¹⁵

For instance, when we look at a volume printed before the nineteenth century, the cover is certainly part of the codex, but it is not, in fact, part of the book, since early modern book copies were bound to order. Those few books sold already bound at the time were still handmade, and therefore not completely identical to one another either. In addition to minute differences in the binding, each book copy will contain marginalia and other residues of reading that adhere to them thanks to their individual history of ownership and circulation. These are part of the copy without being part of “the book.” The printing press thus changed the book by both facilitating its proliferation and separating the idea of the book from the object.

Because what we call a book is a nexus of various histories and fields, it is impractical to insist on a strict hierarchy of such levels, for example, from material to abstract. How we finally organize the elements we see or define in a book will depend always on what questions we wish to ask of that book.

—Joseph Dane, What Is A Book?: The Study of Early Printed Books

In our own era of proliferating book copies, we have become so accustomed to the codex that we often fail to see it unless it fails us: an unwieldy textbook, a misprinted cover, a missing page. Philosopher and theorist Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility” (1935) suggests that the photography, miniaturization, and distribution of images in the late nineteenth century destroyed the “aura” of art by abstracting it from the hand of the person who created it.¹⁶ Similarly, we no longer sense the hand of the scribe or craftsman when we pick up a mass market paperback, though old books continue to possess an aura for nostalgic readers who hold such volumes like the calfskin-gloved fingertips of a distant ancestor. The codex, like us, has a body, and to know it, we must understand its anatomy.

The language we use for the codex suggests its corpus (see figure 7). The book block, those paper pages we read, consists of signatures, not unlike Roman parchment notebooks and medieval quires. Stacked and bound in covers, the codex becomes a rectangular volume with a spine running down its back, a foot or tail on which it stands on the shelf, and a head where we might insert a ribbon, not to tie up its hair, but to keep our place. A decorative headband also reinforces the binding of the book block, allowing it to curve away from the rigid spine when opened. The hardbound codex puts the book block to bed in covers, to which the binder attaches it with endsheets, often decorative, that adhere to the board on one side and the spine-edge of the book’s first or last page on the other. Because of the tension of its joint or hinge, this flyleaf pulls the pages open ever so slightly, revealing the title page and inviting one into the book.

Figure 7 The body of the book. Illustration by Mike Force for Lightboard.

The endsheets provide an excellent spot to write one’s name or paste in a bookplate, an identifying label that arose in fifteenth-century libraries and became widespread among bibliophiles in the seventeenth century.¹⁷ Those early modern readers not disposed to altering their books’ interiors could identify them during the binding process, both by having all their volumes bound in the same materials and by having a decorative crest or coat of arms stamped into the book’s cover or spine. These modes of claiming a book point to a moment when ownership determined aesthetics, before books became uniform, mass-produced commodities whose bodies bear the marks of manufacturing standards, marketing, and bookselling.

Opening the Book

The title page, the entry point into the book we’ve come to expect each time we open one, developed during the codex’s incunable phase, around 1480.¹⁸ The term itself comes from the Latin titulus, or label, referring to a tag attached to a scroll to identify its contents, which would have been hard to determine otherwise. Scrolls were stored either in cubbyholes with these tags hanging down, or in upright baskets with these tags at the top for ready access.¹⁹ Illuminated manuscripts did not need a title page either. They began with a rubricated incipit, followed by the work at hand, which then flowed onward, providing more than enough information for the work’s potential reader: a monk or a wealthy patron who had commissioned it in advance and who likely owned a very small number of books.²⁰ Any information on the place or manner of the book’s production, which we now find at the bottom of the title page, appeared at the end of the manuscript, in its colophon.

