Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

We were just talking about pamphlets—click here for a picture from a 1617 pamphlet of Guy Fawkes’ head on a pike.:
https://www.alamy.com/gunpowder-plot-the-head-of-guy-fawkes-from-a-1617-pamphlet-image221751638.html

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

Satire

Jonathan Swift. One of the perks of being a pamphleteer was you got to wear big wigs.

Satire : a way of using humor to show that someone or something is foolish, weak, bad, etc. : humor that shows the weaknesses or bad qualities of a person, government, society, etc.

Many pamphleteers commented on social conditions or criticized the government. Jonathan Swift used satire to make his points—‘Swiftian’ is still an adjective for a particularly dark sense of humor. In 1729 Swift published  A Modest Proposal to transform poor Irish children from a burden to society instead to being a benefit. His pamphlet caused a howling, righteous uproar (click on the link to read it)—just as it would today on Instagram or Twitter. Daniel Defoe’s satirical The Shortest Way with the Dissenters got him arrested for sedition.

Then, as now, the ruling class had no sense of humor and wouldn’t tolerate criticism. The British government censored and arrested pamphleteers for expressing politically incorrect opinions. The idea that writers should have the liberty to write about whatever they choose and have their work printed and distributed is called freedom of the press. This was a new concept. John Milton defended freedom of the press in a pamphlet that he had to publish anonymously. He was revealed as its true author only a couple of years ago.

https://www.britannica.com/art/pamphlet
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pamphleteer
https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/lilly/exhibitions_legacy/defoe/pamphlets.html
https://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Swift-As-Tory-Pamphleteer/dp/0295978708
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/milton-9781608193783/
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/satire

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

The pamphleteers

Daniel Defoe

If you were a young writer just starting out during Brit lit’s Augustan Age (late 1600s – early 1700s), pamphlets were the way to build an audience. Pamphlets can be as short as 4 pages. Lots of them don’t even have covers. They’re cheap and easy to produce—and plenty of people could read by then—so you could sell bunches of ‘em. They were the social media of those days. If you had something on your mind, a topic to rant about, you wrote an essay and printed it up as a pamphlet. You became a pamphleteer.

You may recognize the names of some pamphleteers—Daniel Defoe (he wrote Robinson Crusoe), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Tom Paine (his pamphlets were made into a collection titled Common Sense), John Milton (Paradise Lost).

https://www.britannica.com/art/pamphlet
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pamphleteer
https://poemanalysis.com/movement/augustan-age/

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

More Reformation—sorry

The printing press encouraged literacy, which almost all by itself brought on the Renaissance and shaped modern Western Civilization. Those pamphlets of Luther’s presented the argument that the Catholic Church needed to be reformed.

You guys are rolling your eyes now—”C’mon, Manders! Give the Reformation a rest already!” Okay, okay. There IS a reason I bring it up again: for thousands of years, the power-structure of every kingdom and empire was top-down, central-government, one-guy-runs-the-show—that is, all decisions are made by one king or emperor. In the Holy Roman Empire, the pope ran everything to do with the Church. All the Church’s power was in the Vatican, in Rome. The pope appointed priests to every last little church.

This model is ‘top-down.’ The power comes from above and works its way down.

The Reformation brought a big change: the new Protestant churches elected their own pastors. The power to choose a pastor resides in each individual member of a Protestant church. If you belong to a Protestant church, you have a say in who gets to be preacher. This was a big, new idea. It happened because a great number of people knew how to read and did read Luther’s pamphlets.

