Printing and the Mind

A very elongated book, 'Printing and the Mind of Man: The Impact of 
Print on Five Centuries of Western Civilization,' edited by John Carter 
and Percy H. Muir, is an interesting book to be hold, and full of history. 
From its shape and the bold red on the facing title pages to the 424 
books or so that it discusses regarding enormous impact on the world, 
the book is a faucet of early dedication.

A very cool thought arrives in the introduction, that "the bondage of 
words was broken by writing them down," and a page later comes a 
sequence on the availability of the written word allowing mankind the 
ability to forget since the storage of words was then made possible. 
People could make lists of those who owed money, of those who 
donated money, of those in a parish, of those who swam on New 
Year’s Day as members of the Polar Bear Club.

That’s remarkable to me to think that the world changed that much 
with the origin of the written word, and not always with the correct 
consensus words. We have discussed cave marking and other forms 
of communication in class less semester, but with organized wording, 
with printing, with the placement of letters on paper in certain orders, 
the world grew dramatically in a very short amount of time.

I don’t doubt that literature developed across the world like word of a 
happy hour beer special spreads like fire on a college campus when a 
new bar opens, and the world at the dawn of the printed word had 
different lettering, of course, depending where you lived. Latin 
originally had 21 characters, which was derived from Greek and 
Etruscan, and alphabets that were born from it, such as modern 
English, but none carried the weight of the Chinese character total, 
which was upward of 6,000. I can picture the literary giants sitting 
around the Yellow River with their satchels full of character printouts, 
merely there in case someone wanted to write a thought in their journal. 

The first book mentioned is Gutenberg’s bible, per se 1455, and the last 
book mentioned is Winston Churchill’s 'The Lion’s Voice' from 1940. The 
book was a random find in our library, improperly numbered I feel, with 
a badly torn spine and plastic covering. The book has some odd 
illustrations and lettering examples, and a rather massive index, and at 
least one spacing issue on the front cover jacket. 

The book is definitely worth viewing even if you happen to hate all 424 
or so books mentioned inside it. There are more posts about books and
publishing under the Publishing tab on this site.