Early printers continued the manuscript tradition, opening their books with an incipit, either hand-rubricated or printed, that gave a work’s title and author, relegating publication details to the back of the text.²¹ The first incunable to foreground those details was a 1476 printing of astronomer Regiomontanus’s Kalendarium, which lays out the lunar phases and solar movements for each day along with a calendar of religious festivals. Printed in red and black ink, the volume’s title page includes a promotional blurb in verse, the date 1476 in Arabic numerals, and an ornamental woodcut frame of flowers, urns, and flourishes that includes the names of its three printers: Ratdolt, Löslein, and Pictor.²² This frame evokes the illuminated manuscript through mechanical reproduction, a technique many subsequent printers would follow, creating ever more elaborate entryways to the book over the course of the sixteenth century to entice readers to buy them.²³ Some, designed to look like a portico or a building’s facade, symbolized the vast intellectual space within.²⁴ The term we associate with these opening pages, frontispiece, actually originates in sixteenth-century architecture, where it refers historically to a building’s face.²⁵ By the seventeenth century, printers had fully embraced the opportunity for both entry and advertisement, moving colophons to the frontispiece and even printing extra copies of this page to distribute as handbills and drum up sales.²⁶

These ornate title pages were not, as we might expect, the first page of the books in which they appeared. That page was generally left blank to protect the contents prior to binding.²⁷ In the 1600s, as codices were produced in larger quantities, printers began to include an abbreviated title on this blank sheet, inaugurating the “half title” with which we are familiar. This device arose to facilitate distribution: bookshops kept unbound books stacked in bins, so the printed title helped buyers identify the text they wanted while also preventing damage to its interior. In some cases, a volume’s owner would cut out this label and glue it inside the cover after binding, folding it over the fore-edge to help identify it on the shelf.²⁸ Books were, at the time, shelved with spines facing inward, and a book’s fore-edge might be embellished with designs, gold leaf, or intricate paintings to help a reader identify it.²⁹ It wasn’t until the mid-sixteenth century, as readers became collectors whose ever-expanding libraries served as displays of both intellect and wealth, that books were shelved with their spines outward to showcase their bindings, leading to the addition of authors’ names and titles to facilitate access—a feature of the codex we now take for granted.

The Intimate Book

While contemporary books seem to come in all sorts of proportions, our associations with size reflect its role in the codex’s early days: a large book, whether in dimensions or heft, suggests value. We presume such a volume is costly to produce and therefore special. If your home, like mine, contains books in a wide range of sizes, then you have likely experienced firsthand some of the affordances of those dimensions. Exceedingly large codex manuscripts and incunables like the antiphonal and missal were designed to be stable and hefty and to stand open on a podium for prayer. Such large books are nearly always taller than they are wide to reduce stress on the binding and make them easier to handle.³⁰ Our own large-size books are given the moniker “coffee-table book” because they are best suited to leaving around on unused surfaces for others to admire, on those rare occasions we even open them after our initial purchase. Such books wear their aura outwardly, much as oversize manuscript books with gem-inlaid bindings and gilt-edged pages did. Owned by monasteries or a select and wealthy few, they were objects inspiring devotion in both form and content.

Some incunables were quite large, but the period also saw the development of “quarto,” “octavo,” and even smaller-size books, enabled by refinements in typecasting. These smaller books were far more portable than their precursors and allowed a more intimate relationship to the book than the large showpiece on the altar. Books of hours, for instance, were designed to be portable both so that one might immerse oneself in prayer at any time of day and so that one might show off one’s literacy and wealth by drawing the little volume from one’s sleeve or pocket.³¹

We might generalize the historic moment at which the printed text arises as one of increasing intimacy between individuals and texts, which accounts, in part, for the form of the book as we know it today. Although Latin was the language of the church and education across Europe, fifteenth-century printers began to issue vernacular books to serve a wider audience, a move spurred on by the Protestant Reformation, which advocated for a more direct relationship between the individual and God.³² Martin Luther’s best-selling Wittenberg Bible (1522), for example, provided a German translation intended for a broad audience of lay readers. Although it was too expensive for most Lutherans, it was acquired by churches, schools, and priests, and thereby played a vital role in the dissemination of the text across a number of regional German dialects. With Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and the consolidation of power in the monarchy, there was even more support for the spread of vernacular books, leading to the 1611 production of the authorized King James Bible in English.