A path was being cleared for—eventually—a nation whose ordinary-shmo-citizens would elect its political leaders.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1064/protestant-reformation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljdWWjdesMM
https://opencurriculum.org/5475/the-medieval-church/
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/29/world/reformation-world-change/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

It was a big deal

The printing press was the first mass medium. I’m expanding the definition of ‘medium’—how you stick pigment to a surface—to include the idea of spreading information by putting ink on paper. ‘Mass’ as I use it here means lots of people. Printing was a new super-effective way to broadcast ideas to a big audience. Martin Luther understood that right away. His pamphlets were carried by ships to different countries, translated, reprinted and seen by people all over the western world. You could argue that there’d have been no Protestant Reformation without the printing press. We’ll be coming up soon to when pamphleteers used the printing press to explain to lots of people how a new system of government might work: a nation run by its citizens instead of a king.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mass%20medium
THIS: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory/chapter/the-printing-revolution/

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

Citation, please!

If he’d burnt her omelet we’d need an egg-citation.

Standardization is a feature of civilization. The great empires standardized measurement, money, laws, highways, armies…everybody knew how long a mile is or how much a candybar costs. Remember how Charlemagne wanted to standardize music? Printed books standardize information. When you’re in school, reading a textbook, info in your book shows up on the same page in the textbook the kid next to you is reading. That isn’t true of handwritten books. Uniformity allows books to have numbered pages so we can find that information later.

That means if you’re a scholar, a scientist, or just some shmo writing a history blog, you can cite a piece of information. If I write, “In ad 878 the king of England was a not-so-good baker—he let an old peasant lady’s cakes burn,” I can cite that story in a history book so you know I’m not making it up. I’d give you the title of a book, its author, and the exact page so you can find the story. Anyone with a copy of that book will find that info. Printing made it possible to build on a body of knowledge, like history or science.

Cite: to quote by way of example, authority, or proof
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cite
A good old-fashioned citation looks like this: The Vikings, Frank R. Donovan, American Heritage Publishing, page 43
In this blog format, it’s convenient to cite by linking. Remember, though, that information on the web can be changed or deleted easily.
https://britishfoodhistory.com/2018/10/25/king-alfred-burns-the-cakes/
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/King-Alfred-the-Cakes/

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

It’s okay to speak your own language now

I want to take a second to recap. I don’t think I’ve done a sufficient job of telling you how the mechanized printing press, movable type, printed books and pamphlets changed everything in Western culture. For instance, the Protestant Reformation happened because of Martin Luther’s pamphlets. That’s just for starters.

Okay, maybe that’s not actually a line from Don Quixote…

The regional variations or dialects of Latin emerged as distinct languages because they’d been printed in those early books. Printing lent respectability to the romance languages. Before those early books were printed, you probably thought of yourself as some yokel grunting out the local version of Latin mixed with whatever backwoods patois (PA-twah) your great-grandparents spoke. After they were printed, suddenly you were speaking the language of Dante or Chaucer or Luther or Cervantes. If those big shots thought your language were good enough to use in a printed book, there must be something worthy about it. 

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

Who owns what you create?

I’d like to zoom ahead a few centuries for just a minute. Last post was about the brilliant type designer Francesco Griffo and how ownership of his creative output was taken away by the Venetian Senate. Naturally, he was bitter. Griffo did everything right: he worked hard to become skilled; he discovered what his customers wanted and delivered it; what he created was in short supply so he should have been able to command a respectable price for it. But Griffo couldn’t make a buck from his own type designs because his ownership of them was taken away.

Let me put in a plug here for the Graphic Artists’ Guild. In the late 1970s GAG lobbied the United States Congress to enact law that made everything an artist creates the sole property of that artist, unless the artist transfers ownership to somebody else through a contract. You can see how huge that was. Before 1978, an artist protected his creations by applying for a copyright or else a patent through the Patent Office. It cost you money to establish ownership of your own stuff. Now your creativity belongs to you from the moment you create it. Anybody else trying to claim it needs to show a contract you signed. No contract means the artist owns it. If you wonder why I’m unapologetically pro-America, this is one of the reasons. In the USA an artist’s intellectual property is protected by the law of the land.

