Print Culture and the Modern World — Notes

China. From AD 594, each page was carved into a wooden block, inked, and paper was pressed on it by hand. The soft, thin paper soaked up ink, so only one side could be used, so pages were folded into accordion books and stitched at the side. For centuries the imperial state was the chief printer, producing textbooks for the civil service examinations. By the seventeenth century, with a growing urban culture, merchants used print in trade, reading became a leisure activity (fiction, poetry, romantic plays), and rich women read and some published. In the late nineteenth century Western mechanical presses arrived and Shanghai emerged as the centre of the new printing trade.

Japan. Buddhist missionaries from China brought hand-printing around AD 768–770. The oldest Japanese printed book is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra (AD 868), with six sheets of text and woodcut pictures. Books were cheap and plentiful in medieval Japan. In late eighteenth-century Edo (Tokyo), Kitagawa Utamaro (born 1753) and others made ukiyo prints of city life.

Europe. Marco Polo brought knowledge of woodblock printing from China to Italy in 1295. Woodblocks spread (textiles, playing cards, religious pictures), but books were mainly copied by scribes: slow, costly and fragile. Aristocrats long preferred luxury handwritten editions on vellum. Johann Gutenberg adapted the olive press and used moulds to cast metal type; by 1448 his system was perfected, and his first book was the Bible (about 180 copies, about three years). Between 1450 and 1550 presses spread across most of Europe; output grew from about 20 million copies (late 1400s) to about 200 million (1500s).

• Cheaper, faster books. Mechanical printing cut the time, labour and cost of making books, which reached a much larger public.
• A reading public. Knowledge that was once heard could now be read. But literacy stayed low for a long time, so printers produced ballads and folk tales, often illustrated, that were read aloud at gatherings: oral and print culture mixed.
• Fear of print. Some feared that uncontrolled reading would spread rebellious and irreligious ideas. The scholar Erasmus worried that worthless books would bury real learning.
• Luther and the Reformation. In 1517 Martin Luther wrote the Ninety Five Theses against practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Printed copies spread at speed; his German New Testament sold out within weeks. Print helped the Protestant Reformation.
• Dissent and control. The miller Menocchio read books and formed his own ideas of God and Creation; the Church tried him twice and executed him. The Church controlled publishers and booksellers and kept an Index of Prohibited Books from 1558.
• The French Revolution. Historians give three arguments: print spread Enlightenment ideas (Voltaire, Rousseau) attacking tradition, superstition and despotism; it built a new habit of public argument; and by the 1780s it carried writing and cartoons mocking royalty. Caution: readers also read royal and Church writing and made up their own minds; print made new thinking possible but did not by itself cause the Revolution.

• Literacy rose as churches set up village schools; in some parts of Europe it reached 60–80 per cent by the end of the eighteenth century.
• Pedlars sold almanacs, ballads and folk tales: penny chapbooks (England, carried by chapmen) and the Biliotheque Bleue (France, cheap books in blue covers).
• The periodical press mixed current affairs with entertainment; the ideas of Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Rousseau reached ordinary readers.
• Children: compulsory primary schooling meant textbooks; a children's press was set up in France in 1857; the Grimm brothers published folk tales in 1812, leaving out what seemed unfit for children or vulgar to the elite.
• Women: penny magazines and conduct manuals; women as readers and writers of novels — Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot — whose heroines made their own choices.
• Workers: lending libraries educated artisans and clerks; as working hours fell, workers wrote political tracts and autobiographies.
• Technology: metal presses by the late 1700s; Richard M. Hoe's power-driven cylindrical press (about 8,000 sheets an hour), suited to newspapers; the offset press (up to six colours); electric presses, better paper feeding and plates.
• New selling methods: novels serialised in periodicals; cheap shilling series (1920s England); the dust jacket; paperbacks in the Depression of the 1930s.

Manuscripts. India had an old tradition of handwritten books in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and many vernaculars, on palm leaves or handmade paper, often illustrated. They were costly, fragile and written in varied scripts, so were little used in daily life. In pre-colonial Bengal, village schools taught pupils to write from the teacher's dictation; pupils could write well yet had never handled a book.

Arrival of print. The first press came with Portuguese missionaries to Goa in the mid-sixteenth century; Jesuits learnt Konkani and printed tracts (about 50 books in Konkani and Kanara languages by 1674). Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book at Cochin (1579) and the first Malayalam book (1713); by 1710 Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts.

Newspapers. From 1780, James Augustus Hickey edited the weekly Bengal Gazette, which printed advertisements and gossip about senior Company officials; Warren Hastings persecuted him and encouraged officially approved papers. In 1816, Gangadhar Bhattacharya, close to Rammohun Roy, brought out a weekly Bengal Gazette, the first Indian-run paper.

Religious reform and debate. Print widened argument about religion and custom. Rammohun Roy published Sambad Kaumudi from 1821; orthodox Hindus answered with Samachar Chandrika. In 1822 came two Persian papers, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar, and the Gujarati Bombay Samachar. In north India the ulama, anxious about colonial rule and Muslim personal law, used cheap lithographic presses for Persian and Urdu translations and religious papers; the Deoband Seminary (1867) published thousands of fatwas. Among Hindus, the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas was first printed in Calcutta in 1810; from the 1880s the Naval Kishore Press (Lucknow) and Shri Venkateshwar Press (Bombay) published religious texts in vernaculars, which were read aloud to the unlettered. Newspapers carried news across regions, helping create pan-Indian identities.

New forms. The novel took Indian forms; lyrics, short stories and essays on social and political themes appeared. Raja Ravi Varma produced images for mass circulation; wood engravers set up near presses; cheap prints and calendars spread. By the 1870s, cartoons in journals commented on society and politics: some mocked Indians' taste for Western ways, some feared social change, some lampooned nationalists and some attacked imperial rule.

Women. Liberal families educated women at home and, from the mid-nineteenth century, sent them to girls' schools; journals argued for women's education. Some conservatives believed a literate girl would be widowed; some feared girls would be corrupted by romances. Rashsundari Debi learnt to read secretly in her kitchen and wrote Amar Jiban (1876), the first full-length autobiography published in Bengali; Kailashbashini Debi wrote in the 1860s; Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai (1880s, Maharashtra) wrote with anger about upper-caste widows. Ram Chaddha's Istri Dharm Vichar taught obedience to wives. Battala in central Calcutta printed cheap religious and popular books, carried to homes by pedlars.

The poor and caste. Cheap small books were sold at crossroads in Madras towns; public libraries spread from the early twentieth century. Jyotiba Phule wrote Gulamgiri (1871) on caste injustice; B.R. Ambedkar and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) wrote powerfully on caste. The Kanpur millworker Kashibaba wrote Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal (1938), linking caste and class exploitation; another, writing as Sudarshan Chakr, wrote poems (1935–55) collected as Sacchi Kavitayan. Bangalore millworkers set up libraries in the 1930s, following Bombay workers.

Censorship. Before 1798 the Company was not much concerned; early controls targeted Englishmen critical of Company rule. In the 1820s the Calcutta Supreme Court passed press regulations. In 1835, after petitions, Bentinck agreed to revise press laws and Macaulay drafted rules restoring earlier freedoms. After 1857, attitudes hardened. The Vernacular Press Act (1878), modelled on the Irish Press Laws, allowed extensive censorship: papers were tracked; a report judged seditious drew a warning, and a paper that ignored it risked losing its press and machines. Nationalist papers nonetheless multiplied. When Tilak wrote sympathetically about deported Punjab revolutionaries in Kesari (1907), he was imprisoned in 1908, provoking protests across India.