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Twenty thousand years or more separate the way of life of the Aurignacian hunters, who contributed the first pictures to the modern symposium of human communications, from the beginnings of settled community life and the beginnings of a priestly script. Fully three thousand years separate the way of life of the first Semitic trading folk who had an alphabet from the vast expansion of knowledge which occurred in Northern Europe after the spread of printing from movable type during the half century before the voyages of Columbus. Civilised mankind had to surmount many hurdles before it was possible to exploit to the fullest extent the considerable economy signalised by the introduction of alphabetic writing.

At first, there were few people who had any use for the art of writing except as a convenience of commercial intercourse. There was in fact no incentive to adapt the art of writing with letters to the flexible uses of daily speech.... An age-long popular tradition of community singing and community dancing lies back of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes; but it was one which could assume so novel an aspect only in the trading communities of the islands in the Mediterranean, where constant interchange of personnel promoted conditions less propitious to the dominance of a priestly class of avaricious landed proprietors than under the earlier dynasties of Egypt and the near East. Thus and there, at an early date, a segment of tribal ritual crystallises as a secular pursuit; and where there is a flourishing drama there is also a motive for writing, equally aloof from association with the repetition of sacred texts or from the limited requirements of the counting-house. There is, in fact, an incentive to write down what is more than a ceremonial password, an epitaph or a bill of goods, an incentive to record in writing what living people actually speak.

It is indeed a far cry from the Greek drama to the free-and-easy visual speech of a modern novel or of a modern newspaper in the Western world; but we unduly belittle our too often overrated debt to Greek civilisation, if we fail to pay tribute to an innovation which entitles Greek literature to rank as a cardinal contribution to the self-education of the human species. To a far greater extent than the Romans, the Greeks wrote about the life of their times with an intimacy and liveliness which foreshadows the adaptation of writing to all the familiar uses of speech. For the Latin which generations of schoolboys reluctantly construed in the grammar schools, Latin in the Gladstone tradition, was actually dead when committed to writing, a language as remote from the common speech of the Italian peninsula as the idiom of Gertrude Stein from that of the contemporary American household.

Within the framework of Greco-Latin society, the written word became available to the more prosperous citizens on a scale unprecedented in the civilisations which had preceded them; but there were still very few who read much or read often. The spoken word was still the main instrument of instruction and of political persuasion. Even among those who could read, there were still few who could also write. There were in fact two formidable impediments alike to the use of the written word as a medium of instruction or of propaganda and to the availability of any considerable body of written matter for those with inclination and training in the art of reading. Needless to say, one was the laborious nature of the only available means of multiplying the products of the pen, when it was necessary to copy every script individually by hand; and since this was a labour commonly entrusted to slaves, deficiency in penmanship gave little affront to self-esteem among the still privileged few who could read with ease. The other handicap was the writing surface itself, often of its very nature inadaptable to free circulation and at best costly.

PAPER is so much a part of every-day life that we too easily overlook the significance of writing material as a circumstance limiting the advancement of literacy. It is on that account worthy of more than a single sentence. The clay tablets of Babylon and Crete might serve the purpose of stocking a temple or a palace library; but no household of modest size could have accommodated the contents of several issues of the New Yorker, if transcribed in the cuneiform tradition. Much the same may be said about the wax tablets in common use among the Roman contemporaries of Cicero. Indeed the advantage Egyptian civilisation, and thereafter the mainland Greek, Alexandrian, and late Latin, enjoyed from the use of papyrus is difficult to exaggerate. Papyrus consists of longitudinal ribbons of reed laid on a wet surface, stuck with gum to an overlaying layer of similar strips at right angles, dried in the sun and subsequently polished. It has a double advantage over clay and wax. It is not bulky, and its smooth surface permits an easy cursive style of writing. On the other hand, its manufacture is tedious; and it does not stand up to a moist climate.