Incunables reflect the market of their time. Among these early printed books, more than half are religious: missals for church use, books of hours for private use, and lives of the saints and religious guides for parish priests. Not only did incunabula facilitate a religious Reformation, they aided in the spread of humanism and scientific knowledge. The period saw a rise in interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, as well as in medicine, in part due to the plagues that were decimating Europe.³³ Aristotle’s fear of texts circulating without their authors proved one of print’s chief assets. The publication of scientific treatises allowed scholars to engage in dialogue and debate with thinkers far removed, directly facilitating the spread of ideas that would flourish with the Renaissance.

The early years of the printed codex thus mark both an important technological shift (the mechanical reproduction of text) and a philosophical one in terms of how we relate to books. At this point they became the intimate spaces we now expect them to be, whether guiding one through the stations of daily devotion or conveying ancient thought on the structure of tragedy. While we currently enjoy many different kinds of reading experiences, in Western culture “the book” is almost universally seen through this intimate lens. Codices can be owned and shelved in a private library as a sign of one’s intellect. They can be wrapped in covers to protect (or hide) them. They can be handed from one person to the next as a love token or symbol of great kinship: Here, I loved this, and I think you’ll love this too. Whether the volume in question is a travel guide or a romance novel, the perception that books are little worlds enclosed in covers remains the same. We think of ourselves as disappearing into them, only to emerge hours later, changed by what we have read. Pundits frequently draw on this romance of disembodiment as a contrast to the passivity of watching television, characterized as a kind of vegetative state. Even in this vanguard moment of complex televised dramas, the stigma remains: We would be better people if we disappeared into books instead.

A book is a machine to think with.

—I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism

By the seventeenth century, the structure of the book had developed to facilitate this sense of intimacy and cultural value. As the codex became a commodity, printers developed appurtenances to help frame it as one. To differentiate themselves from one another, they developed “printer’s devices,” emblems incorporating their initials and an icon, which they included on the frontispiece—metonyms that prefigure today’s familiar logos, such as the penguin in an orange oval that most contemporary readers will recognize. Long titles helped advertise the book as well by giving readers a taste of what was to come,³⁴ much as jacket copy and subject area designations today give us a sense of a book’s relevance to our field of interest.

The navigational aids we now associate with books—tables of contents, page numbers, running heads, and indexes—arose during this period through a shift from devices that helped printers and binders in manufacturing a book, to devices that helped readers navigate that same text. Scholar Peter Stallybrass has argued such features define the history of the codex, suggesting that “the invention of printing [was] the culmination of the invention of the navigable book—the book that allowed you to get your finger into the place you wanted to find in the least possible time.”³⁵ Most incunabula, for instance, did not include page numbers—readers were expected to number them by hand. Because books were bound by specialists outside the print shop, they had to be clearly marked to prevent the pages from getting out of order in transit. To ensure the binder correctly collated the work’s sections, printers included folio numbers, signature marks, and catchwords (marginal words printed at the end of one page and the start of the next, inherited from the manuscript tradition) to keep the text in order. The efficiency of page numbering in facilitating book use became clear to early modern printers, and, along with running heads, was incorporated by the seventeenth century.

Tables of contents and indexes, an outgrowth of the “registers” of first words that helped binders collate a book’s sections, were introduced not only to help readers navigate a text, but also to assure them of its comprehensiveness (despite the erratic and highly interpretive nature of such catalogs).³⁶ Another type of index, known as a manicule, fist, or pointer, was adopted by printers within the body of the book. Originating in medieval manuscripts as early as the twelfth century, these emblems in the margin and body of the text literally “put one’s finger into the book” in the form of a closed fist with an extended pointer that draws attention to a specific passage. Such elaborate illustrated hands were used by Renaissance humanist scholars to annotate their books, both as navigational aids and mementos that leave their personal stamp on the text (a hand, scholar William Sherman points out, is a far more individual marker than an underline or arrow).³⁷ Even after the advent of the printing press, readers used such marginalia to engage more deeply with their books and turn them into private spaces for dialogue with the author.

Authors and publishers actively courted this kind of dialectical relationship. Prefaces as we know them developed to invite readers into the book and instruct them in its goals, setting up a conversation between author and reader. Such intimacy was most explicit in the “treatises” that proliferated during the sixteenth century, providing step-by-step guides to tasks great and small, from how to design buildings to how to mix paints.³⁸ Illustrations, foldouts, volvelles, and other movable book features invited the reader to engage in a tactile way with the book, treating the page as a space for exploration.

