A Brief History of the Written Word

Just in time for NaNoWriMo, it comes out: New research shows that Johannes Gutenberg may not have used moveable type in the Gutenberg Bible after all. Others dismiss the new research as a crock of crap (ok, their word was "stunt"). I wonder how much longer into this age of desktop publishing people are going to care who invented moveable type. Now that we have Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, who among us gives a rodent's rear end who invented the catapult?

Actually, it's sort of odd that we celebrate moveable type as the great leap forward. Ever since the invention of moveable type, we've been trying to reverse that invention, slowly moving back up to setting entire pages again. Not discounting the influence of cheaper printed material on the general literacy level of humanity--probably second only to the invention of the written word, so called because it was all hand written for a few centuries--but let's take a look at the evolution of printing for a moment. If I missed or mixed up anything, I'm sure my printer forbearers would be happy to set the record straight (that's your cue, Dad and Gran'dad).

It started out with an entire page carved on one block, which was hard work and not entirely efficient. Then moveable type split the blocks into individual letters that could be set and reused. It did not take humanity long to figure out that letters are tiny things and setting type by hand is hard work, as is un-setting the type. Try cutting a magazine page into individual letters and sorting the letters without mixing up 8-point Times with 9-point Palatino sometime. You'll get the idea. Mix up the sorting, and your next project looks like a ransom note.

The first step in moving back up to full-page typesetting was linecasting, where something akin to moveable type was used to create blocks of full lines of type; these were usually melted and the metal reused after the print run to make new lines. Then we got rid of the metal (and aren't you glad you can print something in your home without a foundry?) and moved on to photomechanical and cathode ray tube methods of creating, once again, blocks of entire pages for the press.

Now, with desktop publishing, we have broken through the pre-Gutenberg barrier of only being able to set a page at a time. With Quark or Pagemaker or even MS Word, you can set an entire book fairly easily, and if you're setting an e-book, you aren't even constrained by having to make page breaks for the presses.

So there you have it. A 550-year effort to get back to what we were doing before, only without the chisel.