Long before printing began in Europe—during the Han dynasty in the first century A.D.—the Chinese had taken a lesson from the wasp, which makes its nest by chewing vegetable fibre and pressing the moist suspension into a film of even thickness. As a source of vegetable fibre, the Chinese used anything which came to hand: old fishing nets, worn-out rope and hemp, macerating it in tubs before removing with a sieve the artificial detritus. It is then possible to compress the latter to required thickness, and the triturated fibres adhere when dry. The Mandarin had now material far superior to papyrus, alike for copying or for storing the written word; but he lacked the incentive to share the advantage of this invention with his underprivileged compatriots. Chinese literature received a new impetus; but there were still few who could enjoy its benefits....

The capture of Samarkand by the Arabs in A.D. 750 marks the date when paper starts on its trek to the as yet non-existent printing presses of Europe. The Moslem invaders of Spain and Sicily brought it with them into the territories they conquered, and with it a recipe for deriving the fibre basis from old rags. For three centuries after its introduction to Christendom, somewhere about A.D. 1200, it had to compete with parchment or vellum made from stretched, pressed and dried animal membranes. What was probably decisive in establishing its supremacy was the spread of water mills in the two centuries before Caxton. Power was necessary to speed up maceration of the raw material; and we have record of paper mills in Germany by A.D. 1336. Had it not been for this new tempo and economy of production of thin, smooth and flexible material for the impress of the written word, the vastly increased volume of written matter put into circulation by the printing press could not have come about.

As we all know, printing from movable type began in Europe about fifty-years before Columbus set out on his first voyage; but few of us reflect upon the dramatic speed with which the new trade spread from one city or one country to another. A single leaf of a sibylline poem called the Fragment of World Judgment is supposedly the earliest extant product of the new technique, probably issued about the year 1445 from the press of Gutenberg, a master printer, then resident in Strasbourg. From law-suit records we know that Fust, a goldsmith of Mainz who financed Gutenberg's earliest trials, was printing there during the fifties; and McMurtrie, author of The Book, states that

the first dated piece of printing preserved to us appeared in 1454, which is thus the earliest date that can be set beyond any speculation or controversy. In that year four different issues of a papal indulgence appeared in printed form. The occasion was historic. Constantinople had fallen to the Turks the year before. At the solicitation of the king of Cyprus, Pope Nicholas V granted indulgences to those of the faithful who should aid with gifts of money the campaign against the Turks. Paulinus Chappe, as representative of the king of Cyprus, went to Mainz to raise money of this cause. Ordinarily, these indulgences would have been written out by hand, but in this case, as there were a considerable number to be distributed, the aid of the new art of printing was enlisted, and forms were printed with blank spaces left for filling the dates, the names of the donors to whom they were issued, and other details.

The new art turned out to be a double-edged weapon in the hands of papal authority. A Latin Bible in two columns of forty-two lines to the page came out in 1456, most probably, according to McMurtrie, from the press of Fust, now in competition with Gutenberg. As early as 1478, a Cologne master printer issued a Bible in two different German dialects with well over a hundred illustrations. There were 133 editions of it during the next fifty years. To be sure, a century was to elapse before printed Bibles were available in the home tongue throughout Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and the Low Countries; but it was a disastrous step to make the poorer clergy Bible-conscious.

Within ten years of the issue of the Indulgence mentioned above, printing by movable type was going on in several German cities other than Mainz and Strasbourg. German printers brought the art to Rome in 1467, and two years later John of Spire, like Fust a goldsmith, had started work in Venice. In Switzerland, says McMurtrie, it seems likely that "the first printing office in Basle began work about 1467." Printing in Paris starts about a year later. In 1469, Caxton, a Kentishman, who had occupied consular status to the English Merchant Adventurers at Bruges, began translating into his own tongue for the press the Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, printed there in 1475. A year later, he returned to England, set up business with Colard Mansion in the Almonry near Westminster Abbey, and from that office produced The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers. This, states McMurtrie,

was the first dated book printed in England, the Epilogue being dated 1477 and in one copy November 18. Though this was the first dated book, it was not certainly the first issue of the press, Caxton's translation of Jason and a few other publications of slight extent having probably preceded it.

