CHAPTER 4

Since most of the ingredients of Gutenberg’s invention had been in independent existence for centuries, it seems odd that printing with movable type did not happen elsewhere, and earlier. Well, it did; but without a few vital elements added by Gutenberg. Only this new recipe could turn a potential revolution into a real one.

In a sense, printing is almost as old as writing, for the act of writing is a sort of printing. You conceive of a symbol from the store in your brain and turn out copies with pen, ink and paper. It’s the same principle when word-processing or typing. The store of letters remains fixed in the brain, keys or magnetic patterns, and you use the designs as references, reproducing them ad infinitum. It’s an idea so obvious that it occurred to human beings remarkably early, as the enigmatic object known as the Phaistos Disc reveals. The fifteen-centimetre clay disc, found in 1908 in Crete, was made in about 1700 BC. Its 241 images, which have never been deciphered, were printed into the clay with hard metal stamps. In ancient Egypt, scribes used wooden blocks to stamp common hieroglyphic symbols on tiles. But neither culture used their stamps to write extended messages on papyrus, probably because of the number of signs required. Easier simply to write.

Only many centuries later at the other end of Eurasia did this sort of printing appear. One crucial element in printing is paper, invented in AD 105, according to Chinese tradition, by the imperial counsellor Cai Lun, who in the words of a fifth-century official history, ‘conceived the idea of making paper from the bark of trees, hemp waste, old rags and fish nets’. Near his home, it was said, was a pool, where he learned to mash his materials into a slurry with a mortar, setting it to dry on his fish-net webbing. Five hundred years later, Buddhist monks carried the secret to Korea and Japan, and in the eighth century Chinese prisoners captured in Samarkand brought the art to the world of Islam, and thus into Spain, then under Arab control, in the twelfth century. This paper, made for Chinese calligraphy, was thin, soft, pliable and absorbent, more like toilet paper than typing paper. It could be used on one side only, because the marks showed through. Europeans found this material too soft for their quill pens and took to hardening it with animal glue, creating a firm, impervious surface, which, as luck would have it, could take writing – and printing – on both sides.

The idea that individual images, signs and letters could be impressed on paper with a stamp first seems to have occurred by the fifth century. In the eighth century, China, Japan and Korea were all printing whole books made from carved blocks of wood or stone, which over the centuries led to some astonishing publishing ventures. Famously, in about 770, the Japanese Empress Shotoku marked the end of an eight-year civil war by commissioning a million printed prayers which were rolled up and inserted into little pagodas about the size of chesspieces. The work kept 157 men busy for six years. And in China in the late tenth century, the whole Buddhist canon was printed – 130,000 pages. The immense labour of carving tens of thousands of pages on the one hand and the existence of individual stamps on the other made an easy next step – printing with movable type.

The invention is attributed to a certain Pi Sheng in the eleventh century. Pi Sheng’s idea was to incise his characters in wet clay (in reverse) and bake them. To print, he selected his characters, put them in a frame, inked them, and took a rubbing with cloth or paper. This could not have worked well – characters drawn in wet clay would hardly be up to China’s high calligraphic standards – but the principle was soon improved, with calligraphers writing reversed letters on soft paper, which were then pasted on to wooden blocks to be engraved. The same principle was extended to make metal letters: the wood-block was pressed into sand, and the impression used as a mould for bronze, copper, tin, iron or lead. The result was a collection of thin stamps which could be put together into a sort of form, from which a rubbing was taken. But no machinery could possibly cope with tens of thousands of characters until the development of vastly complicated presses in the last century.

Perhaps because their adapted Chinese script used fewer characters, Koreans took the lead in using this technique, moving on to become the first people to use movable metal type, printing the fifty-volume Prescribed Ritual Texts of the Past and Present in 1234. This method had its uses, but it was no revolution, because it remained highly labour intensive. The business of choosing the correct character from 40,000 or more, and then taking a rubbing – it offered no advantage in design and not much in speed; the only benefit was uniformity, which was not enough to replace traditional calligraphy.

What was missing in all this was a writing system that could be readily adapted to mechanical use. The Chinese and by extension the Japanese and Koreans, who adopted and then adapted Chinese script, could never have invented a Gutenberg-style press because their writing system was too complex.

