Meggs Chapter 5 Reading Notes
Why did it take a scribes and illuminators 4 – 5 months to make a 200 page book?
That’s roughly 20 weeks, 10 pages/week, which is very roughly 1-2 pages a day? I do calligraphy and while I am not expert, I could easily do 1-2 pages of writing in a few hours. Does this time frame include making the parchment? The ink and other decorative elements?
I found two articles from the Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Art on making these books:
https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/making/
https://www.nga.gov/conservation/analytical-imaging/art-science-manuscpripts.html
We modern people think of a book as text on a page, but medieval peoples considered illuminated manuscripts a work of art, and with the painting, the decoration, the embellishment, the writing and coloring, not to mention making the paper, the paints and ink, and finally binding these oversized books, 4-5 months seems a lot more reasonable. I wonder why the medieval monks never considered making simple books with just the words? Having more books, even if they weren’t works of art, would have been a good thing for humanity.
Some more research found this fascinating link:
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ancientbooks/2016/05/24/medieval-book-production-and-monastic-life/
They did make simpler books, but the writing and copying was still very grueling and time-consuming.
How many new books were ever made by these scribes? Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in the 1300s, so how was it ever made into a book before Gutenberg’s printing press? It would have been too expensive to have the monks make multiple copies.
I had to double check the veracity of the peope behind this website (https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/), but it is an open access examination of the Canterbury Tales for professors and students. That isn’t relevant to my question above, but this link is: https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/refmanuscripts/
This article discusses the state of printing before Gutenberg and how the Canterbury Tales were originally published. A quote from the article:
Chaucer’s depiction of the ordinariness of medieval books matters, because it contradicts the popular belief that printing revolutionized medieval society by making books suddenly widely available where they had never been before.
Gutenberg borrowed and recombined technologies in order to speed up the slow process of copying documents and books; to make lots more of them; and hopefully to sell them for profit.
Whoa! I know Meggs didn’t have room to examine the state of printing before Gutenberg, but he does say that Gutenberg really perfected mechanizing the printing process to be faster and more accurate, not that he invented printing itself. The term “moveable type” seems to be very important here, it seems earlier printing involved making metal type that was fixed to the substrate. There were also seal presses, which were wooden frames with screw and lever mechanisms that pressed metal “dies” into warm discs of wax, but I can’t find any information about if these were actually used to print manuscripts.
Still, I needed another source and found these:
https://www.medievalchronicles.com/medieval-history/medieval-inventions-list/printing-press/
https://brewminate.com/the-spread-of-knowledge-via-print-in-early-modern-europe/
I still can’t find specific information on how Chaucer had his Canterbury Tales printed when he first wrote the book, but it will be interesting to look some more I’d also like to know how Giovanni Boccaccio had his collection of novellas, the Decameron printed, since it was written between 1348 and 1353 (The Decameron is a classic of medieval plague literature, it continues to be cited by physicians and epidemiologists to this day for its vivid depiction of a disease that held a city under siege).
Note: I ran out of time to research and fully answer the questions below, but I am keeping them here for reference and future answering.
Meggs says papermaking took 600 years to travel from China to Arabia, and traveled
along Pacific Ocean via caravans?
In 751 CE, Chinese attacked Samarkand, which was repelled by Arab forces. Occupying forces captured some Chinese papermakers, who were pressed into service (slavery?) making paper and teaching it to Samarkands. Samarkand’s water & flax fields led Samarkand to become a papermaking center. craft spread to Badghad & Egypt (900s)
France had paper mill by 1348 CE. Italy by 1276
Meggs says that the Crusades opened Europe to Eastern influence. Really? No trade before?
Gums & pastes for block books – details?
I love that boiled linseed oil was used by Gutenberg for ink! I’ve done a lot of research in purifying flaxseed oil to make linseed oil for wood finishing (and have even made and cooked my own), but I would like to know more about the process German printers used to make ink.
Meggs Chapter 6
Need a closer look at woodcut process? Some of the the illustrations are so delicate.
Meggs Chapter 7
Question about trade again -Venice was center of Italian printing and also a trade gateway (eastern Med, India, and East Asia).
The Medici family scorned new books, did this impact them and Florence eventually?
Do we use Jenson’s typefaces today, or have they been refined for modern users?
Geoffroy Tory – just how do you introduce an apostrophe?
Meggs Chapter 8
How close are the original Caslon fonts one used today? Bodoni? Didot?
William Playfair – invented bar graph, line graph & circle graph? His wheat chart! Can’t
imagine his politics…