BOOKS AND THE PRINTING PRESS

Dunstan Times, Issue 3513, 16 March 1931, Page 5

BOOKS AND THE PRINTING PRESS

Written for the Dunstan Times By D S. Paterson.

"Of making of books there is no end.'' Proverbs 12. 12. So said the preacher of old, and so it is to-day. This is a book-writing age, with greater facilities for production than any previous age. I don't claim originality for these remarks, as a matter of fact, I don't put forward any claim to originality at all, for, at the back of their minds. I heartily beiieve that the best writers to-day are at one with the American humorist who reckoned that •'originality was not to be thought of now, the only thing we can do being to steal with as much caution as possible." But it is a bookwriting age, and judging by the class of literature most in demand, there are about as many fools who write books, as who read them. A goes to a place where scores of thousands of his countrymen have gone before, many of them talented writers, yet A conceives it his duty to write a book, so he scratches together a few immaterial facts and lengthens them out with his own imaginings. The pen of some ready-writer works it up into something "fermentable'' and it is launched on a long-sufl'cring public with what Loi'd Macauley has described as the ''direct, oblique, and collusive puffing'' of that which is in reality the veriest trash —Oh! what a lot has cheap literature to answer for. Tne tloods of rubbish, the stale reprints, the noxious deluge poured out upon us to the exclusion of sane, healthy reading, demoralising and weakening the public mind and faculties, and, after all, we can do nothing but lament the public taste, lor it is the public that makes three-fourths of the authors, for if authors are out to make money, it is no use to write what the public won't read. Be that as it may, and while acknowledging it as one of the evils inseperable from the great blessing bestowed upon mankind by the printing pi ess, let us leave this aspect of the matter behind us and give our minds to the grander aspect of the grandest subject on which we could dwell. Looking backward, it is a far cry from the little township of Clyde, New Zealand, A. D. 1931, to Mentz on the iihine in the middle of the 15th century. But it is good to look backward as well as well as forward, for only by so doing can avc mark the progress made, and make a probable estimate as to future advancement. At a time when prominent scientists are calculating, or speculating, on the origin of man, or the course of evolution, in million of years, the four to five hundred years spoken of seems to be such a short period as to be scarcely worth mentioning, but when we consider the marvellous change, the marvellous progress made between the time when John Gutenberg by slow, slow process printed his latin Bible at Mentz and the year of Our Lord 1931 when the printing offices of tne world with their up-to-date machinery are throwing out their broadsheets by the thousands per hour, we must realise that the period mentioned was, humanly speaking, the most momentous period in the world's history, and that the printing-press has been the main factor in making it such. The Latin Bible.—The first fruits of Gutenberg's invention was printed at Mentz some time between 1450-55 (the date is uncertain). Throughout all the previous centuries books had been labouriously written by hand, different materials being used at different times —stone::', metals, skins, wood, the bark of trees, paper made of reeds and paper made of cotton had all been used and abandoned; thus the earliest writings of which we read were engraved on rocks or on the polished surface of brick or stone. It would be interesting, did space and time permit, to trace back the making and selling of books to the earliest period. To go back to the rock writings of Job, the chronicling of the law of Moses, the pillar-stones of Ireland covered W'th characters that none can rend, the inscriptions of Ninevah and Kgypt, with recent discoveries in Ur and elsewhere, and leaving the rock engravings aside, to try if we could, as it were, roll back the tide of tune, and see the improvements used and processes d,is: played in the inanufactu,re pi tne anqent books, but tune and space alike forbidding we shall content ourcelvi;s with saying that from tables of stone and brick the transition to wooden and metallic plates was not immediate. There remains a soyt ,>f debatable ground between ijh, the same way it k> impp,s£sMe t-Q fix with precision se. ftuund'ary of the first 'ju ' the progress of the art of writing from the second. The use of wood was certainly known to the Athenians before the death oi Raolon* but it is an undisputed tV.c.c in their history that the sa^ie 'people 'still eonti),v,-\e<.t to lygtsler their' legal on stone''24o,'years l;\t > ..; < _ A.'"', of which proclaims tl:Is uw&or as a subject for !,iu't).-;, r backwards. So. fur the w V . shall leave it there and concludo lhis article in terms, which I Yt-'MUUV '■'• think, we are all agreed uj".hi. The influence of the printing press on civilisation has been secondary only to the really greatest event in the world's history. may not have given us Shake; vcare,. and Newton but for the yri.etir.g press, the authos of I'.-.'.'.wet might hav<; died, a woolcjmber! 'and the author of the Piiueipia a Lincolnshyv ycviaau. But for the printing i&wiou, t )*c Chancellor, m'-i'-V ku,\o be. ii known to us, but scarcely &.". Bacon* the author of 'De Augiuentis" and Milton, as one eminent writer has put it. "might have been a " Beuedictiuc Monk'' Qouajly

famous for his sanctity and the purity of his latin verse, while James Watt might have escaped the faggot to die in the workhouse. The list of men, who luit for the printing press would never have known what they did know, or have been what they were, could be carried out "ad infinitum," but in the state of our present day knowledge of what the press does, such a list would be like carrying water to the river, so let us close by saying that whatever advantages men of the twentieth century possess over the men of the fifteenth century, whether in connection with religion, science;'civil liberty, liberty of conscience, or any of the arts winch minister so largely and increasingly to their comfort, it is to the printing-press that they owe them. And when they realise this, they will also realise, the inestimable boon conferred on them, when in comfort, they peruse their morning, evening, or weekly paper, linking up as it does all the countries of the world, and bringing news of all that is happening therin, right into their very homes.