Gutenberg's Fingerprint Page 6

  Hugh plucks it out of my hand and offers it to me again.

  “Like this,” he says. He holds it perfectly flat, at eye level.

  I look across the terrain of the paper, its landscape of hills and hollows. I could get lost in there.

  “Feel how soft it is,” Hugh says. “On paper like this, words make an impression.”

  THE PRINTER’S DEVIL

  Hugh is in love with words, but his love is different from mine. I adore the shape of words in my mouth, the music of them in the air, the way a word can be a Proustian madeleine, springing the door on a full-blown movie of memory. Hugh, on the other hand, craves the feel of words under his fingers, the press of them against a sheet of paper. Not storytelling, typography.

  It doesn’t surprise me that Hugh’s first idea for the endpapers of The Paradise Project is typographical.

  “What I have in mind is to print with wooden type, in two shades of yellow, words and phrases taken from your work,” he writes by email. “These words will range from one inch to three inches in height and will run horizontally across the endpapers. I must use TRUST ME from The Convict Lover. If I don’t like the effect, it will end up in the garbage. Don’t worry. I need to feed my addiction to the press, and this will be my fix for today. So just sit back and relax until I get something to show you.”

  In his book The Gutenberg Revolution, John Man theorizes that there have been four crucial turning points in “the line zooming from grunt to email.” The first was the invention of writing. The second was the invention of the alphabet, which simplified writing and made it accessible to everyone. The fourth is the turning point that is spinning us dizzy right now: the invention of the Internet.

  The third turning point in human communication was the invention of printing with mechanical movable type.

  Before Gutenberg, books were produced by scribes toiling away in scriptoriums, each manuscript copied by hand. A book would take a month or two, at the very least, to produce, working by sunlight then candlelight on sloped desks that torqued the body. The margins of medieval texts are littered with scribe complaints:

  This parchment is hairy. The ink is thin.

  A curse on thee, O pen!

  Writing is excessive drudgery.

  Thank God it will soon be dark.

  Oh, my hand!

  In 1438, just before Gutenberg unveiled his invention, a 1,272-page commentary on the Bible was finally finished: two scribes had worked five years on the project. Only a few years later, with mechanical movable type, 500 copies of such a book could be produced in a week. The implications were staggering: information was no longer a guarded secret available only to the rich and powerful. Through a printed book, anyone could travel the world.

  The paradigm shift currently rocking our world is of equal magnitude. A writer no longer has to wait for someone to select their manuscript, edit it, typeset and print it, move it to a warehouse, then ship it out to bookstores by truck and train. Writers don’t have to wait for a publisher, and readers don’t have peruse the shelves of a store or library in search of a title. Book warehouses are all but obsolete. The gatekeepers are leaving the building. Now, within minutes of being written, a book can be simultaneously in the hands of readers in China, Chile, and Chattanooga.

  Surely turning point is too mild a term. These four inventions have acted as detonators for worldwide explosions in literary outpourings. At the time Gutenberg printed his first book, all the books printed in Europe could be hauled in a single wagon. A mere half century later, tens of thousands of titles were in print. Today, some 10,000 million books are produced every year worldwide. John Man offers a compelling image. “One year’s production would make a pile four times the height of the Great Pyramid.” Multiply one giant pyramid by five centuries of printing and we humans have produced a Rocky Mountain range of printed matter.

  Like Gutenberg, Hugh is an inventor, although he prefers the term innovator. Before he became a letterpress printer, he was a certified orthotist, working as a consultant. In the early 1980s, he was spending two days a week at Ongwanada, a Kingston facility that provides community support, including rehab, research, and radiology, for the developmentally challenged. Hugh’s job was to shape seats that would fit within a wheelchair frame to improve the comfort and health of children suffering from postural deformities such as scoliosis.

  One day he observed to his horror that the spinal curvature in his young patients wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse. X-rays confirmed his suspicions.

  “I can remember driving home and thinking, What are you doing, Hugh? You’re saying to these kids, ‘Oh I’m sorry I’ve made your back worse, now I’m going home to have some red wine.’ It wasn’t enough to say sorry.”

