Printed books existed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg’s Bible | Hacker News Reader

Printed books existed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg’s Bible

io9.com

102 pointsgruseom56 comments

Gutenberg didn't invent a machine for quickly producing books, he invented a machine for quickly producing machines for quickly producing books!

That is, his key innovation was a way to mass-produce the characters (the movable type) which could then be arranged to mass-produce the printed pages.

First, individual characters were carved from steel (each taking about a day to make). This was the only part of the process done "by hand". Every other element of the process was produced through some form of (repeatable/arrangeable) transfer of shape/information.

The master characters were hammered into brass to create a mold which could then be reused to cast multiple copies of a character. Each page had thousands of characters and Gutenberg's shop had multiple presses going at a time, so they needed lots of these characters on hand (50,000 is a conservative estimate).

The masters could also be easily transported to another city. These masters (plus raw materials of course) were all that was needed to set up a new print shop. This enabled the printing press technology to quickly spread throughout Europe.

I think it's a good analogy for the power of software :)

Source: http://retinart.net/beautiful-things/gutenberg-book-changed-...

Yeah, that’s a good parallel. Copying is cheap and automation is applied not only to a task, but to the automation of the task.

this 2 fold demultiplication hits my mind regularly.

  instance / class / metaclass / ()
  instance / model / metamodel / ()   -- very redundant.
  value    / type  / kind      / ()
  machine  / vm    / utm       / ()

() denotes the closed loop where you don't need another layer.

anybody has a theory that explains this trait ?

It’s just a linguistic phenomenon. In English, at least, the prefix meta- denotes not only a single level of metaness (if you will) but also two levels or more, e.g., meta-metaclass → metaclass. So the “closed loop” is there only for convenience, like saying “and so on”.

If we were being precise, we would explicitly denote the level at which we were working. However, we tend not to do so for two reasons: first, that we rarely work with n-meta things for high n; and second, that being explicit is just plain unwieldy.

It’s for the same reason that we follow line, square, and cube with 4-cube, 5-cube, &c.

i think it's deeper than that. the progression is from object (every one hand-crafted) to template-based object-maker (hand-crafted per kind of object, but can produce a bunch of objects of that kind), to metatemplate-based template maker.

however, once you hit that second level of abstraction, you have almost invariably added enough flexibility that the range of templates your template-maker can make includes templates for other template makers. that is, it's not just a quirk of linguistics that a meta-meta-template-maker is called a meta-template-maker, they really do tend to be objects on the same level of abstraction and flexibility.

We seem to be saying the same thing; I just don’t see any inherent meaning in it. A literal interpretation of meta- would have us define it like this:

    Instance ::= 0
    Meta(X)  ::= Succ(X)

But it’s much more convenient to define meta- recursively:

    Instance ::= 0
    Meta(X)  ::= Succ(X)
               | Meta(Succ(X))

In both cases, we have an arbitrary designation:

    Class    ::= Succ(Instance)

That kind of redundancy is a linguistic artifact, not a deeply meaningful one.

It’s not the case that reaching the second level of abstraction necessarily results in enough flexibility to make the inductive step. As a counterexample, consider C macros, which only add one meta- because they are only expanded once. Lisp macros, on the other hand, are expanded until a fixed point is found. That’s why Lisp macros are Turing-complete while the C preprocessor is only a pushdown automaton.

A bit of disagreement with your last paragraph: The (Common) Lisp macro processor is Turing-complete trivially because it invokes a Turing-complete language along the way, not because of power inherent in its expansion strategy.

Common Lisp macro bodies are written in Common Lisp, i.e. written in a Turing-complete language — they would still be Turing-complete even if we wrote them in the subset Lisp-without-macros. The C preprocessor, on the other hand, does not invoke a Turing-complete language to compute a macro's expansion.

Of course.. zero, one, infinity strikes again.

It’s an interesting accident of history that Gutenberg was able to make the innovations he did, and thereby ignite the explosive popularity of movable type in the West. If the Roman empire hadn’t brought the Latin alphabet in its various forms to so much of Europe, it’s possible that a less modular script would have dominated—leading to the same problems that plagued Chinese printing.