Within twenty years from the start, on the threshold of the discovery of the New World, printing from movable type is thus in full swing throughout Europe. The speedy and consequent intellectual ferment is an oft-told tale, scarcely worth further comment, if it were not too customary to dwell on the alleged impact on natural knowledge, as on biblical criticism and political theory, of Greek scholarship imported into Europe by Byzantine immigrants in flight from the victorious Turks. The fact is that the positive outcome of Alexandrian mathematics, astronomy, medicine and mechanics had long ago penetrated north-western Europe through visits of students to the Moorish universities in Spain, where positive knowledge had attained a higher level than ever before through the marriage of Alexandrian science to Hindu number-lore. Equally indisputable is the fact that the universities of Toledo, Cordova and Seville were midwives of the cartography which Jewish pilots put at the service of Henry the Navigator. That the new technique of printing made available for the great explorations of the fifteenth century a new scientific amenity for which there was a pre-existing and insistent demand is evident from the mounting number of nautical almanacks published between Gutenberg's first productions and the project of Columbus. Soon there were to follow manuals of military science propounding problems of ballistics created by the introduction of gunpowder into warfare—like paper, from Chinese sources by way of the Moslem world.

Why monks, such as Adelard of Bath, should disguise themselves as Moslems to study in the Moorish universities during the twelfth century is easy to understand. The Church had assumed the responsibilities of the ancient priesthoods as custodians of the calendar, and hence of astronomical lore, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. As founders of hospitals in conformity with the beatitude of the sick visitor, they were prohibited from active participation in the advancement of medicine as a science by Papal bulls against dissection of the human body, but on that account the more well-disposed to Jewish missionaries of the Moorish culture, when the latter set up schools of medicine on the campuses of the mediaeval universities....

That Ionian scientific speculations exerted a salutary influence on Newtonian science, when the atomic concept invaded modern European thought after the seventeenth-century translations of Gassendi and others, is not open to dispute. Nor need we rob the fugitive scholars of Constantinople of the credit for playing a minor part in this climax off-stage; but the efflorescence of science in the seventeenth century was the immediate consequence of technological advances made in the preceding century, and put into circulation through a commercial undertaking which had to sell science to a reading public of master pilots, mining engineers, artillery commanders and spectacle-makers before naturalistic science had paid its way into university cloisters under a more accommodating sobriquet as natural philosophy.

With this overdue obituary on the immigrants from the fall of Constantinople in the year preceding the first dated product of the new printing technique let us leave them; and again get into focus the astonishing speed of its spread in an age when the craft guilds jealously guarded their secrets. Here is a technical revolution of the first magnitude at a time when technical innovations diffused leisurely against menacing obstacles of custom thought and of legal sanctions. As such, its tempo is a challenge to curiosity; and part of the answer to the enigma is that there was already a flourishing craft of printing to take advantage of the economy of movable type, when Gutenberg and Fust began their partnership.

Again, we must pause to pay a debt of gratitude to China, and to civilisations far older than the Chinese. We have seen that the seal is the oldest form of signature; and that all our knowledge of one of the earliest literatures of the world comes from clay tablets on which the Sumerian priesthoods engraved their sign-language with a punch to which it owes the characteristic style called cuneiform. The same impulse to impose the signature of a sky-sign on the clay tablet had led men to impress symbols of ownership or good omen on the soft clay products of the potter's wheel before the baking began. A stamp is, after all, a seal to carry a pigment; and the practice of stamping pottery with coloured patterns is of great antiquity. The next step is intelligible in its own territory. In China, whence the silkworm made its lethargic way across the great trade routes of Asia, stamping patterns on silk was probably a practice before the Christian era began; and it was China which produced the first paper. Probably about A.D. 700, though it may well be earlier, the practice of stamping charms by wood blocks on paper began there. In A.D. 767 the Empress Shotoku of Japan ordered a million Buddhist charms to be printed from wood blocks on paper for placing in miniature pagodas.

