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315 Chapter  “Little Jobs” Broadsides and the Printing Revolution Peter Stallybrass The printed calendars and indulgences that were first issued from the Mainz workshops of Gutenberg and Fust . . . warrant at least as much attention as the more celebrated Bible. —Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change Printed Sheets I begin with a counterintuitive proposition: printers do not print books. It is the process of gathering, folding, stitching, and sometimes binding that transforms printed sheets into a pamphlet or book. Certainly, some printers may have undertaken or paid for all of the latter processes. But that is not what printing is about. It never was. The first dated text that survives from Gutenberg’s press is not a book but an indulgence. Most indulgences are printed on only one side of a single piece of paper. They were usually printed as multiple settings of the same text, which the compositor placed in a single For Elizabeth Eisenstein and James Green. . I owe this formulation and much else to James Green, the Librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia. See his “The American Bindings Collection of Michael Zinman,” in The Library Company of Philadelphia: 1999 Annual Report (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 2000), 9, where he writes: “Printers print sheets, but books are made by binders.” That printing is about sheets, not books, is a point repeatedly emphasized by Hugh Amory. See particularly “A Note on Statistics” in his Bibliography and the Book Trade: Studies in the Print Culture of New England, ed. David D. Hall (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 163–70, where he notes the pitfalls of measuring printing by titles or number of pages. One of the many impressive features of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, vol. 1 of A History of the Book in America, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) is the insistence of the editors and the contributors on the sheet as the basic unit in printing. See particularly graphs 8a and 8b on p. 516. Hugh Amory and David Hall draw on the implications of D. F. McKenzie’s work, particularly The Cambridge University Press, 1696–1712: A Bibliographical Study, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966). 316 Peter Stallybrass forme; the printed sheet was subsequently cut up to make two, four, or more separate copies. Gutenberg was already printing his great Bible when he stopped working on it to print 2,000 copies of his thirty-line indulgence in 1454–5. He undertook this work because it was paid for up front and brought an immediate cash return. The massive project of printing the Bible required a large investment of money, above all to buy paper. Gutenberg both kept afloat and subsidized his larger project by printing broadsides (that is, single sheets printed on one side only). But Gutenberg’s 1454–5 edition of 2,000 indulgences was only a foretaste of what was to come. In Augsburg in 1480, Jodocus Pflanzmann printed 20,000 certificates of confession, four to a sheet, and Johan Bämler printed 12,000 indulgences. In 1499–1500, Johann Luschner printed 142,950 indulgences for the Benedictine Monastery at Montserrat. As Clive Griffin has shown, so profitable was the printing of indulgences that printers competed fiercely for the patents to print them. Successful printers sometimes had to set up new printing houses to cope with the work. Varela, for instance, set up a second house in Toledo where he printed indulgences from 1509 to 1514. As with Gutenberg, so with Caxton—the first surviving dated text that Caxton printed in England is an indulgence. The names of the recipients (Henry Langley and his wife) and the date (December 13, 1476) are written in by hand in the carefully placed blank spaces of the printed text. Caxton . Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberg:The Man and His Invention, trans. Douglas Martin (Aldershot, Hants.: Scolar Press, 1996), 189–90. See Keith Maslen, “Jobbing Printing and the Bibliographer: New Evidence from the Bowyer Ledgers,” in his An Early London Printing House at Work: Studies in the Bowyer Ledgers (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), 141: “If we go back to the cradle of printing we find no . . . separation [of jobbing work from printing books]. Gutenberg’s Indulgences of 1454–5 were necessarily printed and issued while his massive forty-two-line Bible was still slowly going through the press, not to be completed until 1456...

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