Of course, abjads and syllabaries are as common (and about as modular) as alphabets, so it’s likely that we would have been fine either way. Still, it’s interesting to think of what Europe would be like if the predominant script were semantophonetic like Chinese. Oddly enough, the main reason that phonemic scripts exist is precisely because languages tend to be non-isolating—in other words, modularity in a language leads to non-modularity in its orthography, and vice versa.

Great post, but I'm not sure we should wholly credit the Romans with ensuring we have a 'modular script'.

Before the Romans, the Greek and Phonecian writing systems (and derivitives) were taking hold, and more complex scripts (like Chinese logograms) had never simply never been common near Europe, with the single notable exception of Egyptian heiroglyphs (which had complex logograms, but could equally be used with simpler phonetic characters).

Even before the Greeks and Phonecians we have evidence of such writing systems. SUch as the Linear A or Linear B (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B). Word scripting using letters/glyphs goes a long way in the past of Europe. It's a long tradition in this part of the continent.

Right, I didn’t say we should. I was giving two separate hypotheticals. First, what would have happened if the Roman empire hadn’t unified the alphabet of Europe? We might still write English with a runic alphabet, which would mean you could no longer have typeset English with the letterforms you’d cast for, say, French. Second, what would have happened if European scripts were not typically alphabetic, but instead logographic/semantophonetic? Would the printing press have been adopted so quickly?

When you compare Roman & Greek letters to Arabic, it's clear that the former were designed for carving, and the latter for writing. It's interesting that the carving letters wound up being more suitable for a printing press.

It’s largely coincidental though. The Mayan script was carved, while Latin, Greek, and Phoenician were all originally pressed in clay with a stylus. With few limitations, you can use any medium to convey any script. I don’t think the original design constraints have much bearing on that.

I love posts like this. Between the ideas in this post and the googling of words I wasn't very familiar with, I just learned quite a bit.

Byzantine imperium brought greek script to Europe, so if not for latin, we would probably write in cyrylica - still good for printing.

Gutenberg's real innovation was his type metal alloy. Most alloys shrink when cast in a mold, causing distortion. Depending on the alloy, type metal may even expand slightly. It gives a nice, sharply-defined character.

Gutenberg's type metal was also considerably harder than (say) pure lead, which made it possible to print thousands of impressions from one setup.

What is much less well known is that, little more than 100 years later, Arab Muslims were also printing texts, including passages from the Qur'an. They had already embraced the Chinese craft of paper making, developed it and adopted it widely in the Muslim lands. This led to a major growth in the production of manuscript texts. But there was one kind of text which lent itself particularly to mass distribution: this was the private devotional collection of prayers, incantations, Qur'anic extracts and the "beautiful names" of God, for which there was a huge demand among Muslims, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. They were used especially as amulets, to be worn on the person, often rolled up and enclosed in a locket.

http://www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=9...

By the way, it seems that the author forgot to mention that one of the 'western' innovations was the adjustable mould. Basically it is a device where you can put matrices of different width, used to cast lead types; in that way you can cast letters like /i/ or /m/ or even ligatures etc. with the same mould. I must add that I don't know if Gutenberg actually invented the mould as we know it (according to James Mosley[] the mould was first described in the XVI century).

[] http://typefoundry.blogspot.it/2007/04/drawing-typefounders-...

There was a better way to present the generally unknown history of moveable type without twisting it into historical revisionism. Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing press that revolutionized literacy and the availability of information. This article does not dispute this, it just used a provocative title to get you to click.

This article is superficially correct but omits enormous amounts of detail.

Woodblock printing is ancient, mostly used for religious texts but requires very little infrastructure. Obviously not suitable for small printing runs, as the entire block has to be carved at once.

Bi Sheng invented movable type using porcelain characters. But Chinese is fantastically ill suited to that sort of printing; it was viewed historically as a novelty and not used basically at all. He decamped to Korea where he found a more receptive audience, IIRC.

Gutenburg's type alloy and the casting process were the real core of the innovation; the rest of the technology existed, but wasn't compelling without the ability to mass produce characters and with a reliable type alloy.