The Chinese predilection for games such as Mah Jongg is an ancient tradition; and an early use of block printing—long before it came into Europe—is the production of sheet dice or, as we should say, playing cards. As charms—pictures of saints—and as playing cards, wood-block printing established a market in Europe at least a century before Gutenberg's Bible. Fortunately, we know some facts about this, as often by a happy dispensation. For the age-long obstruction of the legal mind to progress conspires with its obsessional drive to record its own ineptitudes and us to perpetuate milestones of progress by the resistance it offers to innovation. Thus we have the record of a prohibition issued by the Provost of Paris in A.D. 1397 against working men playing cards on working days; and there were many such prohibitions in German towns about this time. We have also originals of contemporaneous wood-block prints portraying saints for sale at shrines by travelling pedlars and palmers, encouraged to foregather by papal indulgences for the pilgrims.

Like Snap and other children's card games of today, the first playing cards were wholly pictorial, in suits exhibiting the feudal hierarchy, starting with the king and queen. The joker is a relic. Sometimes, the wood block of the picture card accommodated a title or epithet, and often the Heiligen, or shrine charms promoted by the clergy as an antidote to the carnal indulgence of card-playing, would carry the name of the saint. Either way, the next step was inevitable. We are now in sight of printing as a medium for the rapid circulation of knowledge; but we have to take stock of several features of the folk ways of Europe in the Middle Ages before we take the next hurdle.

When we reach the threshold of the fifteenth century, writing is no longer the prerogative of a priestly caste. There are merchants with big balances in the wool trade, the herring trade and the spice trade. There are pilots who have to rely on their rutter books to navigate cargoes of the spice trade over long ocean routes. There is a mounting volume of manorial accountancy and litigation connected with the exchange of produce between the countryside and the boroughs where master-craftsmen and merchants are now aspiring to domestic conveniences heretofore inaccessible to the landed gentry. All this signifies the pre-existence of considerable semi-literate personnel to provide a market for the products of Gutenberg's trade. It is necessary to say this, because school history too often exhibits the Church and the Law as the custodians of literacy.

What is true is that the monks, and to a less extent the lawyers, were the only people who had time to write at length during the century we have now reached. The lawyers we may leave to their own sadistic pursuits.... The Church deserves kinder consideration, even if the Church had outstayed its welcome. For Catholicism kept alive the lucidity of picture-language in an age when a new technique of illustration offered the only means of grace to the few men who saw the light of science through a miasma of verbal puns.

In short, we are here talking of the Missals, a form of sacred art with a charm to which even a hard-boiled technician such as the writer is not entirely indifferent. There is a pathetic earnestness about the tender care with which the monks illuminated their copies of devotional texts, and one which established what we may fairly call the first experiment in visual education for the people. The monks who made the missals offered a helping hand to the new industry. To be sure, we read a lot of rubbish written about what we owe to them; but they did one thing of enduring value besides starting hospitals and nursing the spectacle trade for the benefit of "poor blind men." They made block-books possible. In the admirable book already cited, this is what McMurtrie has to say about their contribution:

There is ... one exceedingly primitive block book, the Exercitium super Pater Noster, in which the illustrations are printed from woodcuts and the text added in manuscript.... The costume is that of the Burgundian court of the second quarter of the century, and this feature, in conjunction with the technique of design and cutting led Hind to date the book about 1430 and hardly later than 1440.

There is still argument about whether devotional block-books with both illustrations and text produced from fixed blocks antedated or synchronised with printing from movable type; but it seems fairly certain that block-books were in circulation before the wastefulness of cutting the same letter over and over again on the same block occurred to Gutenberg, and likely enough to many others. The issue is of academic interest only. What we can say certainly is that the printers of playing cards and of Heiligen were already involved in the book industry before it occurred to anyone to make punches and dies for letters of the alphabet in order to dispense with the necessity of repeatedly carving the same sign on a composite block. Metal-founders of the thirteenth century already knew the art of using stamps with single letters in relief to make an impress on fine sand for molten metal when making inscriptions, themselves to appear in relief on the finished casting. In bell foundries, among craftsmen who made pewter vessels with inscriptions, in the minting of coin and the casting of medals, the use of metal single-letter punches and dies was also commonplace.