  Instead of taking that glass of wine, Hugh went into his workshop. In those days, the back and seat of a wheelchair were fixed at a 90-degree angle. When a physically challenged person sat in a wheelchair, the spine necessarily slumped; the part of their body that supported the weight inevitably developed pressure sores. Hugh knew that lying flat produced the least pressure on the spine and that sitting up straight produced the most. What if he could design a chair with an adjustable seat, one that could be tilted so the person was optimally both upright and relaxed?

  He built a tilting chair and chose six children whose backs had worsened and arranged to have them x-rayed lying flat, sitting up, and reclining.

  “The effect was almost immediate: five of the six improved. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the one that didn’t get better. Then the light bulb flashed on: it wasn’t only the weight on the spine, it was the fact that this child was spastic. So we tilted the chair a little more, enough that the muscles relaxed, and, bingo, that child improved, too.”

  His wife, Verla, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1948. For thirty-two years she’d battled pressure sores. Hugh made her a tilt chair, and within three months the sores were healed.

  Hugh tried to sell the medical community on his new adjustable tilting wheelchair. “I went to a conference and I gave a paper on the tilt chair, but I might as well have stood on the street and talked to the squirrels.” When he failed to interest a manufacturer, Hugh started a company, Advanced Mobility Systems, to produce the dynamic-tilt wheelchair. He was too busy filling orders to file for a patent, and soon others were manufacturing their own versions, advertising them as lighter, cheaper, stronger.

  “I couldn’t compete, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that things got a whole lot better for people in wheelchairs.”

  Brilliant new concepts rarely appear out of the blue. More often, the key elements have been bumping up against each other for a while, waiting for someone with the insight, the foresight, and the audacity to try something new.

  “More Aha! than Abacadabra!,” I say to Hugh.

  “Good girl. You’ve got it!” he says, and I beam ridiculously.

  What were the elements, I wonder, that came together for the invention of mechanical movable type?

  Johannes Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany, around the turn of the fifteenth century. His father was a Companion of the Mint. Young Johannes would have seen coins struck, a process by which gold or silver was poured into a mould made of two dies, one for each side of the coin. The dies were made with a punch—a shank of steel engraved with an image. When the punch was struck with a hammer, the image transferred to the softer metal of the die.

  Punchmaking was an art that required not only metallurgical skill but also proficiency in the engraver’s art. We are smug about the ever-increasing resolution of digital technology, but the men that young Johannes would have seen cutting letters into steel punches were achieving resolutions of at least six and in some cases sixty times the resolution of a modern laser printer.

  Was Gutenberg himself a punchcutter? He is described as a goldsmith and a member of the bourgeoisie, but, really, the histori
cal record is slight. What is known for sure is that in his early thirties, this well-educated bachelor received a windfall—the equivalent of five years’ salary in one lump sum. With it, he bought a house outside Strasbourg, a city that straddles the Rhine and is now part of France but at the time was an independent republic boasting the tallest building in the world, the Strasbourg Cathedral.

  Gutenberg was young and ambitious, an entrepreneur: he decided he could make a fortune selling 32,000 mirrors to pilgrims flocking to Strasbourg to see the relics of Emperor Charlemagne. (Mirrors were thought to concentrate the healing power of the relics.) The venture collapsed when the pilgrimage was cancelled due to a recurrence of the bubonic plague, but here’s where it gets interesting, as Hugh would say. In the court records of his business failure, Gutenberg offers to appease his disgruntled investors by sharing the secret of something else he’s working on, something so surefire that they immediately drop their lawsuit against him.

  The court records mention a “secret art” that Gutenberg developed sometime in 1438. He calls it kunst und aventur. Art and enterprise. At one point he orders the melting down of all the “formes” that have been created, formes that are described as “four pieces” held together by “two screws.”

  Were these formes designed to hold type for a press? Screw-based presses were commonly used in fifteenth-century Europe for pressing olives and grapes and for squeezing paper dry. Press, paper, ink, punch-cutters to create moulds for letters: all of these technologies were at hand. So what was the catalyst that sparked the invention of mechanical movable type, the missing element that would make the printing press possible?

