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The 500th Anniversary of Print in Yorkshire
Date Posted:
20 Mar 2010
At a time when some are writing it off, York is celebrating the printed word. Five centuries ago the first book in the North came off the press, and 250 years later the first novel. John Woodcock reports.
Just after Christmas a headline asked ‘Have books turned their last page?’ It was in response to record sales of electronic versions of the written word.
Obituaries for the hardcover and paperback are appearing thick and fast, and seem a little less absurd when they coincide with the passing of a bookshop chain whose collapse was in part due to competition from the internet.
Virtual libraries are beginning to replace bookshelves, and Amazon.com has experienced its first day when e-books outsold the physical version.
York knows about revolutions involving words and how they’re read. Last time around it was at the forefront of change, which makes the closure of its branch of Borders particularly ill-timed. Behind the doomed bookseller’s empty store the city is about to celebrate 500 years of printing and paper-made books, and how they helped shape the nation’s history.
In and around Stonegate, its most famous thoroughfare, ink-stained craftsmen were among the first with the means to spread the word on behalf of monarchs, politicians, the church, rebels, visionaries, gossips, and traders advertising their dubious potions and ‘female pills’.
February 18, 1510, was a bad day for York’s scribes and their quills. They confronted a technological challenge as profound as that facing today’s High Street retailers from online rivals; one as daunting as the battle being waged by the pages of a Penguin Classic, with their crinkly feel and papery smell, against a pocket size e-reader screen.
In what was then called Steengate, an immigrant from Antwerp called Hugo Goes followed William Caxton’s lead and produced a book on a wooden press with individual metal letters and movable type. The Directorium Sacerdotum was a bestseller among the clergy because it was an extensive ecclesiastical calendar - 234 white pages in black letter Latin text informing them when services should be held in line with the changing dates of Easter.
It was the first recorded book printed north of Oxford and only two copies survive, one of them in York Minster Library. It’s about the size of a modern paperback, has since been bound in calf, and is dwarfed by many of the ancient tomes in the cathedral’s collection. In this case size is misleading. The compact Pica, Latin for magpie and given the name because printing then meant black and white, helped establish York as a major publishing centre, with all the benefits, upheavals and dangers which accompanied communication via the printed word.
There was the 16th century equivalent of China’s censorship of Google. Provincial printing was severely restricted, breaches were a penal offence and Wardens of the Worshipful Company of Stationers were empowered to search for prohibited and unlicensed books outside London. York survived the purges and in 1642, in the build-up to the Civil War, Charles I based the King’s Printer in the city. In the quadrangle of St. William’s College the timbers and metal pieces of the Royal Press were kept busy producing His Majesty’s responses to the declarations of Parliament.
Nearly 50 years later another printer in York was at the heart of new intrigue surrounding the throne. John White had a workshop in Coffee Yard, off Stonegate, and was known to the advisers of William of Orange who’d landed with an army in Devon in response to invitations from Protestants to challenge the Catholic reign of James II.
White risked everything to print William’s manifesto and appeared to have backed a loser when he was jailed in Hull, awaiting torture and execution, before James fled to France. King William and Queen Mary expressed their gratitude by appointing White “Their Majesties’ Printer for the City of York and the five Northern Counties’.
After his death his widow Grace earned her place in history too by launching the city’s first newspaper, the York Mercury. It soon led to more public sheets and a contributor who, in the narrow lanes and alleyways awash with printers’ ink, wrote himself into literary immortality.
One of White’s apprentices was John Jackson who in 1703 opened a print shop in Grape Lane where the craft is still practised today. From there Jackson’s son published the York Gazetteer and carried political articles from a young country vicar, Laurence Sterne. For his pains Jackson was physically attacked by a Tory supporter who also threatened the clergyman. In the event the Reverend Sterne’s writing gifts lay elsewhere and in 1760, at his own expense, he had published and printed in the city the first two slim volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
He offered subsequent sections to the London publisher who initially had rejected the work. In a letter to him Sterne wrote: ‘The book shall be printed here and the impression sent up to you for as I live in York, and shall correct every proof myself, it shall go perfect into the world, and be printed in so creditable a way as to paper, type, &c., as to do no dishonour to you……’
Tristram Shandy is now considered a masterpiece, and often regarded as the first ‘modern’ novel. In the words of JB Priestley: ‘Modern literature begins with Sterne’.
In which case the printing of modern literature began in York, claims Michael Sessions. He’s the fourth generation of his family to print there and his oak-beamed premises in Grape Lane reflect how the industry has evolved. He uses computerised technology for today’s customers but in another part of Jackson House there’s a bibliographic workshop which pays tribute to his predecessors: iron presses, the metal version of typefaces such as 8pt Gloucester, 10pt Old Style Bold, 24pt Samson Script and 36pt Garamond, and how printing terms such as ‘out of sorts, ‘dab hand’ and ‘ps and qs’ entered our everyday language.
Sessions has been largely responsible for the York exhibition celebrating book printing in the region. And with a sub-title that advances the story from 1510 to 2510 he scoffs at the doubters in his confidence that the printed word will be around for least the next 500 years.
“For all the impact of computers, more paper is being used now than ever before,” he points out, “and in one form or another printing will remain a fundamental of life. Caxton’s revolution had a massive impact on society and what he introduced continues to develop. Electronic technology is not making print redundant but taking it to exciting new levels.”
In the Minster Library they also know about the perils of the printer’s art. They have a copy of the Wicked Bible, so-called because in 1631 a compositor typesetting the Ten Commandments forgot, by accident or mischief, to add a word of three letters. The seventh Commandment read: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’.
* The exhibition is being held in Grays Court, Chapter House Street (near the Minster) 14-18 February, 11am-4pm. It includes demonstrations of a historic printing press. For information info@quacks.info or 01904 635967
Latest figures reveal the extent of the threat to printed books from electronic alternatives. Last year two billion books were sold in the United States but the figure was down nearly five percent on 2008 and is expected to fall another two percent this year.
Waterstone’s, now the only UK-wide specialist bookseller since the collapse of Borders, saw sales decline by 8.5pc over the Christmas period.
Meanwhile in the US sales of e-books are soaring and will be worth an estimated billion dollars by 2012 as new products emerge from tech companies like Apple. At the same time Google is intent on scanning and posting every book ever written.
But PrintYorkshire, which promotes the fifth largest employer in the region, is optimistic. Having inspired a revolution in communications and education in Caxton’s day, it says the industry is now a major player in the digital age.
Paper-based printing still accounts for most of the industry’s output and new technology is improving its quality. New media is reliant on print in many ways – e-readers for example, provide electronic versions of books that have already been printed.
PrintYorkshire recently won funding for projects to explore technology that would enable electronic circuits to be printed onto paper or plastic. That would create another revolution with endless possibilities. Eventually it could lead to gadgets like a mobile phone being printed on a box of corn flakes.
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