In short, there is already in existence an industry of master printers when the record of Gutenberg's law-suit bequeaths the first documentary evidence of printing as we use the term today—moreover an industry working in close contact with ancillary crafts which had already solved the technical problems on whose solution printing on a larger scale at less cost was attendant. There is a market for books, with richer profits if the printer can solve the technical problem of outsmarting the monks in the art of making the first copy, as he can already outsmart them by reproducing the first copy without limit. In one sense, we now have a press.

Still, we have not explained the phenomenal rapidity with which the new technique of cutting stamps to make up a frame of continuous type spread throughout Europe, unless we look at our period in its social entirety; and if we are to do so we must take stock of many things which were not happening in China, the parent civilisation of the printing art. One of them is sufficiently obvious to be easily overlooked in an age of central heating. Europe, as post-war American tourists will agree, is rather cold and rather cloudy. That is why it is important to bring glass into the picture. GLASS is an invention of great antiquity, being in fact an early Egyptian amenity; but the very qualities we admire in the iridescent glass of Etruscan or Roman vessels make it equally unsuitable to the uses of domestic life or to the science of gas or temperature measurement. Before you have leisure to read, in the chilly north of the Hanseatic League or the Flemish wool trade, you must have a technique of house design utterly different from what meets your requirements in the sunny south of Greece and Italy, Crete or Egypt. It is therefore relevant that there is now, in the fifteenth century, a prosperous burgher class with houses equipped with windows made of glass, glass of poor quality by our standards but vastly better fitted to its principal use than the glass of antiquity. Nor is it irrelevant that spectacles are now coming into use for the old folk who have time on their hands.

The very fact that we now have windows brings into focus that we have an emergent class of semi-literate and relatively prosperous merchants and craftsmen, a class which is beginning to send its sons to grammar schools to get a smattering of reading and of the art of cyphers. This consideration prompts reflection upon the almost ubiquitous association of the goldsmith as the patron, partner or financier of the earliest master printers of books. There is now a wealthy craft of jewellers and armourers skilled in the art of using punches and dies to make patterns in relief on a metal surface, with a secure trade among the nobles and the wealthier merchants; and there are already the beginnings of a new trade in pictorial reproduction fostered by artists seeking patrons among them. Before printing by movable type begins, the wood-block illustration is competing with a better technique. Instead of smearing a sticky ink on a raised surface, it is now possible to achieve the same end by filling the crevices in a metal plate wiped clean; and who should be more concerned with promoting the use of pictorial reproduction by engraving than goldsmith and jeweller well versed in the uses of impressing a pattern in relief or intaglio?

What is happening in the fifteenth century is not the outcropping of inborn genius. Contrariwise, we should regard it as the confluence of a large number of new techniques, individually of little import to human advancement, collectively with a new momentum. Nor need we pride ourselves on the fact that European civilisation proved equal to exploiting to greater advantage what it had thanklessly received from the Eastern world. Paul Pelliot has discovered wooden types attributed to Wang Cheng in the beginning of the fourteenth century, well over a hundred years before the first dated printing from movable type in Germany; and if this invention came to nothing, have we far to seek the explanation? With twenty-six pigeonholes for a box of letter type at his elbow, the European compositor of the fifteenth century enjoys an immeasurable advantage over his fourteenth-century fellow craftsman who has to manipulate several thousand Chinese characters. Korea took up movable type, probably through Chinese influence, about fifty years before Europe.

No intelligent Anglo-American needs to be told at length how printing contributed to the diffusion of knowledge previously transmitted by oral tradition, how much more the master printers and book-makers from Gutenberg to Benjamin Franklin contributed to the making of our language habits than all the professors of their time, how much the trade in reading matter contributed to the great enlightenment of the four centuries which followed, how it also contributed to the liberation of Christendom from papal authority, what it bestowed on the age of Galileo and Newton, how it catalysed man's thought about human dignity and fundamental human rights. What we are prone to forget is how much water had to pass under the bridges before the homeland of Caxton or that of Franklin could assert the ability to read and to transcribe the written word as the birthright of every citizen.

