An attempt has been made in this book to trace briefly the story of the book from the earliest attempts made by mankind to convey a message by marks on some substance down to the invention of movable types. The development of writing is rapidly traced from the earliest known pictures and sign marks to the present day. The discussion covers the subjects of writing materials and how they were made; the evolution of the book; the conditions of manufacture, distribution, and preservation of books before printing, and the conditions out of which sprang the invention of typographic printing.
It is believed that a comprehensive knowledge of the main facts in this long story will be of great value to the young printer, and it is hoped that he may be interested to continue the study in some of the many very excellent books which are available. A short list of a few of the best and most accessible authorities in English will be found on page 44. It has not been thought worth while to refer to books in other languages.
The story of the efforts of men to convey their thoughts to the absent is one of absorbing interest and leads into many pleasant byways of knowledge. While we are studying the processes and materials of a trade by which we hope to gain a livelihood it is well to know something about the men of the past whose accomplishments we inherit. To know something about the men of another time who made this time possible, what they did, what manner of men they were, how they lived, and what they created for us, is the task of this and the following volumes in Part VIII of this series.
The story of printing really begins with the earliest dawn of civilization. As soon as men developed a language, even of the simplest sort, they felt the necessity of a means of communication with those who were not present. This would be needed for the identification of property, the making of records, the sending of orders or information, the making of appointments, and many other purposes which would be developed by the needs of even the most rudimentary civilization. We accordingly find evidences of devices to accomplish these ends associated with the earliest human remains. While the cave man was disputing food and shelter with the cave bear, the sabre-tooth tiger, and the mammoth in those places which are now the seats of the most advanced civilizations, he scratched or painted outline sketches of the animals he fought, and perhaps worshipped, on the wall of a cave or on the flat surface of a spreading antler or a piece of bone.
The oldest known attempt to carve a picture. It dates from the cave period and was found at Dordogne, France.
One of the greatest single steps in civilization was the advance from the use of rough stone implements and weapons to the use of chipped and finished stones for the same purpose, commonly referred to as the transition from the paleolithic to the neolithic age. Just how long ago that was no one knows and only geologists can guess. Among remains dating from this period of transition found in the little village of Mas d’Azil in France, there have been discovered a number of painted pebbles. Whether these were game counters, ownership tags, records, or what not, no one can guess. Whether the marks on them were purely mnemonic signs, numerals, or verbal signs of some sort, no one knows. That they were in some way, however, the ancestors of modern printed matter is unquestionable.
Pebbles from Mas d’Azil.
Among the earliest methods of communicating ideas to the absent, pictures hold the largest place. Other methods were knots, ordinarily known by the name quipus which they bear among the ancient Peruvians. The number and arrangements of the knots and the color of the cords made possible a considerable range of expression. Closely associated with these were tallies, or notched sticks, and wampum, or strings of colored shells or beads arranged in various designs. Here perhaps may also be classed the so-called Ogham inscriptions, made by arrangements of short lines in groups about a long central line. The short lines may be either perpendicular to the central line or at an angle to it. They may be above it, below it, or across it, thus providing a wide range of combinations with a corresponding variety of expression. These primitive methods survive in the rosary, the sailor’s log line with its knots or the knotted handkerchief which serves as a simple memorandum. They may run all the way from purely mnemonic signs to a fairly well developed alphabet.
More important in its development, however, was the picture. Primitive men all over the world very soon learned to make pictures, very crude and simple to be sure, but indicating fairly well what they stand for. These pictures may be so arranged and conventionalized as to convey a good deal of information. The position of a human figure may indicate hunger, sleep, hostility, friendship, or a considerable number of other things. A representation of a boat with a number of circles representing the sun or moon above it may indicate a certain number of days’ travel in a certain direction, and so on indefinitely. This method of writing was highly developed among the North American Indians, who did not, however, get beyond it.
Indian picture writing. The biography of a chief. The next step forward is the attempt to represent abstract ideas by means of pictures. The picture then ceases to represent an object and represents an idea. This is called an ideogram. While it has certain very obvious limitations, it has one advantage over more developed systems. The ideogram does not represent a word; it represents an idea. Consequently it may be intelligible to people who, in spoken language, represent the idea by very different words. For example, there are several cases where a common set of ideograms appears to have been used as a means of communication between people whose spoken language was mutually unintelligible. The Chinese sign for “words” made thus is a typical ideogram. It represents a mouth with vapor rising from it.
The next step forward is the development of the ideogram into the phonogram, or sound sign. When this step is taken, the ideogram, besides representing an idea in a general way, represents a sound, usually the name of the object represented by the ideogram or by one of its components. A succession of these phonograms then represents a series of sounds, or syllables, and we have a real, though somewhat primitive and cumbrous, written language. Concurrently with this process the original picture has become conventionalized and abbreviated. In this shape it is hardly recognizable as a picture at all and appears to be a mere arbitrary sign.
Comparative ideographs.
After a time men discovered that all the sounds of the human voice were really decomposable into a very few and that all human speech, consisting as it does of combinations of these sounds, could be represented by combinations of simple phonograms each of which should represent neither an idea nor a syllable but one of the primary sounds. The phonograms were then greatly reduced in number, simplified in form, and became what we know to-day as letters.
This process appears to have gone on independently in many parts of the world. In many places it never got to the point of an alphabet, and this arrest of development is not inconsistent with a high degree of civilization. The Chinese and Japanese script, for example, are to this day combinations of ideograms and phonograms.
Three of the great peoples of antiquity carried this process nearly or quite to a conclusion, although the method followed and the results reached were quite different in the three cases. The three civilizations, of the Egyptians in the Nile Valley, the Assyrio-Babylonians in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the Cretans, centering in Crete but spreading extensively through the Mediterranean Basin, developed three great varieties of script. All started with pictures. The Egyptians continued to use the pictures in their formal inscriptions down to the Persian conquest in the 6th century B.C. This picture writing or hieroglyphic was well developed and in the phonogram stage about 5000 B.C. The formal picture writing of the hieroglyphic was admirably suited to formal inscriptions either carved in stone or painted on a variety of substances. It was not suited, however, to the more rapid work of the recorder, the correspondent, or the literary man. The scribes, or writers, therefore developed a highly abbreviated and conventionalized form of hieroglyphic which could be easily written with a reed pen on papyrus, a writing material to be described presently. The first specimens of papyrus, containing the earliest known specimens of this kind of writing, called hieratic, date from about 3550 B.C. Even the hieratic was too formal and cumbersome for the common people and was further abbreviated and conventionalized into an alphabet known as the demotic which was in common use among the Egyptians from about 1900 B.C. to 400 A.D.
Names in hieroglyphic text of three of the most famous Pharaohs, Cheops, Thothmes III and Rameses II.
Among the Assyrio-Babylonians the use of an entirely different kind of writing material caused the development of a very different type of script. The lands inherited by these people were clay lands and they made enormous use of clay and its products for building materials, utensils, and