The Astonishing Wealth of Modern Printing

And the impoverishment of excessive availability

I have been reading this morning about the production and reproduction of texts in the Middle Ages (ca. 900-1200).

What stands out is not only how much careful and precise work this would take—with teams of monks working away for months in the scriptorium to reproduce single works—but also the total physicality of the process.

Pen, ink, and parchment needed to be made or acquired. And we learn, for example, that production of a single complete copy of the Old Testament required a whole flock of sheep to produce (for the parchment).

Such a copy could cost the equivalent of a priest’s annual stipend. We would have to compare this investment to the most expensive Apple computers available today—something plainly out of reach for most people to own. So valuable were these copies that they were used as securities for loans or passed down in the wills of bishops.

One must imagine a world where an illuminated manuscript could be used as a down payment for a house in today’s numbers.

This context in mind, I look around at the books in my modest home study and I’m struck by the fact that this private collection would’ve been materially inconceivable to own a few hundred years ago.

An astonishing historical privilege.

One has to wonder, though, what is lost in this process. Certainly, there is an economy of importance at work here. Something at once so central to culture and yet so materially rare will inevitably possess enormous value. The same artifact—or at least some simulation of it—cheaply reproduced 100,000 times will be treated more casually, and thus with less reverence.

I also have the sense that writing out these texts by hand again and again over a lifetime must be an immense spiritual exercise of its own. This was a repetitive practice of precise attention to detail and linguistic choreography, a type of lectio divina stamped outwards onto the very material production of a text and the logos it expresses, which then folded back onto the shape of the soul who crafted it.

Copy-paste seems to not produce this result, even though it saves us from the rote mechanics of repetition. There is an important lesson here about practice.

When I write down by a hand a particular passage I am reading, I am not merely copying down an already existing set of thoughts. I am retracing that writer’s footsteps, walking in his shoes, as it were, and to some degree I am performing that thinking again, performing those maneuvers in thought again.

I am changed by the text as I try to reproduce it.

This is a slower and less efficient process than what digital texts allow for, and yet it is in that slow repetition that a text can finally be heard—in the tracing back of lines, curves, letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs.

This is the scholarship of ritual repetition and philosophical invocation.

I am reminded of a quote from Byung-Chul Han:

Today, many forms of repetition, such as learning by heart, are scorned on account of the supposed stifling of creativity and innovation they involve. The expression ‘to learn something by heart,’ like the French apprendre par coeur, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. . . . Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.

I think again of the monks in their monastic scriptoria. Not alone, not isolated, not strictly in a relation of “inwardness” with their texts, even though these spaces were also punctuated by periods of solitude and silence. No, instead I think of a whole cooperative of monks, an ensemble of monastics reproducing a sacred text together as one choir.

This is textual liturgy, a public and collective relation to the book made alive through its ongoing reproduction.

The astonishing wealth of modern printing gives us almost unfathomable access to all available texts in history—for which we should be eminently grateful. But there is an impoverishment here, that of excessive availability and reproducibility.

The text can grow mute with such ease of reproduction.

My point is, literary recomposition is a crucial askēsis of its own—a transformative exercise of self-overcoming and transformation—one that cannot be bypassed by digital or print reproduction, however beneficial these tools may be otherwise.