These reader-focused elements were just as important to marketing as to book use. They mark the codex as commodity—an important shift in our thinking about how texts circulate. The value placed on reading during the Renaissance was not simply in absorbing a text, but in actively engaging, consuming, and reframing it. Readers of the period made books their own through the practice of keeping a commonplace book in which they copied selections of texts and organized them thematically for easy reference.³⁹ This practice is emblematic of the highly individual and personal relationship between reader and text prized at the time. Open margins left space for active annotation—a visible and tactile engagement of mind with page. Students could also use such spaces to take down lecture notes, creating a multilayered dialogue with their professor and textbook. Of course, these usages were facilitated by the book design of the day, but they also helped structure the book, which developed in response to the needs and values of readers.

We should remember that the ability to mark up a text to this degree is an effect of codex form—such detailed annotation would have required a paperweight or partner to hold a scroll open on one’s behalf, or to take notes on a separate tablet. Likewise, navigating a scroll required an intimate sense of volume if one wanted to return to a familiar passage—one reason ancient readers practiced and memorized their texts.⁴⁰ Our conception of the book and access are intimately shaped by the shape it takes. However, lest we imagine that the printing press swiftly ushered in the end of manuscript production, it bears noting that manuscripts continued to enjoy wide use during the Renaissance, for four hundred years after Gutenberg. As book historian Roger Chartier points out, manuscripts had several key benefits—they escaped censorship, were cheaper to produce, and permitted emendation, for example—all of which kept them in circulation.⁴¹

Books are simultaneously sequential and random access ...; books are volumetric objects …; books are finite …; books offer a fundamentally comparative visual space; the two-page opening of a standard codex …; and last, books are writable as well as readable.

—Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Bookscapes: Modeling Books in Electronic Space”

Type and Face

It is worth a short note on the changing nature of type at this historic juncture in the book’s development. Early printers’ types were modeled on the manuscript tradition and thus used heavy, formal scripts. Gutenberg’s type was modeled on Textura, a German calligraphic style standard among fifteenth-century scribes. Its narrow letterforms and angular pointy ends, or finials, are characteristic of such blackletter scripts. We often think of such heavy lettering as Gothic, a legacy that continues in contemporary digital type.

While it has been conventionalized by now, the term “Gothic” is emblematic of the divisive role lettering can play in demarcating national identity. The name was actually imposed on German lettering by Renaissance humanist scholars, who considered the thorny blackletter hand barbarous. For their Latin manuscripts, they revived eighth-century lowercase letterforms associated with Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, which they believed had come from classical Rome. Because they were easier to decipher, Renaissance scholars also felt they made texts more accessible, bringing them closer to the forbears they wished to study. The first Italian printers based their types on this humanist hand, producing “roman” letterforms named for their purported connection to ancient Rome (see figure 8).⁴²

Figure 8 A sample of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible (1454), set in a Gothic Textura face he designed (at left), and of the Aldine Press’s *Hypnerotomachia Poliphili* (1499), set in a roman type designed by Francesco Griffo (at right). “Leaf of the Gutenberg Bible” image courtesy *Digital Commonwealth*, Boston Public Library. Page from *Hypnerotomachia Poliphili* courtesy Henry Walters, The Walters Art Museum.

As an aside, the Germans developed their own vexed relationship with blackletter type, which was standard in German publishing since the advent of print. In 1933, the National Socialist Party declared Fraktur its official typeface as a sign of German pride. However, the Nazis did an about-face in 1941, claiming Fraktur had been foisted upon them by Jewish printers with the advent of the press, and banning it in favor of the humanist Antiqua letterforms that had arisen precisely to differentiate Gothic and Roman text.⁴³ This tangled history of type tells us much about the legacy of othering embedded in language’s form.