Oddly enough and for reasons I don't fully understand, woodblock printing didn't take off in Europe until after moveable type came in; mostly for illustrations, IIRC.

And, actually, last week was the 1144th anniversary of the printing of the oldest book for which we have a precise date:

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/05/dayintech_0511/

Far more interesting to me (since I knew about the real history of the printing press) was the linked article[1] on the "tweets" scribes would put in the margins of books they were copying before the press came to Europe. Amazing how similar they sound to today's workplace griping!

1. http://io9.com/5896008/medieval-monks-complained-about-their...

Six pages doesn't seem to compare with the complexity of the Gutenberg Bible. Printing on a small scale,using wood... compared to large scale commercially viable printing.

Actually, much sooner, in 593 A.D., the first printing press was invented in China.

However, Gutenberg's was far superior because the press could be altered, the chinese press was carved in wood and could not be modified.

The limited-run exhibit "Passages" in Atlanta shows a portion of a Gutenberg Bible right next to an oriental printed text from 700-something. I just saw it yesterday. Fantastic exhibit, if you have the chance see it before ends.

nice article.

but isn't it more work to hide the content from js-disabled-browsers? so why do it?

There's many parallels between Gutenberg and most of the tech industry for the entire span of human industry.

It's not about getting there first, it's about doing it well. For many the same reasons everyone assumes Edison invented lightbulbs many assume Gutenberg invented printed books. Neither invented the core concept, they just refined it down into what it needed to be to be marketable. Gutenberg disrupted an entire industry not by printing the books but, as others have mentioned, by designing a system that was relatively cheap and more reliable compared to the previous systems.

Although if you want to talk about truly contentious tech. history and marketable success you'd have to head to photography.

If it was obvious and easy, it would not have taken 600 years for Gutenberg to get it right.

Maybe it wasn't as necessary without the context of a wide spread literate culture and market economy?

This book is pretty good if you're interested in this type of thing. It's a bit surprising what ancient civilisations had.

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Inventions-Peter-James/dp/03...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&l...

Ahh, this nice post could form the beginning of a great discussion for an evening between on the East and the West, spanning literature and technology, if the participants are enlightened (some people do tend to take things personally on these matters) and the wine is good.

One discussion topic could be why Gutenberg's press had the explosive effect it had in Europe and not in China? Tyndale smuggling his printed bibles to England may be mentioned.

Another, harder discussion, would be why such topics, i.e. "we invented X hundreds of years before you!" still entice people from the "East" and cause resentment.

Not able to do that on this board, let me give you the following lengthy quotation instead, from Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, (for me) his best work so far [I mostly used Maureen Freely's bad translation, made a few changes]. This is one of the best novels I know trying to analyze the "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet", which in a number of very few countries (Turkey foremost, but Russia, too, and some Balkan countries perhaps) has an indelible effect on daily life.

<quote>

Whenever I venture into the endless saga about what the West stole from the East and East from the West, I think this: If this realm of dreams we call the world is but a house we roam like sleepwalkers, then our literary traditions are like wall clocks, there to make us feel at home. So:

1. To say that one of these wall clocks is right and another wrong is utter nonsense.

2. To say that one is five hours ahead of the other is also nonsense; by using the same logic you could just as easily say that it’s seven hours behind.

3. For much the same reason, it is 9:35 according to one clock and it just so happens that another clock also says its 9:35, anyone who claims that second clock is imitating the first is spouting nonsense.

A year before he attended Averroes's funeral in Cordoba, Ibn Arabi, who would write two hundrend mystical texts before his own demise, found himself in Morocco; it was during his sojourn that he penned a text inspired by the Al-Isra sura of the Koran. [...] Now, anyone who reads Ibn Arabi's account of his travels with his guide through the seven heavens and concludes, after noting that he was thirty-five years old at the time of writing, that Nizam, the girl of his dreams was right, and Beatrice wrong, or that Ibn Arabi was right and Dante wrong, or that the Book of the Israelites and Makan Al-Asra was correct while the Divine Comedy is incorrect, is perpetuating the first sort of nonsense I was describing.