But there was a possibility that Gutenberg could have been preempted. Surprising as it may seem, the potential lay with those notorious destroyers of civilisations, the Mongols. Chingis Khan had started the conquest of China in 1210, a task completed by his heirs seventy years later. Along the way, the Mongols created the greatest land empire in history, linking the Pacific coast to eastern Europe by means of an astonishingly efficient pony-express system and traders who were able, under Mongol protection, to travel the silk routes between China and the West with increased ease.

Quite early in this expansion, the Mongols picked up two ingredients vital to the development of printing:

• from the Chinese they adopted block-printing and paper money, which had been in use in China since the ninth century. The Mongols issued their first notes in 1236, a system much elaborated by Chingis’s grandson, Khubilai, as Marco Polo described (in the Yule–Cordier translation): ‘He makes them take of the bark of a certain tree, in fact of the Mulberry Tree, the leaves of which are the food for silkworms – these trees being so numerous that whole districts are full of them. What they take is the fine white bast or skin which lies between the wood of the tree and the thick outer bark, and this they make into something resembling sheets of paper, but black. When these sheets have been prepared they are cut up into pieces of different sizes’, thus creating a currency common from Korea to India;

• from one of the Mongols’ subject peoples, the Uigurs, the Mongols in about 1204 adopted a script very different from Chinese: an alphabetical system.

The Mongols thus became an unwitting part of a process started 3,400 years before, when a Middle Eastern immigrant community in ancient Egypt first started to adapt hieroglyphs and stumbled into that revolutionary invention, the alphabet. The genius of the alphabet – not just our Roman alphabet, but any alphabet, the underlying principle – is that it uses a few symbols, typically between twenty-five and forty, to represent the whole range of linguistic sounds (and non-sounds, like the silent gathering of energy before the little explosion that begins the letter p). It is not a one-to-one match between sound and symbol, as is sometimes claimed. Its astonishing power comes from its vagueness, its fuzziness, its flexibility, its ability to record anything spoken simply by rearranging the same few symbols. Like language itself, the alphabet is so easily embedded in a child’s brain that its use soon becomes automatic, unconscious, un-analysed, so that adults no more think about the use of the alphabet in writing than we analyse grammar before speaking.

This combination of fuzziness and simplicity gives it a massive advantage over other writing systems that predated it or evolved in parallel with it, notably Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese symbols. These systems recorded not letters but syllables, of which every language has many thousands: hence their complexity. Though potentially as effective as an alphabetical system for conveying information and narrative, these syllabic systems were cumbersome intellectual products devised by elites – priests and bureaucrats – who could afford the time to learn and had a vested interest in keeping things complicated. It may come as a surprise that Chinese is syllabic, not the word-for-a-symbol language it is often supposed. If it were purely ideographic – with each symbol uniquely representing a word – it would be impossible to use, because brains simply cannot carry tens of thousands of separate symbolic images, and even with superhuman brilliance Chinese-speakers would never be able to represent foreign words or coin new terms, which they do all the time. But there’s no denying that Chinese, like the other ancient syllabic systems, is burdensome – beautiful, effective, no bar to literary creativity, but definitely burdensome.

The alphabet – any alphabet – is a blessing by comparison, for its simplicity opens the way for everyone to read and write. Not that everyone did, because writing materials – fired clay, slabs of rock, brass, copper, bronze, lead, pottery, animal skins, papyrus – were not easy to come by, or use, or transport, or store, often all four at once. But at least, with an alphabet, ordinary people had the possibility of communicating in writing, using simple materials like papyrus, bits of pottery, wax, even clay tablets, spreading the use of the invention from Egypt throughout the Middle East. From the scanty evidence, it was Greek artisans and traders who first took up Phoenician alphabetic writing, not the scribes and poets whose works eventually laid the foundations for literacy in Western Europe.

Eastwards, the alphabet underwent a mass of different incarnations. A Semitic branch of the alphabet family was adopted by the Sogdians of present-day Uzbekistan, whose script evolved over centuries into that of a Central Asian lingua franca, or rather scriptum francum. It was this script that Chingis’s bureaucrats adopted and adapted. A later version was used until 1945 in Mongolia, and is still in use in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia.