We tend not to refer to the fonts we currently use as roman type unless we are contrasting them with italic type, the right-slanting face used for emphasis in contemporary typesetting. The styles’ names suggest their geography: while roman was drawn from both the Ancient Roman and Holy Roman Empires, italic was developed in Venice in 1500 by engraver Francesco Griffo for printer Aldus Manutius (ca. 1450–1515), who wanted to differentiate his publications from those of his fellow printers. Based on the cursive handwriting of humanist scholars, these letterforms appealed to Aldus as a compact and eye-catching script that would link his books to the intellectual currents of his age.⁴⁴ Both roman and italic type are considered “humanist” faces because they emulate writing with a broad-nibbed pen, which produces strokes of varying thickness. While such faces continue to be used in both print and digital contexts, we have lost the association with the hand that made them that was so appealing to the Italian scholars.

The Aldine Revolution and Portable Libraries

Aldus himself reflects the Renaissance humanist spirit. Born Teobaldo Manuzio, he adopted a Latinized name because of his love and scholarship of Greco-Roman literature and language. As the personal tutor to a wealthy Italian family, over the years he amassed a network of well-connected patrons who helped finance his Aldine Press in Venice around 1490.⁴⁵ Initially publishing textbooks and dictionaries to facilitate the study of classical languages, Aldus built ties to a number of Greek scholars who had fled to the city after the 1453 Turkish invasion of Constantinople, as well as to humanist scholars in Venice and Padua who, like him, were dedicated to the dissemination of Greco-Roman art and thought. So close-knit was this scholarly community that Aldus began including the phrase “in Aldi Neacademia” in his colophons in 1502, turning this society of scholars into an “Aldine New Academy.”⁴⁶ While they may never have actually founded a physical institution, Aldus and his cohort disseminated their love of Greek and Roman thought through a more intimate, one-to-one method: publication.

Aldus initiated the use of his italic type with a series of octavo editions of the Latin classics and Italian vernacular poetry in 1501 that would change printing and reading forever. These compact volumes, published with prefaces but no notes or commentary, were intended for an intelligent lay reader but were most popular and beloved among scholars, politicians, and courtiers. Machiavelli famously wrote in a 1513 letter to a friend that he took such books with him on hikes through the woods to read of Dante and Petrarch’s romances as he savored the scenery or checked his bird traps.⁴⁷ Their portable size was made possible, in part, by Griffo’s compact type, which was narrow and condensed enough to allow for the reduced page size and count that kept the book affordable. There is some debate as to whether the typeface truly saved any material cost, but it was certainly popular, as evinced by Aldus’s attempts to patent it.⁴⁸ Though he was granted a privilege protecting his sole right to use the typeface, he could not stop printers in Italy and beyond from copying—and improving—his letterforms.

Aldus’s printing is emblematic of an important moment in book history—one in which the aesthetics of the page began to be considered both in terms of artistry and legibility. Competition among printers and stationers, as well as humanist inquiry, led to a careful consideration of the interior of the book as an expressive space. Aldus’s first vernacular book, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the story of Poliphilo’s dreamlike erotic quest to find his love Polia, has been praised for the craft of its pages, which include text in Latin, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic, feature beautiful woodcut illustrations, and use shaped paragraphs to integrate word and image (see figure 8).⁴⁹ Renaissance printers sought to differentiate their publications from medieval manuscripts, and in doing so, they merged classical elements with contemporary ones. They removed glosses and critical commentary that cluttered the page to allow scholars unfettered access to the text. Certainly, folio and quarto printings with such additions continued to be produced for a scholarly audience interested in the book as a space of deep conversation among generations of authors. But it was the Aldine octavo that sought a broader audience for classical texts—one with no need for such extras.

While these reprints didn’t find the wide readership Aldus expected, due in part to expense and in part to competition from other printers, his practice of reprinting “edifying” and “important” works prefigures the proliferation of “classic” reprints in the nineteenth century. Increased literacy during the period led to greater demand for books, especially since most people didn’t have access to formal education. In the words of Victorian scholar Richard Altick, books were considered “fireside universities” and promoted in the press as a means of both cultural and intellectual enrichment.⁵⁰ No longer solely the purview of the aristocracy, excerpts from great works were included in the cheap weeklies and newspapers for broad enjoyment, and publishers saw the value in making classics available to this hungry audience at a price they could afford.