In North America and in Northwestern Europe, literacy is today a medical diagnosis. That a person cannot read or write is now a sufficient criterion of mental defect; and this is so in a sense which would have been utterly false of Britain or the United States alike when Charles Dickens wrote an uncharitable record of his transatlantic itinerary. Until the middle of the nineteenth century there was everywhere a large underprivileged class cut off from the possession of books and without the incentive to purchase reading matter....

By attaching a cast of the hand-set type to cylinders it was possible to take advantage of the introduction of steam power with considerable economy of time entailed in running off the printed sheet; but it was impossible to reap the harvest of this economy while it was still necessary to set type by manual extraction from a box of each die for a letter, cypher or punctuation mark. Also, the manufacturer of paper from rag was a relatively costly process by modern standards; and the discovery of a cheaper source of raw material was a precondition of expanding trade in the printed word. Rag, be it said, is simply woven fibre of cotton or flax; and any vegetable fibre is good enough for the work of the wasp. It was therefore a great advance, when it was possible to use the by-products of the lumber camps for paper manufacture. Wood pulp as a source of paper came into its own in the eighties, though its use goes back to a German patent about 1840. In 1857 Routledge had introduced, as an alternative source of raw material, esparto grass from Spain and North Africa; and there had been notable advances in the mechanics of paper production during the preceding fifty years.

In 1803 the French printer Didot brought into England a device which took advantage of steam power by running wet pulp on to a moving, endless belt of wire mesh through which the water drained off. It could run off in a day six miles of paper of uniform width. In 1821 Crompton invented the process of drying by steam-heated rollers. Between 1803 and 1815 König in Germany and Cowper in Britain had perfected power-driven machinery for printing off a continuous roll of paper from cylinders carrying the type cast. The four-cylinder machine patented by Cowper and Applegarth in 1827 ran off 5,000 sheets per hour of the London Times simultaneously printed on both sides. The Walter Rotary of 1866 appears to have been the first cylinder machine to print on both sides of an unwinding roll of paper with a power-driven mechanism to cut the sheets, previously fed to the machine by hand. By that time a cheaper source of paper was available.

The advent of cheap paper accommodated the purchase of reading matter to the purse of the poorer classes in the community; but it did not bring into their lives a daily stimulus to read. While type-setting remained a manual operation, the maintenance of a daily press was beset by many difficulties and possible only because it did not as yet aspire to the topical immediacy which could coax a large semi-literate section of the population into the habit of daily reading. What made possible a truly popular press was an invention thus described by McMurtrie:

Setting extensive manuscripts by hand is, of course, a very slow and laborious process, and as the printing industry grew in extent and importance it was only natural that efforts should be made to devise a means of setting type mechanically at greater speed and less cost.... The failures were myriad. All efforts to take the foundry type used by the compositor and set it up mechanically came to naught. Finally, however, Ottmar Mergenthaler invented a machine which, by the action of a keyboard somewhat resembling that of a type-writer, assembled not type but matrices and, when a whole line was set and spaced, cast this line in one piece, or "slug," of type metal. This machine, which was first put into practical use in 1886, and appropriately christened a "linotype," gave a revolutionary impetus to the printing industry ... as with all new inventions of importance it was expected that thousands of compositors would be thrown out of work. But, again as usual, the industry grew so fast that more men were employed than before.

This device is not the only machine which sets type. On its heels came the monotype which employs the pianola principle for power transmission and is for some purposes preferable. The technical advantages of one or the other are irrelevant to our theme. What makes printing by linotype an outstanding achievement of nineteenth-century technology is that it permits type-setting to keep pace with the tempo of topical affairs at a time when a railroad schedule co-ordinated by telegraphy has made man minute-conscious for the first time in history. It is at once a new goad to the new social discipline of punctuality and a new means of satisfying an appetite for sensation among a section of the population not as yet attuned to habitual reading....

