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8. Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and Its Importance
- University of Minnesota Press
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Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and Its Importance 8 183 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Lisa Gitelman the title of this chapter deserves explanation. Like others in the volume, it is meant to refer to a form of textual media, yet it is doing a lot of other work besides. It is inclusive, appealing to the category “print culture,” as well as exclusionary, excepting anything “codex.” Both categories warrant scrutiny, while codex appears simpler to define. A codex is a text in the shape of a book: groups of pages gathered and sewn together to open along their fore edge. So the term codex designates a material format. One might say that a text can be a codex in the way that a sound recording can be an LP, though that isn’t precisely right, because codices—unlike LPs—can come in different sizes, such as folios, quartos, and octavos, as well as in different types, such as books, magazines, and stab-bound pamphlets. That there are different contexts in which the codex, octavo, and pamphlet are each referred to as a format only goes to show how difficult it can be speak or write about media with any great precision. In the history of communication, the codex is typically defined in contrast to an older format, the scroll, and William A. Johnson explains in chapter 5 of this volume just how difficult it is to generalize about scrolls. (He calls them bookrolls.) By late antiquity , the widespread adoption and manifold uses of codices had helped relegate scrolls to a few highly specialized uses, notably in synagogues. When letterpress printing was developed in the West in the mid-fifteenth century, the codex had already been around for more than a millennium. So wherever “Print Culture (Other Than Codex)”may lead, another chapter remains undreamed and unwritten: “Codex Culture (Other Than Print).”1 184 LISA GITELMAN Like distinguishing the codex from the scroll, the history of communication typically distinguishes print from manuscript, though there is significant poverty in these gross categories. Far from a simple precursor, manuscript stands as a back-formation of printing. (That is, before the spread of printing, there wasn’t any need to describe manuscript as such. 2 ) Meanwhile, print itself has come to encompass many, diverse technologies for the mechanical reproduction of text, despite its primary, historical association with letterpress printing à la Gutenberg. Until the nineteenth century, every text “printed” was printed by letterpress, using a process of composition, imposition, proofing, and presswork very like the one that Johannes Gutenberg, his associates and competitors, developed in the mid-fifteenth century, though saying so admittedly overlooks xylography (woodblock printing) and intaglio processes such as printing from copperplate engravings. Since 1800, however, multiple planographic, photochemical, and electrostatic means of printing have been developed and variously deployed, to the point that today, in the twenty-first century, virtually nothing “printed” is printed by letterpress. Tables turned, the term print has floated free of any specific technology, if indeed it was ever moored in the first place. Instead, print has become defined—as if in reflexive recourse to its own back-formation—by dint of “a negative relation to the [writer’s] hand” (Warner 1990, 7). Any textual artifact that is not handwritten or otherwise handmade letter by letter (such as by typing) counts as“printed,”while today, even the printer’s hand has gone missing, because we have“become accustomed to speaking or writing of ‘printers’ not as people, but as machines” connected to our computers (McKitterick 2003, 1). That Gutenberg’s Bible and the assortment of documents rolling out of my laser printer both count as“printed”again goes to show the difficulty we face in nailing down terms. Print culture is a much more recent term than either codex or print. As Paula McDowell (2010) explains, it was coined by Marshall McLuhan...