But demand alone could not have facilitated the spread of Sir Walter Scott’s Ballantyne’s Novelists Library (one of many higher-priced series), Constable’s Miscellany, or the more than ninety cheap reprint series published between 1830 and 1906 that Altick has cataloged.⁵¹ By the 1880s, publishers were in an all-out price war to drop their reprints to as low as one shilling a volume or less. Printing itself had become cheaper by that point thanks to industrialization: the steam-driven press (invented in 1814), steam-powered papermaking machines that produced continuous rolls (patented in 1807), the development of stereotyping and mechanical typecasting and setting (discussed in this chapter), and machine-made case bindings allowed publishers to produce books rapidly, in greater quantities, and at reduced prices.

Intellectual Property

The spread of the book in the nineteenth century was also affected by changing notions of copyright, which influenced both the availability of works for reprinting and the number of new authors making original work. Copyright did not exist during the manuscript era, but ideas about ownership had developed with the rise of print as publishers sought to protect themselves against competition. In the sixteenth century, the exclusive right to a work was tied to the book object and belonged to the printer once he had purchased it from its author or compiler.⁵² Possession of the book gave one the right to copy it but didn’t prevent others from producing their own pirated versions. Across Europe, a printer might petition the crown or church for a book privilege to protect their right to a certain work. Such privileges, when granted by emperors, dukes, and popes, gave them a certain amount of control over the press, which meant that those agreeable to the government were favored, and newer presses had trouble finding a foothold.⁵³ In the United Kingdom, publication was carefully controlled by the Stationers’ Company in London, a select group of printers that granted and registered licenses for approved books. They gave the rights to the most popular (and lucrative) of these, including the Bible and schoolbooks, to a select few, extending the monopolistic control of printers over British publishing.⁵⁴

With the surge of competition among publishers in England during the eighteenth century, concerns over intellectual property mounted. Debates around copyright mark an important shift in thinking about “the book,” transferring rights from the object itself to the text it contained at a moment when it could be not only printed but also translated and adapted for another medium—all of which needed protections.⁵⁵ The world’s first copyright act, the Statute of Anne (1709), finally gave ownership of a work to its author, enforcing the primacy of content over form, for a term of fourteen years, with the possibility of a fourteen-year extension if the author outlived the first term. Books already in print were granted a twenty-one-year term. This shift improved both the status and solvency of authors, who could earn a living from their work by arranging a profit-sharing agreement with their publisher, selling their copyright outright, or leasing it for a predetermined period.⁵⁶ Their copyrights, however, were not enforceable abroad, so international piracy still presented a significant problem, particularly between Britain and the United States. International respect for copyright was established by the 1886 Berne International Copyright Convention and the American International Copyright Treaty of 1891, defining important protections for reprints and works in translation.⁵⁷ As authors began to receive a living wage for their work, writing became a profession, and a burgeoning class of novelists and poets provided publishers with still more material to print.

Copyright itself may have had the greatest impact on the resurgence of classic reprints in the nineteenth century. While the Statute of Anne had restricted copyright to a maximum of twenty-eight years, British booksellers fought to maintain perpetual copyright during a sixty-year period known as the “battle of the booksellers.” The landmark case Donaldson v. Beckett (1774) struck down perpetual copyright and confirmed the copyright term established by the Statute, bringing a wealth of material into the public domain and setting a precedent that would be adopted and adapted around the world in the ensuing decades. The United States would pass its own Copyright Act, An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, in 1790, revising it periodically over the next two centuries.⁵⁸ As its name suggests, it aimed to protect the rights of authors while also ensuring works would enter the public domain within a reasonable time frame.

Copyright continues to evolve in response to changes in publishing, legal battles with the estates of artists and authors, and debate over mass digitization projects, which will be discussed in chapter 4. A quick aside, though, on the current status of copyright illuminates the extent to which it privileges a work’s idea—what I have been referring to as content. In the United States, publication is not actually required to secure copyright, which applies to original works “that are fixed in a tangible form of expression.”⁵⁹ An author holds the copyright to their works throughout their lifetime and seventy years beyond their death, at which point it enters the public domain. If a work has been made “for hire,” then copyright belongs to the employer or corporation that commissioned it and extends ninety-five years from publication or one hundred twenty years from creation (for unpublished works). Long periods of protection indeed.