After the Mongols first invaded Korea in 1231, the beginning of a conquest that took twenty years to complete, among the treasures they seized could well have been a number of books set in movable metal type. They thus had in their possession in the mid-thirteenth century three of the vital elements necessary for the development of Western-style printing: paper, movable metal type and an alphabetical system. Nor, as heirs to Chinese culture, did they lack technical ability, having been quick to seize on that devastating Chinese invention – gunpowder – as a terrific means of breaking into otherwise impregnable cities.

Yet it never occurred to the Mongols to explore the possibilities further. They were blocked not by technical elements so much as social ones. Mongolia lacked a written literature, and the only purpose of adopting Uigur script was to keep records for the administration of the expanding empire. Possibly, Chingis chose to avoid the complex script of his No. 1 enemy, the Chinese; but Chinese traditions were the only ones to hand to provide a model for how the records were to be kept, and for whom: by scribes, for the leaders. There was no market, no need for the leaders to reach out to their subjects, no need to raise or invest capital in a new industry. The potential which historians now see as existing in the culture of Chingis’s heirs never showed any signs of further progress.

It was Korea that took the next essential step, thanks to the genius of their emperor, Sejong, who by coincidence was almost an exact contemporary of Gutenberg, in a parallel but distant universe. His starting-point was the mismatch between his society and that of Korea’s big brother, China. Korea, like Japan, drew heavily on Chinese culture, and adapted Chinese script. But the script did not fit the language well. In 1418 – when Gutenberg was just starting his university studies – the twenty-two-year-old Sejong came to the throne, bringing to his task a rare combination of brilliance, dedication, ambition and altruism. Advised by his own research institute, the Hall of Worthies, he revised the calendar, set guidelines for the study of history, devised syllabuses for interpreters and published the results, with the latest techniques. Of the 308 books produced in his thirty-two-year reign, almost half used movable type.

But he also took another brilliant step forward. Distressed at the complexity of the old Chinese-based writing system and its unsuitability for his language, he decided to devise a new writing system and commissioned scholars to research a range of possible solutions. They came up with two pointers, the first being Uigur, used to write the language painfully familiar in Korea, Mongol; the second being a second script devised by a Tibetan monk, Phags-pa, to write the various languages of the Mongol empire, including Chinese. It, too, was alphabetic.

So Sejong set to, and worked out his own alphabet for Korean. The result was published in 1443–4 (just about when, at the other end of Eurasia, Gutenberg was working at his mysterious ‘adventure and art’ in Strasbourg). Sejong’s alphabet was and is regarded as a work of outstanding brilliance. As he himself said in the introduction to The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People, ‘Among the ignorant, there have been many who, having something to put into words, have in the end been unable to express their feelings. I have been distressed by this, and have newly designed a script of twenty-eight letters, which I wish to have everyone practise at their ease.’ Chinese took years to master, but Hangul (Great Script), as it became known, was something ‘a wise man may acquaint himself with before the morning is over . . . even the sound of the winds, the cry of the crane and the barking of the dog – all may be written’.

And yet no revolution followed. Hangul was used in a few of Sejong’s pet projects and in Buddhist literature. But it did not sweep the country, because Korea’s elite were appalled at the idea of losing Chinese, the badge of their elitism. Even an invention of undisputed brilliance by the emperor himself was not enough to overcome the weight of conservatism, with nowhere near the impetus to inspire technical and social change. In fact, Hangul has only come into its own, slowly, after 1945, first in Communist North Korea, and finally, during the 1990s, in South Korea where Sejong, always a hero, became a national icon.

