Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending

1: First Impressions

C h a p t e r 1 First Impressions The Presse, the most-honorable Presse, the most-villainous Presse —Gabriel Harvey (1593) Prologue: Some Foundation Myths Let me start with some of the foundation myths that reveal long-lasting attitudes toward printing on the part of Western Europeans. They concern Gutenberg ’s one time partner, Johann Fust (sometimes spelled Faustus). He helped to subsidize the operations of the Mainz press, and his daughter married Peter Schoeffer, who fathered the first Mainz printing dynasty. Thus, there is good reason to consider him as a founding father of the new industry. The mythic dimension is supplied by the long-lived confusion between Johann Fust, who died in 1466, and the necromancer ‘‘Doctor’’ Johann Georg Faustus, whose life provided the prototype for the Faustbuch and who was born around 1480.1 According to the anticlerical author of an eighteenth-century dictionary, Fust was wrongly confused with ‘‘one Johann Faust, a fraudulent magician’’ owing to ‘‘lies circulated by monks who hated anyone associated with the invention of printing.’’2 A nineteenth-century biographical dictionary provides a different, more detailed version: FUST, or FAUSTUS (JOHN) a citizen of Mainz and one of the earliest printers. He had the policy to conceal his art; and to this policy we are indebted for the tradition of ‘‘The Devil and Dr. Faustus,’’ handed down to the present times. About 1460, he associ- 2 chapter 1 ated with John of Guttemburgh . . . and . . . having printed off a . . . number of copies of the Bible, to imitate those which were commonly sold in MS, Fust undertook the sale of them in Paris, where the art of printing was then unknown. As he sold his printed copies for 60 crowns while the scribes demanded 500, this created universal astonishment: but when he produced copies as fast as they were wanted and lowered the price to 30 crowns, all Paris was agitated . The uniformity of the copies increased the wonder; informations were given in to the police against him as a magician; . . . a great number of copies being found [in his lodgings], they were seized; the red ink with which they were embellished was said to be his blood; it was seriously adjudged that he was in league with the devil; and if he had not fled, most probably he would have shared the fate of those whom ignorant and superstitious judges condemned . . . for witchcraft.3 Whereas the first version took for granted the hostility of monks (a common misconception even now), this one depicts a mystified urban populace. It takes note of the sudden rise in output, drop in price, and uniformity of copies which led contemporaries to suspect magic. In view of recent assertions that the handpress was incapable of standardizing texts and that uniformity came only in the nineteenth century, it’s worth citing the early eighteenth-century version of a similar tale by Daniel Defoe: the famous doctors of the faculty at Paris, when John Faustus brought the first printed Books that had been seen in the World or at least had been seen there, in to the City and sold them for Manuscripts : They were surprized . . . and questioned Faustus about it; but he kept affirming that they were manuscripts and that he kept a great many Clarks employ’d to write them thus satisfying his questioners for a while. But then they observed the exact agreement of every Book one with another, that every line stood in the same place, every page [had] a like Number of lines, every line, a like number of words; if a word was misspelled in one, it was misspelled also in all; nay, that if there was a Blot in one, it was alike in all; they began again to muse, how this should be . . . not being able to comprehend the Thing . . . [they] concluded it must be the Devil, that it was done by Magic and Witchcraft . . . [and that] . . . poor Faustus (who was First Impressions 3 indeed nothing but a meer Printer) dealt with the Devil . . . [This is the] true original of the famous Dr. Faustus . . . of whom we have believed such strange things . . . whereas poor Faustus was no Doctor and knew no more of the Devil than any other body.4 Defoe, who certainly knew his way around printing shops, thus held the handpress capable of the sort of standardization that recent critics have deemed impossible.5...