Comment by thaumasiotes
7 years ago
> I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased".
...what? Loss of books has pretty much nothing to do with the technology used to produce them. If you stop producing them and lose the existing ones, they're gone.
You can lose printing plates just as easily as you can lose a printed book. Actually, losing the plates is much easier -- the point of movable type is that you can cannibalize old plates to print new works.
Think about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia -- not printed for budgetary reasons, but produced several hundred years after the introduction of the printing press. Almost all of it is gone.
The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets and some funeral documents were preserved simply by lasting a long time. Others, like many religious documents, were preserved in some form or another by expensive, tedious, completely manual copying. Some information (both fiction and nonfiction) was only ever verbally communicated, as it wasn't deemed worth the expense and difficulty of putting it onto paper.
Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies.
It's not about the loss of the printing plates. It's about the extraordinary difficulty of preserving a document of which a single copy exists, and the much higher probability that one of thousands will survive.
> The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets
Mesopotamian clay tablets are incredibly robust. We have many times more than we have the manpower to translate, not to speak of the ones still buried in more or less unknown locations.
Funnily enough, they survived much better in cities that were destroyed -- and burned, firing the tablets -- than in cities that weren't, where the tablets might eventually fall below the water table and dissolve.
But anyway, we don't have "a small number" of durable tablets; we have an extremely large number, including some entire royal libraries.
> Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies.
This is not the case; China had extensive markets in printed popular works for centuries beforehand. Most of that work doesn't survive because of lack of interest. The fate of almost all printed material is total disappearance, because we can only maintain so much material, and printed material is a subset of all material.
From the introduction to Record of the Listener ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ ):
> At the time of Hong Mai's death in 1202, the Record [夷坚志] had grown to a massive collection of 420 chapters, totaling over four thousand entries. Although it was not clear whether any complete editions were ever published by any Song publisher, we do know that multiple editions of varying sizes and qualities were made available by commercial publishing houses in different parts of the country. Much of the Record was nonetheless lost as early as the Yuan Dynasty [less than 100 years later], an indication of the traumatic effects of the Song-Yuan transition. The current 207-chapter editions are based on post-Song redactions and later manuscripts by traditional and modern scholars.
Note that this is a famous work considered relevant today. Contrast the countless printed popular works that nobody thought were worth preserving in the first place.
The ability to make copies is not relevant in the slightest. The number of copies made is relevant, but only weakly. Information is preserved when people devote effort to preserving it, and lost otherwise.
I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text. The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether
> I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text.
And that is exactly how I've interpreted it in all of my comments.
> The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether
As I point out in response to your sibling comment, Mesopotamian works, which had to be copied by hand 3000 years ago, have been much better preserved than Chinese works that were mass produced 1000 years ago, simply because clay tablets are much more robust than paper is.
If you want your text to last, inscribe it high on a cliff: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription is still around and almost as good as new.
Though note that after the cultural upheaval brought by Islam, the Persians forgot how to read that inscription, which is a different form of book loss.