Simon Garfield

Pirates of the printing presses

A printer’s inky Kitemark was easily counterfeited, making the early days of commercial printing an extraordinary saga of piracy and fraud

Say what you like about the efficiency of the Kindle, one day we’re going to wake up and miss the lizards. Among the many lost methods of making an illuminated book in the pioneering days of Renaissance printing, the way we once obtained powdered gold may be the most lamented: ‘In a pot place nine lizards in the milk, put on the cover, and bury it in damp earth. Make sure the lizards have air so they do not die.’ By the seventh day, ‘the lizards will have eaten the brass… and their strong poison will have compelled the brass to turn to gold.’

The design consultant John Boardley quotes this early recipe with relish, and is equally enthusiastic about many other arcane techniques employed as book production liberated itself from the tight hands of monkish scribes and copyists to the revolutionary flat-bed printing presses of the late 15th century.

His survey takes in the printing of the first atlas and musical scores, alongside the first frontispiece and children’s books. There is plenty about the gold-rush establishment of the first unregulated printers (Erasmus noted that it was initially easier to become a printer than a baker.) But the book begins with that most elemental and radical innovation, the painstaking hand-carving (or ‘punchcutting’) of the earliest 120-piece metal alphabets, a process taking between one and four months, a skill accounting for an incalculable measure of ruined eyes and backs. And that was just the start, before all the other weeks of justifying, tempering and casting. Only then could the gargantuan task of setting this gothic font in page blocks begin: the printing of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible of the 1450s required at least 100,000 pieces of type.

Inevitably, Gutenberg’s process lies at the heart of this guide to the extraordinary breakthroughs that transformed printing into a booming and piratical business.

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