McKitterick 2003

McKitterick, David. Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

The printed word and the modern bibliographer

"assumptions about the apparent authority of print, the reality of its creation, and the combination of conservatism with a creative training in readers, may be questioned, in order that we may better understand the expectations that have underlain a principal means of communication" (3)

"With some notable exceptions, this extra dimension, of time, is underestimated or ignored by many who have written about the creation of a book in the printing house." (7)

"Perceptions of books change with time;and with them there change also our ways of using and looking at books." (7)

"In amalgamating manuscripts of all kinds, old codices and contemporary papers, the librarians (and, be it added, booksellers) of the seventeenth century confirmed assumptions that had only ever been partially true: that printing displaced manuscripts, and that the two media were definable most appropriately by their means of production. Differences were more important than similarities. Such widespread and ever more deeply rooted assumptions have coloured understanding of the history of authorship, books and communication generally ever since. They have defined how our libraries are organised; and therefore how readers are encouraged to pursue their goals; and therefore how to think. In the interests of connoisseurship, itself defined according to headings based on this distinction, the bibliophile and art market reflects genres and nedia, rather than historical fact." (17)

Dependent skills

"By the seventeenth century, and for many purposes much earlier than that, to print was not just to give a wider circulation. For some -- if emphatically not for everyone -- it was to establish an authority." (27)

"The history of printing reveals less often a search for standardisation than for the formalisation of the written word and image, their setting out and reproduction in coherent and due order." (29)

for many readers "in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, the differences between the printed and the manuscript word were less important than their similarities." (31)

"Pen and type were wielded together in order to produce fully functioning copies. Quite apart from the experiments of Schoeffer, and for many other kinds of books, the pen was an assumed part of the production process." (33)

"All the emphasis, by printers at the time and by others since, tends to be on the achievement of printing -- the innovation that transformed not only the production of books, but also the ways in which they could be employed. But in order to understand the nature of this revolution, it is helpful to ask the opposite question: what did printing not achieve? To answer part of this large and complicated question is to view the mid-fifteenth-century book not as a printed book to which manuscript marks were added, but as a book parts of which were printed." (34)