It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .5番

One of the more interesting inventions humans came up with over the two thousand years we have been talking about was printing. It seems that for most of the long, mostly forgotten history of humankind either you or your mate actually had to remember everything you needed to know to survive. I mean everything. Stuff like:

• How to find and catch dinner without doing too much damage to yourself.
• How to keep the neighborhood lion from feeding her family with yours.
• What the exact procedures were when someone had coveted your ass (or worse yet, your wife’s ass).
• How to build a shelter, a fire and a baby carrier.
• Which mushrooms were safe to eat, which ones would cause you to see strange things, and which ones would kill you
• Where it was safe to cross the river, and where to suggest strangers cross it when they came by trying to sell you some kind of god.
• How to keep the kids amused in the evening.

And that’s just for starters.


Some villages had old people (thirty-five, maybe even forty years old) whose job it was to remember stuff. Stuff like:

• It was the winter the wolves killed Pluug One Hand’s white bull that Ragnar took Brindula for a wife.
• Lief Wind Blown is the son of Lief the elder, son of Herb who was Ragnar’s brother, son of Smelt who was the son of Quail Bushbane.
• Briknal, Brindula’s oldest brother, was given the hovel of Blister, his father, and the field of muck next to the fen the same year Klink died.

Then when someone came along and claimed Briknal was living in a hovel that was really theirs the village elders would get together, and one of them would say, “It was the winter Klink died, which was just two winters after Ragnar took Brindula for a wife, when Blister, Briknal and Brindula’s father, gave Briknal that hovel along with the field of muck next to the fen,” and the case would be thrown out.

Then someone figured out that marks left on a convenient rock or leaf or piece of skin (a real breakthrough was made when someone thought of using the side without the hair) could be used to represent things like the number of goats the family had that morning, or how many days had passed since the river flooded, or the number of days since the sun was exactly over the big oak tree; and all of a sudden a person didn't need to remember all those pesky little facts anymore. Now they could look up that morning’s goat inventory whenever someone like a tax collector came around asking. This eventually led to people using these marks to represent other things—like the color blue and how it made them feel.

Taking the quite unheard of step of accepting an advancement in knowledge the Church decided this new writing thing was just what they needed to help spread the Word, as it were. Eventually quite an industry of transcribing the Holy Word developed. Well, actually lots of Holy Words—there wasn’t just The One. God was quite old even then and had begun repeating himself with embarrassing regularity, and He had this maddening habit of mixing the details up just a bit each time He told the story. Did He create animals first and then Man, or did Man come first? That kind of thing. It was a muddle, and each time it got written down it got a little more muddled. You would almost think the whole thing was being made up as it went along.

The one thing He never wavered on, however, was that The Word came first. He was sometimes a little iffy about which Word it was, but it was definitely a Word. Actually, I have it on good authority that the Word was Kumquat. No particular reason—He just liked it.

And so generations of monks went blind copying sacred texts for the greater glory of God. Day after day they would sit next to an unglazed window sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter so they could have enough light to work. This was long before those fancy monasteries of the Thirteen and Fourteenth Centuries were built. We’re talking little wattle and daub hovels with a dirt floor, and if you’re lucky a bit of hay and a blanket to sleep on.

Of course every now and again the Vikings would come calling in that amusing little way they had—usually on the first day it was warm enough you weren’t freezing those bits of your body the Church had told you not to touch. They would spend the afternoon pillaging and slaughtering. Eventually, perhaps after a picnic and a friendly round of target practice with your second cousin, now permanently removed, they would leave and the survivors would make sure the bits of you they could find got a decent burial. Then someone else would move into what was left of your hut and take up where you had left off.

Writing still, however, had the disadvantage of being just a tad bit slow at reproducing the longer attempts at describing the color blue, and when your publishing house is cranking out a single copy of the Omnibus Edition of Aristotle every four months or so, you tend to charge just a bit more than the average serf has at hand. For this reason writing, and reading, became specialized knowledge that was reserved for a few unfortunate monks busy dodging Vikings; and some quite well fed scribes keeping track of the king’s stuff and all of the decrees kings are apt to make. This way when you were caught wearing the exact wrong shade of blue they could point to a piece of parchment that neither you nor the king could read and declare that you must give up your estate, or head, for the heinous crime of wearing the Azure Royale.

Eventually, someone figured out that you could carve a picture of, say, a Saint into a piece of wood or soft stone, smear some ink on it and then press it against a piece of parchment or vellum, and you could have as many pictures of that Saint as you wanted. Stumble forward several generations, and finally someone figures out movable type. (Meanwhile the Chinese are wondering what took us so long.) At last, printing was getting cheap enough that pretty much everything you needed to know could be looked up in a book. As printing became less and less expensive and more and more stuff could be looked up, people naturally began remembering less and less about their world until a fair number of them couldn’t find the Atlantic Ocean from a Miami Beach hotel without two maps and a fairly lucky guess as to direction.