Carried Across · Chapter 8
The chains become rails
For its first three decades, the printing press could not print Euclid.
Text was solved; the Elements is barely text. Its arguments live in diagrams, hundreds of them, keyed letter by letter to the propositions they accompany, and no printer could set geometry in type. The book that had anchored mathematical education for seventeen centuries sat out the incunabular revolution while psalters and grammars poured off the presses. The man who cracked the problem was Erhard Ratdolt, an Augsburg printer working in Venice, and he knew exactly what he had done: his dedication announces that he had found the method by which figures could be printed as easily as letters. His Elements of 1482 carries the diagrams in the margins, beside their propositions, more than four hundred of them, and it is one of the most beautiful scientific books ever made.
Look closely at what Ratdolt printed, though, and this chapter's theme appears. His text was the medieval university's Euclid: the redaction of Campanus of Novara, built in the 1250s on the Latin of Adelard of Bath, which Adelard had made around 1120 from the Arabic of al-Hajjaj, the Baghdad version commissioned by a Barmakid vizier three centuries before that. The first printed Euclid in history is a Greek text at fourth hand through Arabic. A printed Greek Elements did not exist until Basel, 1533, half a century later. Print, the technology we associate with the recovery of the classics, began by mass-producing the caravan routes: Europe's first typeset geometry came down the Baghdad road.
What print changed was not what traveled but the arithmetic of traveling.
A manuscript chain moves one body at a time: each copy a fresh act of labor, each act a fresh decision, each decision a chance to stop, and, as this book has insisted, the chain is exactly as strong as its least-motivated link. Print collapsed the per-copy decision into a single per-edition decision. One choice, by one printer with capital at risk, now produced hundreds or thousands of bodies at once. The chain became a rail: lay it once, and traffic flows without further heroism.
The Canon of Medicine shows the new arithmetic at full scale. Ibn Sina's encyclopedia had crossed into Latin in twelfth-century Toledo, item 63 on the list Gerard's students drew up; for three manuscript centuries it spread at the speed of scribes. Then the rails arrived. A first edition around 1473; about fifteen more before 1500; and between 1500 and 1674, some sixty editions of all or part of the text. Whole university curricula could now be provisioned in a print run; Montpellier and Louvain were still teaching the book around 1650, six hundred years after its author died in Hamadan. No manuscript culture could have sustained that density. A chain carried the Canon to Europe; rails made it European furniture.
The rails also reversed a current that had run one way for five hundred years. In 1593, the Medici Oriental Press in Rome, directed by Giovanni Battista Raimondi with Arabic type cut for the purpose, printed the Canon in Arabic, the book's own language, largely for export to the Ottoman and wider eastern market. Europe, the civilization that had spent the twelfth century importing Arabic learning by mule, was now manufacturing Arabic books for sale to the East. The venture, it should be said, was commercially ahead of its market: a later inventory found hundreds of unsold copies in the warehouse. But the direction of the gesture was the future, and the object itself was without precedent: Ibn Sina, who had waited five and a half centuries to see print in Latin translation's wake, finally typeset in the language he wrote.
Print being a technology, it is tempting to end the story of carrying here, with machinery replacing the carriers. The record says otherwise, twice over.
First, the names persist. Nothing about a press removes the human decision; it concentrates it. Ratdolt chose Euclid, chose the Campanus text, solved the diagrams, and signed the dedication. Raimondi chose the Canon and commissioned the type. The carrier class did not disappear with print; it changed costume, from translator to printer-editor, and this book's atlas records them with the same fields, names, dates, places, evidence, as it records Burzoy. The unit of transmission was still a person deciding a book was worth the labor and the risk.
Second, and less comfortably, the rails carried the flaws of the chains at scale. The Venice 1506 edition of al-Ghazali's survey printed the text Latin Europe had always owned, prologue still missing, misreading now fixed in hundreds of identical copies under the title Logic and Philosophy of Algazel. Manuscript error wanders; every copy at least differs, and a lucky collation can catch a fault. Print error stands still and multiplies. The press was an amplifier, and amplifiers are loyal to the signal they are given, including its damage.
There is a third effect, subtler, that the previous chapters equip us to see. Manuscript chains, whatever their faults, had memory. A codex tends to carry its pedigree on its body: colophons naming scribes and dates, marginalia accumulated reader by reader, the physical evidence of exemplar and copy that lets a modern philologist reconstruct a family tree, the very stemmas this book's atlas borrows for its diagrams. Print thinned that memory. A thousand identical copies tell you almost nothing individually; the apparatus of provenance migrated from the object itself into a new scholarly discipline, bibliography, that had to be invented to recover what every manuscript had carried for free. The rails moved more freight than the chains ever could, and they moved it with fewer fingerprints.
None of this is a complaint against print, which did more for the survival of the books in this atlas than every patron in it combined. It is a pattern worth stating cleanly, because it is about to recur on a larger scale. Each great cheapening of transmission trades fingerprints for reach. Speech to manuscript, manuscript to print, and, in our own moment, print to the machine-readable: each step multiplies the audience and thins the chain of custody, and each step therefore raises, rather than retires, the old question of this book. When the carrying becomes too cheap to notice, who is carrying, and how would we know?
The last chapter takes that question where it now lives.