A Time of Magic

Up until Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, reproducing books was a mammoth task.

The reason why we aren’t knee-deep in ancient texts isn’t because there weren’t people around with the urge to write but that people who today would be published authors went around telling their tales directly and untold numbers of fantastic tales from ancient times have been lost as they were never written down. They did this basically because the majority of people couldn’t read but then why bother learning to read if there wasn’t that much available to read anyway?

For that matter, whilst we take it for granted that learning to read involves all kinds of books from books that you read to your children, through simpler texts that they can begin to read themselves to nursery rhymes and the like, virtually none of those type of books existed prior to the printing press. After all, given that books had to be reproduced by hand, who was going to spend days or perhaps weeks to reproduce a book for a child?

The arrival of the printing press changed all of that of course.

Books suddenly became affordable to the common man (women didn’t have any possessions then). Spelling started to become much more standardised as indeed did the grammatical structure of the language. English texts written much before that time aren’t “English” as we would recognise it and they are no longer readable to an English speaker yet we can read all the texts produced after that time. That’s not to say that the language didn’t change anymore as anyone who has read Shakespere will know. Although his phrasing is a little peculiar these days, less obvious is that there are things in present day English which he just couldn’t say eg he could say “I go to Canterbury” but not “I am going to Canterbury” because “going” in the sense of an action in progress wasn’t a tense introduced to English until after his time.

So next time you pick up a best seller and wonder why it’s so expensive, remember that the only best seller before 1440 was the bible and today’s best seller would cost thousands of pounds/dollars/euros to produce in those days.