  For the answer, it may help to step back from Gutenberg to look at the time in which he lived. Gutenberg was born exactly halfway through the century of the Black Death, the plague that buried somewhere between thirty and sixty percent of the population of Europe. Those who survived were reeling from grief, yearning for an explanation, and desperate to prevent the disease from wiping humankind off the map. It was a turmoil tailor-made for religious fervour, and, sure enough, a vision arose of a single Christian church, with the devout all saying the same prayers, singing from the same songbook, reading the same psalms. A standardized missal. One true Bible for everyone.

  I am an inveterate watcher of clouds, my eye trained for the bright flash of lightning among the thunderheads. So I think, Yes, that could be it: the Black Death itself prompted the “what if” that sparked the invention that cracked open our lives.

  A SHORT HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL WRITING

  Even in Gutenberg’s day, there was nothing new about making multiple, identical copies of a single, approved original. Whether the human animal is intrinsically lazy or hard-wired for efficiency, the fact is that almost as soon as writing was invented—in Mesopotamia in 3200 BCE and independently in China in 1200 BCE and in Mesoamerica around 500 BCE—people were trying to figure out how to reduce the work of drawing each glyph or character by hand.

  The solution was some sort of stamp. In 1700 BCE, an enterprising Minoan produced the Phaistos Disc, a clay circle the size of a bread-and-butter plate with 241 images pressed into the clay with metal stamps. Ancient Egyptians stamped hieroglyphs on tiles with carved wooden blocks. Paper was a more fragile medium, but even so the Chinese perfected stamping on paper in the fifth century; by the 700s, printers in China, Japan, and Korea were all producing books made up of pages stamped with a single carved block of wood or stone. In the tenth century, the Chinese used that method to print the entire Buddhist canon of 130,000 pages.

  There was even movable type, of a sort. An eleventh-century Chinese printer named Pi Sheng incised separate characters in reverse in wet clay, then baked them in a kiln. To print, he chose the characters he wanted, mounted them in a frame, inked them, laid on a sheet of paper, and rubbed to get an impression. Clay characters gave way to wooden blocks and, eventually, characters cast in bronze, copper, tin, iron, and lead. Even so, the selecting and arranging of the elements of a text and the rubbing continued to be done by hand. The practice wasn’t widespread partly because there was little demand for printed matter beyond the emperor’s palace. There was no real need for a press because the paper in that part of the word was delicate and didn’t require the forceful stamp of a screw press. Hand-rubbing worked just fine.

  Even if someone had thought up a press, no machine at the time was up to handling the multitude of characters that make up an Asian language. The Koreans took movable type to its highest sophistication, but they still had to hand-select from among 40,000 characters and take a rubbing, a labour-intensive process. In the end, these calligraphic writing systems were simply too complex to spawn a printing revolution.

  An alphabet, however, condenses the vast array of human linguistic sounds into a few symbols; twenty-six, in the case of the English alphabet. Alphabets are imprecise, which makes for less nuanced written communication, but the pared-down simplicity is a huge advantage when it comes to mechanizing a writing system.

  “When Gutenberg came along, the word ‘modular’ hadn’t even been invented!” Hugh exclaims, and he’s right. I checked. The first recorded use of modular to mean “composed of interchangeable units” was in 1936. “And there he was, five hundred years before the rest of us Neanderthals caught up, developing a modular system for making words with metal type. He mechanized it, and the rest is history!”

  Gutenberg’s modular innovation took two forms. He developed a hand-held mould that allowed printers to cast a letter accurately again and again from one original punch. In the course of printing, type wears out, gets chipped and bent and generally banged up. Re-cutting a punch every time that happened would be expensive and time-consuming. Gutenberg’s handheld mould allowed a printer to cast endless units, either from new metal or from the old letters, melted down.

