Academic Reading — All-Types Test 12

Reading passage

The Coming of the Printed Book A. Before the middle of the fifteenth century, almost every book in Europe was copied out by hand. Working in the scriptoria of monasteries or in the small workshops of professional scribes, a copyist might spend the better part of a year producing a single large volume. Such labour made books rare and expensive, and it also introduced errors, for no two hand-written copies of a text were ever quite identical. A reader who wished to compare two manuscripts of the same work would often find that they disagreed in hundreds of small particulars. Knowledge, under these conditions, was fragile: it depended on a slow and unreliable chain of hands. B. The transformation that began around 1450 in the German city of Mainz did not spring from nowhere. Paper, cheaper and more plentiful than the animal-skin parchment it gradually replaced, had spread westward from China through the Islamic world and reached European mills two centuries earlier. Screw presses were already used to crush grapes and olives. Metalworkers understood how to cut punches and cast small objects in moulds. What a goldsmith named Johann Gerhardt is traditionally credited with doing was not the invention of any single one of these things, but their combination into a working system. His decisive contribution was movable type: individual letters cast in a metal alloy, each on its own small block, which could be arranged into a page, inked, pressed onto paper, and then broken up and reused for the next page. C. The heart of the system was the type itself. Gerhardt is thought to have devised an adjustable hand-mould that allowed a workshop to cast thousands of identical letters quickly, all of exactly the same height so that they would print evenly. The alloy he settled on was a mixture of lead, tin and antimony, which melted at a low temperature, flowed cleanly into the mould, and hardened into a durable block. He also had to develop an ink that would cling to metal rather than beading up on it, and this proved to be an oil-based preparation quite unlike the water-based inks used by scribes. Each of these problems had to be solved before the others were worth solving, which is one reason the whole enterprise took years of secretive experiment and a good deal of borrowed money. D. The famous Bible that emerged from the Mainz workshop in the early 1450s was a commercial object as much as a technical one. Around 180 copies were produced, some on paper and a smaller number on the more prestigious parchment. To the eye of the time the pages were meant to resemble fine manuscript work, and spaces were even left for decorated initials to be added by hand afterwards. The venture was not, however, a happy one for its originator. Heavily in debt, Gerhardt lost control of his workshop and its equipment to a financial backer in a lawsuit, and it was others who reaped the early profits of the trade he had done so much to establish. E. What followed was rapid and, to contemporaries, bewildering. Within a single generation the technique had crossed the Alps to Italy and spread to more than 250 towns across Europe. Printers set up near universities and trading centres, where both the demand for texts and the money to pay for them were concentrated. Books produced before 1501 are known to scholars as incunabula, from a Latin word suggesting a cradle or infancy, and tens of thousands of distinct editions survive from that first half-century alone. Prices fell steeply as competition grew, and works that had once been the preserve of the wealthy came within reach of merchants, lawyers and schoolteachers. F. The consequences reached far beyond the book trade. A printed edition fixed a text in a stable form: every copy of a given printing carried the same words, the same diagrams, the same page numbers, so that a scholar in one city could refer a colleague in another to a precise location and be confident they were looking at the same thing. This new reliability accelerated the exchange of ideas in law, medicine and the natural sciences. It also standardised spelling and helped particular regional dialects harden into national languages, as printers chose one form over another for the sake of consistency. The hand-copied book did not vanish overnight, but the balance had shifted permanently, and the modern world of cheap, uniform, widely shared information had begun to take shape.