Printing Revolution & Making Mistakes

It didn’t take reading Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe to recognize the outstanding historical impact resulting from the invention of the printing press. It revolutionized learning and how information was presented and consumed by people. “A serious student could now endeavor to cover a larger body of material by private reading than a student or even a mature scholar needed to master or could hope to master before printing made books cheap and plentiful” (47). What an interesting time it must have been when printing was becoming the next big thing, yet hand-copying was still being employed. The old was mixing with the new in Western Europe. Yet, it could not be denied that the new would soon overpower the old and extend it’s supreme hold on communication to the whole world. Dare I say, it’s not unlike our current shift from analog to digital? Yes, of course it is. We still use books and understand their inherent importance (like scriptoria in the 15^th century) but we are learning to communicate in a new way.

The part of Eisenstein’s book I’d like to focus on is the excerpt on standardization. Although this is a pretty obvious component to the advent of print, there are many aspects to this I would have not likely considered before reading this book.

When we think of printing today, we can rest assured that every copy of a certain edition of a certain book would look and read the same. When a manuscript is written, it is submitted to a publisher. That publisher then will edit & revise and then has the responsibility to print a standardized copy of the edited original.

However, during the early years (and centuries) of print, publishing was an unknown entity. Original manuscripts may arrive at the print shop to be printed with mistakes already in them. It is true that many originals would have been hand-copied and could have variants resulting from the individual scribe. Also, who was there to regulate what was sent to each shop? There could be 15 different print shops receiving 15 different versions of an “original” work to make prints of. Additionally, each print shop owner was left to determine what he wanted to print and how much of it he wanted to print. Generally, he had full discretion with regard to the finished products that he himself did not likely write. This means he could put the time and effort he felt like putting toward making a good (and correct) product. Eisenstein addresses this, yet she states there was largely enough consistency in print to be effective. And where there were inconsistencies, these could be addressed if necessary. “[The printings] were sufficiently uniform for scholars in different regions to correspond with each other about the same citation and for the same emendations and errors to be spotted by many eyes.”

Now, even today, we cannot rule out human error as part of everything we encounter. One of the more notable examples in the book is one on a mistake in a print of the Bible that was not caught in time. Printed by R. Barker in 1631, the “wicked” Bible featured a sixth commandment that commands one to commit adultery, instead of abstaining from it.

One interesting thing about mistakes in print at that point in time, however, is how the mistakes were dealt with. “Press variants multiplied rapidly and countless errata had to be issued” (56). A list of errors and their corrections would have to be distributied to right the wrongs of the printer. “The very act of publishing errata demonstrated a new capacity to locate textual errors with precision and to transmit this information simultaneously to scattered readers. It thus illustrates rather neatly some of the effects of standardization.”

Today, mistakes in print usually result in a recall and a reprinting of the erred book. Or if this is not a possibility, it is much easier today to inform the public, who have already purchased the book, of a mistake because of the ever-expanding reach of the media. Think James Fray’s A Million Little Pieces. (Oprah was pissed!)

But now, in an age that is moving away from print, it’s even easier to correct mistakes. Everything is digital and therefore incredibly easy to manipulate and improve. Hell, I usually go back to make edits and corrections several times after “publishing” my blog posts. The same is true of any news source today. Address it, fix it and move on.

But one significant similarity between the advent of print and the global presence of the Internet is the idea of “transmitting information simultaneously to scattered readers.” This raises the rate of mistake catching exponentially because of the sheer number of people that have access to a certain piece of writing (collective intelligence). But what is even greater now that it’s all digital? That person not only has the ability to call attention to that mistake, but to correct it himself.