I sought out my pal Fred Carlson’s (Fred was GAG’s president 1991-1993) input on this. Here’s what he added—

I always like to note that the US Constitution itself protects the intellectual property of its citizens, acknowledging the USA as the worldwide leader in copyright assignment to benefit creators—even Jefferson (who invented quite a few items in his lifetime!) saw the need for this:

US Constitution, Article 1 Section 8, clause 8 (in the whole article describing the creation of Congress)

“Section. 8. The Congress shall have the power to…”
Clause 8 “…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”

This recognized the positive impact of assigning ownership to inventors, writers, artists, who could then exploit the work for the profitable and regular distribution through the economy of their valuable intellectual property.
It created such things as Patent offices, copyright offices, etc. For a lot of the modern world these concepts dating to 1787 are still unknown and often disrespected.—Fred

https://www.wilsongunn.com/history/history_patents.html
https://graphicartistsguild.org/
https://graphicartistsguild.org/the-code-of-fair-practice-for-the-graphic-communications-industry/
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
https://carlsonstudio.com/

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

Francesco Griffo

Francesco Griffo

Manutius got type-design-superstar Francesco Griffo to cut type for his lowercase/minuscule Greek letters. Greek minuscules had been developed by the monks in those old scriptoria to save some space on the page. Griffo redesigned them as italics so they would take even less space. He did the same for Hebrew and Roman lowercase. When you look at the examples in the links below, you’ll see that the capital letters are still in their old form—only the lowercase letters are italic.

A page of the polyglot Bible. Looks like only the Greek got lowercase italics. Why are there blank spaces at the top-left of columns 2 & 3 but top-right of the first column? http://www.griffoggl.com/en/biografia/

I give some links below here and yesterday’s post to Griffo’s beautiful work. One of my favs is the polyglot Bible: 3 columns on every page in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The guy was cutting those tiny letters in steel by hand and they’re perfect. Really, go look. Griffo’s designs for italic type are beautiful—and they’re useful. Italics take less space on a page, so books can be smaller and less expensive. Manutius was selling a ton of books thanks to Griffo’s italics. Here’s the ugly part: Manutius didn’t want any other publisher to have Griffo’s italic type. In 1502 Manutius went to the Senate of the Venetian Republic who granted him a 10-year protection—only Manutius could use Griffo’s italic type designs. I’m not talking about the physical metal type—I mean the design, the creative idea, the ‘intellectual property.’ So Griffo didn’t own his italics anymore, because he couldn’t sell them to anyone else. He should have been able to make a fortune from them, but Manutius owned ‘em. Welcome to the 1500s graphic design business, Francesco. Disappointed and disgusted, Griffo left Venice soon after that.

http://www.griffoggl.com/en/biografia/
http://www.griffoggl.com/en/corsivi/

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

Aldus Manutius

Aldus Manutius

The brains behind all this innovation was one guy: Aldo Manutio, or Aldus Manutius in Latin. Latin & Greek weren’t completely abandoned by the early book publishers. Manutius was a scholar who spoke several languages and made it his mission to use his printing press to publish some beautiful editions of the classics (Hebrew, Greek & Latin lit)—while keeping his books affordable enough that the college crowd could afford them.

Manutius built a reputation for accurate translations. He was a meticulous editor. And though his books were produced inexpensively, they are gorgeous to look at. Either he or a designer on his payroll composed pages using classic mathematical proportions that Pythagorus, the ancient Greek mathematician, dreamed up (more about that soon). Scholarly writers/translators started coming to Manutius because they knew they could trust him with their work.

The dolphin & anchor image is Manutius’ colophon, or printer’s mark.

Here are links so you can looks at these books:

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/early-renaissance1/venice-early-ren/a/aldo-manuzio-aldus-manutius-inventor-of-the-modern-book
https://rarebooks.library.nd.edu/exhibits/durand/italian/manutio.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Manutius
For only $8,800 clams you can own a first edition from the Aldine Press: https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product-tag/aldine-press-first-edition/

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.