A record of things that hath been

This morning’s In Our Time on Radio 4 was an enjoyable canter round Caxton & the coming of printing to England. What made it all the more illuminating was the way the discussion introduced notions, - more familiar to our age – of the business model & marketing strategies, rather than rather than just a reverential regard for scholarship & cultural blossoming.

One of the discussants pointed out that printing did not bring instant redundancy to the makers of manuscript: “The thing that killed off the scribe was the typewriter” – which made its appearance only 400 years later. Some comfort there for lovers of printed books & newspapers.

But scribes were, I believe, almost exclusively male, while the typewriter was famously a female occupation, which provides more food for thought. Was it that the sheer explosion in the making of paper records devalued the occupation, typing what others dictated considered demeaning, or pure hamfistedness which kept men away from the keyboard until the advent of the computer.

Another intriguing thought: scribes have disappeared linguistically – we call them calligraphers these days, prizing their art for precious personal documents such as deeds, diplomas & memorials. But Steve Jobs gave some of the credit for the artistic sensibility, which made Apple computers so popular, to a course on calligraphy that he took as an undergraduate.


Links
BBC Radio 4_In Our Time: Caxton & the printing press
Smithsonian: A Tribute to a Great Artist: Steve Jobs
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