In the eleventh century, the Andalusian philisopher Ibn Tufeyl wrote a book about a child abandoned on a desert island; during his sojourn there he came to respect nature, the sea, the life-giving sustenance afforded to him by a doe, the certainty of death, the heavens above and the "divine truths"; but claiming that Hayy Ibn Yakzan is six six hundred years ahead of Robinson Crusoe or that, observing the latter describes the tools and objects in greater detail, that Ibn Tufeyl was six hundred years behind Daniel Defoe is an example of the second kind of nonsense.

</quote>

You can search Google Books to read Pamuk's interesting example for the third kind of fallacy.

There's a simple reason why Gutenberg's technology was explosive and these alleged Asian moveable type systems were not:

"Gutenberg's True Innovation", not present in the article despite that being a paragraph heading, wasn't any of the things mentioned in the article.

Gutenberg created a system to easily cast letters as interchangable parts (centuries before Eli Whitney, as it were) This meant that Gutenberg built a system to mass produce printing presses

Carving the letters for an entire typeface by hand could take over a year. However, Gutenberg created a system for taking a hand-sculpted typeface, turning each letter into a mold, and then quickly and cheaply casting each letter. The result: mass production of the most difficult part of the system to produce, the typeface itself, and thus a way to mass produce printing presses.

This article is about as poorly researched as The Oatmeal's ode to Tesla.

Honest question. I'm not white ; do many white people in America really truly believe high school history as it is taught?

i.e that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?

That's not an honest question--you are being fatuous. Every culture suffers from this to a very large degree. It's easy to give examples drawn from parts of the world where printing presses predated European inventions. The traditionally taught dynastic histories of China go back thousands of years beyond where there is any credible archeological evidence of a civilization in continuity with later Han culture. Koreans are similarly taught that their civilization has a 5000-year history based on nothing other than latter-day textual sources to support the deeper part of its antiquity.

The fact that non-white cultures also distort their youths' understanding of history to their own benefit isn't a valid argument for Americans to continue to do so. And it isn't a valid argument against skepticism on the part of students.

Clearly. The point is that this isn't some white thing. It's a universal flaw of human cultures that has resulted in much ignorance and atrocity throughout history.

I don't think the parent claimed that it is "some white thing" in the sense that this phenomenon only applies to white cultures. Instead, he was referring to the topic of discussion here, namely an example of white culture perpetrating this mistake.

From your username, I'm guessing you were born in 1983; I was too. There's a huge variety in American education so it's possible our experiences were completely different.

However, when I was in high school our textbooks were so concerned with political correctness that if anything they were overly focussed on diversity.

I took AP US history, World History, Asian History, and AP European History. The Average student only got one section of European history in the overall World History class.

>that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?

I find it very hard to believe (not impossible, just very unlikely) that you were actually taught that. More likely you just saw your history classes through your own biases.

I am not American so I could not talk for them, but in Europe nobody teaches that white people invented everything.

E.g everybody knows when he studies history what this article says along the invention of the compass and gears and zero and algebra in Asia.

But people from western countries invented almost everything since the Guttemberg press, maybe because of this press, as books became hundreds or thousand of times cheaper that what they were before and Asian countries had to face an obsolete language with thousand of characters (Japanese realised they had such and inferior language and created higajana and katakana later).

Knowledge spread so fast other places could not compete. It has nothing to do with the color of your skin.

I wouldn't say Chinese is "obsolete". Written chinese does not convey pronunciation at all and therefore changes very slowly compared to spoken chinese. That meant even though chinese people from different regions of china couldn't always communicate using spoken chinese because of language divergence they could communicate by writing. I think this has had an effect on the unity of China - over thousands of years it stayed as a single nation; in comparison the Europe where many languages have diverged from Latin and where there are many nation-states where people are bound together by their language.

If China was not united during the incursions by European countries in the 1800's, maybe they'd have ended up even worse off.

With today's technology, would you say Chinese is now un-obsoleted?

I wouldn't say modern technology has completely erased the disadvantages of written Chinese. When I was taking Mandarin in college the typing system seemed like a rather inelegant hack.

I thnk the modern technology the parent refers to is touch screens for writing chinese characters, not keyboards for typing pinyin.