  Gutenberg’s second modular element was a technique for bringing together the letters of the alphabet into an endless variation of words and sentences and fixing them so that page after identical page could be printed, then the letters released to be reused to create other pages.

  Gutenberg wasn’t the only one keen on figuring out how to mechanize type. That’s usually the case with inventions: Tesla and dozens of others were tinkering with the light bulb when Edison brought his version to market; my father spent years in the 1940s trying to invent instant coffee, unaware that a process had been patented in 1890. Coincidentally or not, just as Gutenberg was launching the first movable type, a goldsmith named Procopius Waldvogel turned up in southern France carrying two steel alphabets and various metal formes, offering to teach “the art of artificial writing.” (Scribes of the day referred to their calligraphy as “artifice,” so “artificial writing” may indeed refer to printing.) Gutenberg probably didn’t know of Waldvogel’s existence and the “forest bird” disappears after this one puzzling mention, but the speed with which Gutenberg’s invention was taken up proves that the time was ripe. If he hadn’t done it, chances are someone else would have.

  “I’m not sure if I’m going to lie to you or not,” says Hugh, “but in those years 1980, ’81, ’82, I gave something like twenty papers at national and international conferences on my innovations in orthotics.” Hugh isn’t boasting. After the dynamic-tilt wheelchair, he produced dozens of innovative orthotics, including an invisible body brace and a wrist-driven flexor hinge splint. “Because of all that, I was invited to teach a design course at the Ontario College of Art in problem-solving. Designing Outside the Box, I called it. And I’ll tell you something. Inventing or doing artwork, they both take the same sort of thought. You don’t get where you need to go by looking for what is bad. You have to look for the good, and build on that. That’s Barclay’s Law #27, by the way. Look for the good.”

  THE MOST HATED FACE IN THE WORLD

  I started writing on a portable Smith-Corona typewriter. Type Writer. When I pressed a key, a metal letter at the end of a long arm was propel
led toward the page, where it whacked a ribbon inked with two bands, black and red. The typeface was probably Courier. I don’t remember. It never occurred to me that there could be more than one.

  Half a century later, when I begin a new book, I choose a fresh face for the project. I spend hours peering at the 120-plus typefaces that are standard equipment on my MacBook Pro. A name will attract me first, but it’s the shape of the letters I’m interested in. Baskerville, for instance, sounds strong and noble, but its squat letters give me a headache. Myanmar MN seemed perfect for my novel set partly in Burma, but this alphabet goose-stepped too aggressively across the page.

  I have only two rules when choosing a typeface for a writing project: it has to be a face I will be happy to look at every day for several years, and it has to reverberate in some way with the nature of the book. In the past, I’ve written books in Times New Roman, Palatino, Avenir, American Typewriter, and Arial—traditional, romantic, literary, journalistic, practical. With Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, I was tempted to give each chapter in its own face—Papyrus for “Paper,” Franklin for “Press,” Copperplate for “Type.” Editors don’t like writers getting fancy with typography: it’s harder to catch errors and to calculate pages. But with a computer, I can revert to standard Times with a click of a key, so I am free to indulge myself.

  In a fit of whimsy, I consider Comic Sans, a typeface developed twenty years ago by Microsoft typeface engineer Victor Connare. When Comic Sans was released in 1995, type-lovers were so outraged that they set up BanComicSans.com, where they sold anti–Comic Sans mugs and T-shirts to help finance a documentary called Comic Sans; Or, the Most Hated Font in the World.

  Comic Sans Must Die went further. It deconstructed the face, glyph by glyph, until the typeface was finally declared officially dead on December 5, 2012. You can witness its demise at ComicSansMustDie.tumblr.com. But check the pull-down font menu on your computer: chances are that Comic Sans is still there, with its goofy, round, erratic letters that look like a child’s handprinted sign for selling lemonade at the curb. Brownies use it for bake sales. Families use it for birthday invitations. On Orange Is the New Black, Piper uses it for her prison newsletter. Even Pope Benedict XVI used it for the tag lines in the online photo album that commemorated his papacy. His resignation letter is there, too, printed in the same innocently charming Comic Sans.