That the Moslem world of Omar Khayyam and Alkarismi transmitted so many of the benefits of Chinese civilisation to the West, reaping themselves no advantage from the invention of printing, illustrates a truth which Marxist dogma ignores. Fruitful innovation is, as the Marxist rightly asserts, the result of interplay between human needs and natural resources; but the triple formula of means, motive and opportunity suffices to account for the vagaries of man's history only if we recognise the inherent inertia of human motivation. Beliefs do not come from heaven; but they have a remarkable tenacity in the teeth of worldly profit, a tenacity forcefully illustrated by two facets of the Moslem creed. In the racy, though none the less scholarly, account of the history of printing already cited several times in this chapter, McMurtrie states:

The Koran forbade games of chance.... The Koran had been given to the Moslems in written form, and writing, therefore, was the only means by which it might ever be transmitted. To this day the Koran has never been printed from type in any Mohammedan country; it is always reproduced by lithography.

One consequence of this is that Moslem countries, and African communities which have received their script from Moslem missionaries, suffer from the educational disability of a cursive style which is ill-suited to easy reading. If we are tempted to ascribe this to defective hereditary equipment of peoples whose culture was the inspiration of Europe in the Middle Ages, we may well reflect with moral and intellectual benefit to ourselves on the complacency with which western scholars disown the constructive tasks of language-planning at a time when scientific journals embodying new discoveries are appearing in twenty or more languages.

Statistics which convey a clear picture of the mounting volume of printed matter issued annually during the four centuries of European printing are hard to come by. The number of editions printed in England increased from 13 in 1510 to 219 in 1580, to about 600 a year in the first two decades of the nineteenth century and 12,379 in 1913. Unhappily, an edition is a grossly misleading index of production, even of new books. What we call a modern best seller signifies a first edition of over 25,000 copies. In the fifteenth century, the average edition was about 300 copies. Till the middle of the eighteenth, an edition rarely exceeded 600; but there were notable exceptions. There were 34 editions of the Adagia of Erasmus, each of a thousand copies, in the first few decades of the sixteenth century, and 24,000 copies of his Colloquia Familiaria came out in the same author's lifetime. Of Luther's tract To the Christian Nobility 4,000 copies were sold within five days. The Bible Society, founded in 1711 by Baron von Canstein in Halle, printed within a short space of time 340,000 copies of the New Testament and 480,000 copies of the Scriptures as a whole. The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 by Thomas Charles of Bala as an incident in his crusade against Welsh illiteracy, was responsible for the issue of 237 million copies in the three decades 1900-1930....

So far, we have taken no cognisance of the formative role of the master printer vis-à-vis the culture of contemporary western civilisation. We shall now try to get into focus the consequences of something quite new in the history of our species, the emergence of a social personnel with a vested interest in the enlightenment of mankind. Of such was the inventor of the first saleable electrical device, the originator of the very names positive and negative in their now most common technical context, a man who rendered signal service for his country at the court of France and put his signature to the Declaration of Independence, the man whose last will and testament begins "I, Benjamin Franklin, Printer...."

At first, the master printer was also a publisher, till the trade began to expand a book-seller as well, and sometimes, like Caxton, translator or author. Nor is it surprising that printing and bookselling still preserve the professional outlook of the mediaeval craftsman far more than any other contemporary commercial undertaking, with mores peculiar to themselves. Today, as throughout the past four centuries, there is still a place for the small-scale high-quality firm in printing, publishing or bookselling alike. Throughout the five centuries of printing from movable type the small proprietor has ever been the ally of novel thought; and the book trade still thrives on the free expression of views which are anathema to big business, oil politicians and Wall Street tycoons. To say this is not to say that every publisher, every partner in a printing firm or every back-street book-seller is in the vanguard of liberal sentiment and fertile cerebration; but to be blind to their contribution to our common culture is to be blind to one of the burning issues of our age. Even to say that the publisher, the printer or the book-seller is always ahead of his business colleagues in joining the bandwagon of progress is to dispel a miasma of moral indignation which distorts our view of a decision contemporary man has to make wisely or incur the prospect of a dark age of superstition and authority....