In the 15th century, typography was invented, and the cost of storing information in "hard copies" in comparison with handwriting dropped by an order of magnitude. This has caused consequences comparable to those that have produced today computerization. Today, because of the massive introduction of "numbers", printing houses are dying, and then - just because of the development of printing houses - the profession of a book copyist died.
In the years 1445-1450, Johannes Gutenberg, trying his printing press, produced brochures, leaflets, calendars - in general, every little thing. Businessmen were not impressed. But when he attracted a sponsor and published the Bible in Latin - a large, important, colorful book of 1272 pages, with a circulation of 150 copies at once - then the businessmen were impressed! After all, making so many books by hand would take many years of work.
New earnings for old craftsmen
Typography quickly took over all of Europe. And the inventor, who was robbed by his own sponsor, on the contrary, was forced to give up this business.
During the second half of the 15th century, 1,099 printing houses were established in 246 European cities. Some had up to 24 printing presses. They have published over 40 thousand publications with a total circulation of 12 million copies.
But thousands of scribes lived in the same cities! Some carried out orders of the authorities and secular bosses, rewriting historical chronicles and chivalric novels, others replicated liturgical books, and still others drew illustrations for both.
The printing press took their jobs away.
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The scribes - primarily among the monks - declared typographic books to be the creation of Satan. Copies of the printed Bible brought there were burned in Cologne. In France, King Francis I was persuaded to punish printers. Some were even hanged …
With the advent of printing houses, scribes, illustrators, miniaturists, binders and parchment-makers lost their jobs and earnings. It is clear that many of them - goldsmiths, carpenters, artists - could find other work. But what could calligraphy masters and font connoisseurs do?
It was not possible to retard the development of book printing - but I wanted to survive. And they found another way to coexist with the information novelty. Which - is evident from the fact that simultaneously with the advent of printed books on the market suddenly and in great abundance began to arrive "just discovered" old manuscripts and chronicles.
The manuscripts of that period were divided into two categories. Some met the demand of collectors. Whole legends were previously created for them: they say, the handwritten book was found a long time ago, there is one copy, and even the owner must be persuaded. In the meantime, the authors were composing the text, and the scribes made it out "antique".
Collectors paid money and received it is not clear what.
So, Nikolai Kuzansky "discovered" 12 comedies of Plautus, completely unknown before him. In Hungary, King Matthew Corvin collected a whole library of manuscripts that no one knew about before. A certain monk of a Hesse monastery received a list of the necessary books - to put it bluntly, an order - where, among others, there was Tacitus' Germany, about which nothing was known except for the name. Three years later, the parchment with Tacitus was ready and sold to Rome.
Another category of manuscripts met the demand of publishers. In this category, the rule was the disappearance of the original manuscript after the publication of the printed book.
For example, Professor Gasparino Barzizza discovered in the Italian town of Lodi an old manuscript containing the text of all of Cicero's rhetorical works. I took a copy from it for the publishing house, after which the original disappeared without a trace. The Pope's secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, searched all over Europe for old manuscripts. I found several bags of them, and all of them are now known in printed form, but there are no originals. At the end of the 14th - the first half of the 15th century, a complete manuscript of Homer appeared, and in 1488 his first printed edition in Greek was published in Florence. Before that, Homer was known in Europe only by quotations from Latin writers and Aristotle.
Copies of all (!) Ancient Greek writers and philosophers were rewritten allegedly in the XI-XV centuries, but there is not a single original from which they corresponded. What a weirdness!
Sometimes there were mistakes. Abbot Tritemius and the humanist Celtis "found" many historical works, most of which were exposed as fakes by their contemporaries. The humanist Schütz obtained the allegedly authentic text of the diary entries of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. They also exposed …
As for the chronicles, the "historical facts" reported in them could not be verified, for the authors placed them in unknown lands or began and ended in ancient times.
A typical example: the annals of Saxon Grammar ends in 1185. They found it in 1514, and it formed the basis of the history of the Scandinavian countries. A similar old Polish chronicle, stretching from the depths of time to 1113, was written by Gallus Anonymous, and it appeared to the public in the same 16th century. The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours (died 594) appeared in the interval from the beginning of book printing to the end of the 16th century, etc.
After Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, in the ancient history of each European monarchy, there was found its own "Nestor the Chronicler"!
Technological progress in Moscow
The entrepreneur Bartholomew Gotan brought the first printed books to Moscow from Lubeck. Grand Duke Ivan III received him, looked at the books and generally approved the intention to open a printing house in Moscow. But our scribes of the books already knew what was what: they set a crowd on Bartholomew, and drowned the poor "nemchin" in the Moscow River.
Half a century later, I had to get involved in technical progress. A whole group of skilled craftsmen took up the introduction of book printing under the stern gaze of Ivan IV the Terrible. Success was achieved by the deacon of the Church of St. Nicholas Gostunsky in the Moscow Kremlin, Ivan Fedorov - a versatile person, artist and engraver. The first printed book published by him with Peter Mstislavets was called The Apostle (1564).
In 1568, Ivan and Peter, taking fonts and boards for engravings, departed to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - possibly at the behest of the tsar, to support Orthodoxy in the western Russian lands. They founded a printing house on the estate of Hetman Chodkevich. Then Fedorov moved to Lvov and printed there the second edition of the Apostle (1574), and in the city of Ostrog he published the famous Ostrog Bible - the first complete Bible in Church Slavonic. In short, Ivan Fedorov became the first printer not only in Muscovy, but also in Ukraine. And in Belarus, Francysk Skorina bypassed him.
History of fonts
When a novelty appears, the inventor at least in some way copies the old model, although he could have improved it. For example, Johannes Gutenberg used a font that imitates handwritten letters on his printing press. The "real" printed letters appeared in the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Luca Pacioli. In addition, Albrecht Durer's work "A Manual for Measurement with Compasses and Squares" (1525), in which the artist constructed the letters of the entire Latin alphabet, is dedicated to fonts.
Likewise, on a computer keyboard, the Enter button performs the same function as the carriage return on an antique typewriter, although the computer does not have a carriage. On the first computers, Enter was called CR, or Carriage return, and in programming languages, the cursor to the beginning of the next line still translates the CR command!
Dmitry KALYUZHNY