The links between East and West have suggested to some that developments in Asia could somehow have influenced the development of printing in Europe. These contacts were certainly extensive enough for the idea to diffuse across cultures and continents. Nestorian missionaries, who followed the fifth-century heretic Nestorius in refusing to refer to the Virgin as Theotokos (‘God-bearer’), had been active in northern Mongolia from before Chingis’s time; several monks were in contact with the Mongols, including two who travelled to Mongolia in the mid-thirteenth century; and trade links continued through Central Asia. Several travellers other than Marco Polo reported on the use of Chinese paper money in the Mongol Empire. But no one seemed to consider block-printing very remarkable – after all, similar things were being produced in Europe – and never commented on printing with movable wooden or ceramic type. Of Korea’s use of movable metal type there was not a squeak in the West. By the time Sejong invented his alphabet and made a revolution possible, it was too late for the news to make any difference, even if some Westerners had noticed, which they didn’t.

In summary, Eastern cultures had a number of elements that seem in hindsight to predispose them to the invention of printing. In fact, the positive elements discussed above disguise the absence of a number of other elements necessary for the emergence of Gutenberg’s invention:

• writing systems were too complex: printing needs an alphabetical base;

• established writing systems are intrinsically conservative: no one was interested in change, even if the agent of change was an emperor;

• the paper was the wrong sort: Chinese paper was suitable only for calligraphy or block-printing;

• there were no screw-based presses in the East, because they were not wine-drinkers, didn’t have olives, and used other means to dry their paper;

• printing is expensive, and in China, Korea and Japan there was no system to release capital for research and development.

By contrast, all the elements for Gutenberg’s invention were in place in every major European city by 1440. In that case, we may ask, why didn’t anyone else come up with the idea? Well, someone very nearly did.

It happened, or nearly happened, in Avignon, the town in southern France where the Popes made their headquarters between 1309 and 1377. Actually Avignon was not yet technically French – it belonged to the king of Naples and was bought by the papacy in 1348, being annexed by France only in the eighteenth century. But the Popes were French, under tight French control. Then, for another thirty years – the time of the Great Schism – the great fortress-palace was for anti-Popes, while the Popes proper ruled again from Rome. Avignon dominated the Rhône, straddled in the twelfth century by a bridge whose great arches shaded revellers dancing: not sur le pont d’Avignon, as children sing, but sous (beneath). Three of the arches remain today, reaching out across the river.

To this centre of learning and commerce came a German from Czech lands with the Magic Flute-like name of Procopius Waldvogel (‘Wood-Bird’). Having fled Prague during the Hussite troubles, Waldvogel settled in Lucerne, then turned up in Avignon in 1444. According to legal records, he was (like Gutenberg) a goldsmith. He had with him two steel alphabets and various metal ‘formes’, offering to teach ‘the art of artificial writing’ to a schoolteacher named Manaudus Vitalis (or Manaud Vidal in French). In 1446 a certain Georg de la Jardine took him on, promising to keep the art a secret, and a Jewish textile printer contracted Waldvogel to make sets of Hebrew and Latin letters.

Though a couple of alphabets could not have been used to print anything – there is no mention of presses, or casting instruments, or type – this hush-hush business is oddly reminiscent of Gutenberg’s work and has inspired much speculation about possible links. For instance, in 1439, when Waldvogel became a citizen of Lucerne, Gutenberg’s associates the Dritzehns also had business interests there; and Avignon’s records list a silversmith called Walter Riffe – a relative perhaps of Gutenberg’s partner Hans Riffe? Had Waldvogel heard rumours of Gutenberg’s works in Strasbourg? Did he use his knowledge to con himself a nice little income in Avignon? Was he on his way to something more substantial? Or was this all a red herring (for the word ‘artificial’ was also used by scribes when advertising for pupils to describe their own high-class calligraphy, their artifice)?

We will never know. Waldvogel vanished without trace, leaving not a book, press, punch or forme to his name, only a hint to posterity that Gutenberg had good reason to keep his work secret.

There was, until well into the twentieth century, a second threat to Gutenberg’s pre-eminence, originating in Holland. Here, several rich towns – Leiden, Haarlem, Utrecht – sustained a lively trade in block-books, the sort that were printed by taking rubbings from whole pages engraved in wood with text and pictures. In Haarlem there lived a maker of blok-books named Laurens, who came from a line of Kosters (a sort of church warden), which gave him his surname, usually spelled with a ‘C’ under the influence of its Latin version. For 300 years, Coster was to Haarlem what Gutenberg is to Mainz. According to local tradition, Coster made the invention, and Gutenberg stole it.