The way we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america. I am a high school sophomore and so far I have had to site through 5 years of American History classes, and no World History classes. In these classes we learn about the contributions of blacks to society, and in more recent history, the contributions of other races, but hardly anything about other countries unless we were at war with them.

We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and World History, when in fact, teaching America separately means artificially separating it from the rest of the world and having to constantly compensate for that.

You're telling me you've never learned about Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, China, Medieval Europe?

I find that very unlikely. If it is true please don't go around making statements like we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america.

You can't speak for America as a whole since we don't have a national curriculum.

More than likely you just feel the way you do because you just took US history and haven't gotten to any or the world history classes.

>We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and World History,

There's nothing wrong with teaching a separate US history and world History class. When you get to college you'll find that history classes are even further subdivided by time and geography.

The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in third grade, and I hardly think that counts. I've gone to school in three different states, so I have at least some reasonable sample of nation, and although there is no national curriculum, the curricula are generally similar enough.

And college history courses assume that you already have enough knowledge from high school history courses to understand the historical context of what they teach, but by teaching American history separate (and before) world history, we are not taught any global context for events in American History.

>The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in third grade, and I hardly think that counts.

If that's true you are an extremely rare case. I just took a look at the social studies standards for my state (Georgia, not exactly a top performer education wise) for middle schoool.

6th grade is the history and geography of Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe and Australia, 7th is Africa, Southwest Asia (Middle East), Southern and Eastern Asia, and 8th is US/Georgia History.

If you really haven't had any world history since 3rd grade it looks like it may have been a consequence of moving between 3 states.

If each state had world history at a different year in their curriculum, you may have missed them entirely.

Please don't try to speak for America on a forum with an international audience. Your experience is not representative.

Perhaps you are stuck in some weird loop due to attending school in different states, or have attended really lousy schools.

When i was in elementary school in NYC, we learned about ancient civilizations and NYC history in 4th grade -- the ancient part was kicked off with a field trip to the Egyptian artifacts at the Met.

In high school in upstate ny, we studied global history and current events from grade 9 through 11. The Chinese portion sucked -- we basically covered the opium wars though the cultural revolution, but we studied many aspects of global history.

In my state (Michigan) world history is a state wide requirement, so the first part of your comment is absolutely wrong. And I can't talk about any other schools, but the school I attended (a large, public, middle of the road high school) did a very good job of incorporating US history into a broader world perspective. If you've had a bad high school experience, please do not generalize to the entirety of the US.

> Gutenberg's printing press was a novel technology. But to > say that he invented the printing press is like saying > Steve Jobs or Bill Gates invented the computer.

Well, Steve Jobs is a bad example here because he did create the first personal computer, as opposed to traditional mainframes, that was more than an experimental computer programmed using a switchboard and outputting with pulses of lamps. Maybe this is the point of the article, that Gutenberg's press was to the previous presses as PCs were to mainframes, but if it is then it's confusing.

Bill gates is a worse example because his company didn't make hardware until much later.

Jobs took existing concepts from the Xerox concept PC (with the GUI) and shrunk the price and hardware (in the Apple II). There were personal computers before Jobs, he brought together a lot of things which made it a commercial success. In many ways he's much like Gutenburg, he took a group of existing technologies and concepts and brought them together in a working mixture.

ah, nice to know. I thought the closest thing to a personal computer before the Apple I were the micro computers, the size of a room.

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor

Expensive, but by no means did it take up a whole room.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

Still not exactly a "personal computer". And still expensive, but getting closer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

The microcomputer that sparked the microcomputer revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_computer_club

The two Steve's were active members.

While there were mainframes that took up whole rooms, systems that didn't were available in the 60's, but at prices only large organizations could afford.

> micro computers, the size of a room

Early microcomputers were not the size of a room. The defining feature of a microcomputer was that it used a single microchip (integrated circuit) as its CPU, as opposed to needing one or more circuit boards full of components for that task.

No, the first personal computer was the Kenbak-1, which was the first to satisfy both criteria of being a computer (as opposed to something simpler) and personal (as opposed to something hugely expensive and really meant for business use).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1

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