The legal shift to conceiving of the book as content, rather than object, is virtually inseparable from its commodification. While new books were expensive during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries partly because of the cost of copyright, reprints made public domain works affordable to a less affluent readership. Some publishers relied on subscriptions, testing the market for a given work or series by sending out a descriptive prospectus and soliciting advance purchases before deciding to go to press—a bit like today’s crowdfunding efforts. While this process raised the necessary capital up front, it also had pitfalls. If subscriptions waned or a publisher encountered costly problems during printing, it would have to abandon the initiative or fold altogether, leaving customers with a partial series they could never complete.⁶⁰ The market for new books had a direct impact on their physical form. As readers turned more and more to private circulating libraries and public lending libraries, publishers saw an opportunity: publishing longer books that could be bound in sections, allowing them to sell several volumes instead of one. The “triple-decker” novels of the period were too expensive for all but the wealthiest readers, and thus ensured a robust membership (and income) for lending libraries, who profited from the ability to loan the book’s separately bound sections to three readers at once.⁶¹ Publishers seeking to maximize profits experimented with publishing the same work in several forms: first serialized in journals or as pamphlets; then bound for libraries as a triple-decker; and, finally, as a cheap reprint for a mass audience.

The Crystal Goblet

The reprint publishing initiatives of the nineteenth century owe a debt to Aldus’s vision—one acknowledged by bookseller William Pickering and publisher Charles Wittingham, who printed the popular Aldine Edition of the British Poets in 1830, trading on the Aldine brand. While the myriad reissued classics of the period shared the Aldine impulse, they lacked his dedication to beautiful design and production. Placing their emphasis on content over form, they cut every corner to reduce costs: they used cheap thin paper, filled the page with tiny type, and in some cases included advertisements within the text.⁶² To fit as much content into as small a space as possible, such volumes were printed in sizes from the Aldine octavo to the wallet-like 32mo, a tiny format that saved publishers money and buyers valuable space in their already cramped living quarters.

Given this lack of attention to the book object on the part of most reprint publishers, many consider the 1906 Everyman’s Library Aldus’s true inheritor: it made quality design once again central. As editor Ernest Rhys put it, he and publisher J. M. Dent intended “to produce a book which would be pleasant to see and handle, with a cheerful outside, and print easy to read and good for the eyes within, tempting to look at on the shelf, and of a size convenient for the pocket, one that could be taken for a country ramble or for a railway journey or on shipboard”—a goal Machiavelli would have approved.⁶³ They achieved these ends with ornate Arts and Crafts–style endpapers and frontispieces, cloth bindings in thirteen colors to indicate a volume’s genre, and gilt-stamped spines, all protected by a paper dust jacket advertising the series and the volume’s low one-shilling price (about the cost of a dozen eggs at the time). The popular series continued until 1982, evolving to include bindings in a range of materials to suit readers’ budgets, and paperback editions began appearing in 1960 in deference to public taste and aesthetic shifts.

The twentieth century saw a number of publication series that, like Aldus’s, sought to help a lay public amass personal libraries of affordable editions. Unlike those early printing endeavors, these were truly accessible to a mass market—printed on cheap paper and perfect bound with glue in paperback covers, they were designed with the urban commuter in mind. They were sold at newsstands, lunch counters, and anywhere a wire rack could be set up to catch a reader’s eye.⁶⁴ While many of these were works of pulp fiction, British publisher Allen Lane (1902–1970) had a different vision. He founded Penguin Books in 1935 to offer cheap, unabridged works by established authors designed for educated readers on the go.⁶⁵ All books shared the same cover design featuring the penguin logo and a typographic treatment of title and author. Colored stripes at the head and tail of the codex indicated its series: orange for modern fiction, green for crime, blue for biography, burgundy for travel, gray for current events, and yellow for miscellany. At sixpence (less than the cost of a pint of milk), they not only sold well but paved the way for a paperback revolution in Britain, the United States, and France.

The format of the book is determined by its purpose. It relates to the average size and the hands of an adult.

—Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design, trans. Hajo Hadeler

The affordability and accessibility of the series certainly contributed to its popularity, but the quality of its design, implemented by German typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), was pivotal to its long-term success. Trained as a calligrapher and self-taught as a type designer, Tschichold embraced modern design in 1923 after seeing the Weimar Bauhaus exhibition. He codified the rules of good design in a seminal manifesto, Die Neue Typographie (The New Typography, 1927), calling for sans-serif type, wide margins, and asymmetrical page design based on the proportions of the medieval manuscript: a ratio of text block to page known as The Golden Section (1:1.618).⁶⁶ Renaissance printers like Aldus had borrowed these proportions, which correspond to the Fibonacci series, from the scribal tradition, determining them most pleasing to the eye.

Tschichold eventually returned to using humanist typefaces and eased up on his earlier ideals. In 1947, Lane appointed him to redesign Penguin Paperbacks, and Tschichold established The Penguin Composition Rules to unify the series’ asethetic.⁶⁷ This system combined effective branding principles with good design, ensuring the popularity of Penguin for years to come. Like Aldus before him, Tschichold believed good design was not a luxury but an integral part of the book. In his words, “We do not need pretentious books for the wealthy, we need more really well-made ordinary books.”⁶⁸

Prizing legibility and accessibility, Tschichold’s ideals meant the page and typography had to be put in service of the text, used to deliver content as cleanly as possible from author to reader. This philosophy is reflected in another important typographic manifesto of the period—Beatrice Warde’s “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should be Invisible” (1932). Aiming to discourage excessive ornamentation and ostentatious typography, her central metaphor of the page as a “flagon of wine” treats the text as an intoxicant, “capable of stirring and altering men’s minds,” and the page as its crystalline container.⁶⁹ This vision reflects the popular conception of the book in the twentieth century: “It conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds,” and the typographer, designer, printer, and publisher all work in the service of these ideas, trying to transmit them as transparently as possible.⁷⁰ With the perception that books are ideas bestowed on readers by an authorial genius whose activity is purely intellectual, the book’s object status vanished for much of the reading public as we raised a glass to happily consume its contents.

If the book’s handiness has been fundamental to the way we have taken stock of the world, its ability to serve as a container has been another way through which we have found order in our lives. Books are things that hold things.

—Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times

The twentieth century did indeed see a preponderance of well-made ordinary books, as Tschichold and Warde hoped, alongside some less well made but equally popular ones. To reach a state in which the publishing world could support hardbound books, trade editions, and mass market paperbacks, the book required widespread literacy, an easily reproducible material form, and a means of distribution. All of these had developed by this point. No longer did a chapman travel from town to town selling broadsides and pamphlets to the poor while the affluent enjoyed sumptuous volumes—bookshops either stocked your book or could order the one you wanted. And no longer did the printer serve as both publisher and bookseller, a distinction solidified in the nineteenth century. Distributors arose to traffic between publishers and the libraries and bookstores, warehousing their stock and marketing it to retailers.

Brick-and-mortar bookstores experienced a boom in the 1980s, with major American players Borders and Barnes and Noble muscling out many smaller, independent shops by offering huge variety, best sellers, and cafés where buyers could enjoy a cappuccino while thumbing through their purchases. The infrastructure of such stores is built around the codex and in turn has shaped the book: from eye-catching cover designs, to clearly labeled spines with author and title, to the introduction of ISBN barcodes for managing stock, to genre labeling on the back of books telling the seller where to shelve them and the buyer how to perceive them (for instance, as nonfiction, poetry, science fiction, or fantasy). By Tschichold’s time, books were for everyone and were available everywhere, even in grocery store checkout lines. Only fifty years later, the major American chains, including Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, and Crown Books, have all but disappeared, with Borders filing for bankruptcy in 2011. Barnes and Noble has reduced its physical presence and now does much of its business through its Nook e-reader and branded college bookstores. In their heyday, though, such shops played a key role in the commodification of the book and in our changing perception of it as content rather than object. Even though innumerable material elements come together to make the book, these features have been naturalized to such a degree that we now hardly notice them, since we have come to see content as the copyrightable, consumable, marketable aspect of the work.

2 The Book as Content