The story has somewhat vague origins. In 1499 a Cologne town record says that although the ‘art’ was discovered in Mainz, ‘the preparatory trials were made in Holland’. Over the next century, vague suggestion hardened, acquiring corroborative detail, until it could be presented as history. It appeared full-blown in a Latin description of the Netherlands, Batavia, written in 1568 by a government official named Adriaen de Jonghe, who Latinised his name as Hadrianus Junius. The book was published posthumously in 1588.

De Jonghe/Junius based his story on accounts by ‘elderly and respected inhabitants who have held eminent office and who have sworn and assured me that they had heard it from their ancestors’. Among them was his tutor, who claimed to have heard it from a bookbinder named Cornelis, who said he had been Coster’s apprentice.

The story runs like this:

Coster was out walking in woods, where he whittled some letters from the bark of a beech tree. Back home, he used the letters to stamp out a couple of lines of text for his daughter’s children. Further experiments produced letters in lead and tin, now, alas, lost, though ‘wine-pots cast from these melted-down types are still shown as antiquities’ at Coster’s old house. A business arose, leading to books, among them one entitled Spieghel onzer behoudenisse (The Mirror of Our Salvation). Apprentices were taken on, among them a certain Johann, whose family name we will get to in a moment. Julius wrote:

It was he who proved a faithless servant and bringer of misfortune to his master. This Johann, who was bound to the work of printing by oath, as soon as he thought he knew enough about the art of joining the letters and of casting the types – in fact, the whole trade – sought the first favourable opportunity to make off. This fell on Christmas Eve [1441], and when everyone was at church, he took the entire apparatus of types and tools and equipment.

His fellow apprentice, Cornelis, was distraught and remained so for the rest of his life. Whenever he told the story of the treacherous Johann, ‘he cursed those nights . . . when he had been forced to sleep in the same bed as him’. Back in Mainz, Johann went into business on his own account, producing his first book in 1442. And the rest we know.

The story gained in the retelling. In the early seventeenth century Coster was portrayed handling a press like any established printer, and up until the mid-twentieth century schoolbooks and popular histories blandly stated that Coster was genuine, Gutenberg a vile imposter.

But, as historians quickly came to realise, the story is full of holes. Johann’s surname is given as ‘Faustus’, which seems to be a confusion both with Gutenberg’s chief backer, Fust (of whom more shortly), and with that of the medieval necromancer immortalised by Marlowe, Goethe and Gounod. Neither Gensfleisch nor Gutenberg gets a mention. Note the telling details, the friend-of-a-friend snippets designed to give credence to the tale: the wood, the children, the wine-pots, the Christmas theft, which occurred exactly 128 years before Junius wrote it up – a date that just happens to coincide with the date that, by the sixteenth century, was accepted as the year of Gutenberg’s breakthrough. There was indeed a bookseller named Cornelis in Haarlem, but he died in 1522; to have worked in Coster’s place with Johann ‘Faustus’ in 1441, he would need to have lived to 100. And how, if all his tools were taken, did Coster stay in business? And how exactly did Coster make his type? Experts have suggested castings in sand, but experiments show that the method would have been hopelessly inefficient. Finally, we are concerned here not with woodcarvers, as Coster apparently was, but with men expert in metalwork.

And what of the products? Almost certainly all later. Almost – for a number of early Dutch typeset books, referred to as ‘Costeriana’, are undated, and there are still those who wonder whether someone in Haarlem in the 1430s was experimenting with sand and clay and wood to tackle the problem that Gutenberg solved with metal.

In Haarlem itself no one is banking on new discoveries. There is a fine nineteenth-century statue of Coster in the Market Square, and there are no plans to relegate him to a backstreet – after all, he was not responsible for the claims made on his behalf. But no one these days believes the old schoolbooks, which owed more to nationalist wishful thinking than to historical accuracy. As Haarlem’s chief archivist told me: ‘We know he did not pre-empt Gutenberg’. It’s a nice story, nothing more – at most, another reminder of the fierce underground rivalry to make artificial writing work.