Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe

by Anthony Grafton

An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year“Grafton presents largely unfamiliar material…in a clear, even breezy style…Erudite.”—Michael Dirda, Washington PostIn this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, Anthony Grafton captures both the physical and mental labors that went into the golden age of the book—compiling notebooks, copying and correcting proofs, preparing copy—and shows us how scribes and scholars shaped influential treatises and forgeries.Inky Fingers ranges widely, from the theological polemics of the early days of printing to the pathbreaking works of Jean Mabillon and Baruch Spinoza. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and the delicate, arduous, error-riddled craft of making books. Through it all, he reminds us that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands, and the nitty gritty labor of printmakers has had a profound impact on the history of ideas.“Describes magnificent achievements, storms of controversy, and sometimes the pure devilment of scholars and printers…Captivating and often amusing.”—Wall Street Journal“Ideas, in this vivid telling, emerge not just from minds but from hands, not to mention the biceps that crank a press or heft a ream of paper.”—New York Review of Books“Grafton upends idealized understandings of early modern scholarship and blurs distinctions between the physical and mental labor that made the remarkable works of this period possible.”—Christine Jacobson, Book Post“Scholarship is a kind of heroism in Grafton’s account, his nine protagonists’ aching backs and tired eyes evidence of their valiant dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.”—London Review of Books

Genres: History, Books About Books, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Art

380 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 9, 2020

About the author

Anthony Thomas Grafton is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this a very engaging book, although it might not be everyone’s “cup of tea”.The author is an historian of early modern Europe at Princeton. The appears to comprise a number of papers that have been drawn together around a general theme - the details of serious intellectual activity during the period of late humanism/early modernity that followed the invention and spread of printing.

The book’s perspective (and title) come from what one could call a “technological perspective”, namely that the nature of the technology influences the intellectual output produced by that technology. In the initial chapters this comes across in the putative distinction between the “content” aspects of book production (writing, thinking, editorial judgment) and the craft oriented aspects of book production, such as proofreading, error revisions, and other technical aspects of production. While content and craft aspects of the work are supposedly different, in practice they get mixed up, with authors getting the hands dirty (or fingers inky) and proofreaders and correctors exercising much more influence on books than is commonly assumed. This is not a surprising conclusion even today in working with good editors, but the particular stories and examples are really well done and interesting.

The topics move onto other areas and the stories get more interesting. For example, how did the craft of detecting literary forgeries develop? The intellectual process involves determining what the major types of archaic documents looked like and then comparing the forgery to those standard types to show how a claimed document could not be authentic. The grand example is the identification of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery by Lorenzo Valla, but in the early intellectual life profiled in the book, this was a constant and chronic problem. When does a literary critic become a forger? An entire chapter on Annius of Viterbo traces the career of an especially prolific forger/critic and gave examples of how skillful practitioners could just make stuff up and get away with it.

One of the most interesting chapters for me was on Francis Daniel Pastorius, who was an intellectual and attorney in early Pennsylvania. Think of how people read today, even on Goodreads, and then think about how people could manage their reading and intellectual lives when there were no computers or anything else digital, no television or radio, and just books, paper, pens, and ink. Grafton explains how books were used as “commonplace” items in which readers took copious notes, recorded or summarized passages, added questions or related stories, and the like, so that the book, once read, became a keepsake intellectual item that could be passed on to children. The same occurs with the keeping of journals, which became the location where smart and aware people kept track of their lives, developed new ideas, reacted to current events, and the like. Sort of a precursor to Facebook that you carried around and had a nice cover.

Other parts of the book cover how intellectual and documentary support structures developed in a world of paper and ink. When did archives develop and become protected so that records could not be modified as needed by various users? There is an interesting chapter on a competition or sorts between Oxford and Cambridge to authenticate their relative distinguished histories - a nice trick when many of the key initial documents either no longer existed or else never existed.

There is lots more in the book. These are.relatively dense texts that need to be worked through. Some of the topics may seem a bit arcane, but they should not be for serious readers - at least some of them. There are even references to a history of proofreading from 1600-1800. The book is uncommon and expensive to get from Amazon but clever readers can find PDFs of it on the web.

Inky Fingets is a good, although not for everyone.

[Ivri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fascinating. I would describe the book as a history of the making of books in early modern Europe, not just the physical printing, but also the research, fact-checking, discourse, and even annotations that went into writing and creating a book at this time.
I found the chapters on Pastorius (Pastorius chapter is also a dream come true for any English teacher trying to get kids to annotate) and Spinoza particularly interesting, although I may have found the Spinoza chapter interesting because I have far more of a background into Spinoza's work - sidenote: Grafton was an absolute Spinoza glazer, he wrote "Spinoza['s] radical insight and Roman integrity need no defense from me". I really liked how he shows that Spinoza's "conceptions were no more immaculate than those of his Christian contemporaries and readers." His point in the Spinoza chapter was that although we view Spinoza's ideas as revolutionary and a jump for his time, they still had their roots in the works of his predecessors.
Grafton's main idea is that everything about books and conventions we have about sources had to be innovated and he does a great job of illustrating how ideas about things such as notebooks to citation conventions to what can be considered a reliable source had to built from the ground up. Nothing about books today can be taken for granted, for instance in the 1500s it was common practice to edit a book when reprinting it without telling the author, or if the author had passed sometimes even completely changing the meaning of the text. Many of the case studies were about figures who were quite obscure, making it a bit difficult at the beginning of each chapter as it took a page or two to get my bearings. Grafton is extraordinarily erudite, with a broad range of sources, yet once in a while will quote sources in their original language as asides in a bit of an if you know you know kind of way. Also many of the notes in the notes are in Latin, which for obvious reasons was a struggle for me, and translations would have been nice.

[Laura Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A serious disappointment. Even though this book is called “Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe,” and the back cover summary mentions the “physical… labors that went into the golden age of the book,” this book doesn’t ever actually talk about the physical production of books. It’s really just about humanists and scholarship in Early Modern Europe and it would be one thing if that’s what it sold itself as. But I was really waiting for the part that discussed print shops and inks and cases of type and the art that went into book production… and it never got there.

[Gary Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

This sounded like such an interesting title, a great book to read. It was not. An interesting subject made boring. I am simply disappointed and cannot recommend this book. It is very rare for me to be so critical or so disappointed. It was not worth the ink on the book let alone, fingers.

[Daniel Lindholm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skoj och väldigt detaljerad, kul att läsa om hur gamla författare arbetade bakom kulisserna. Ställer ganska höga krav på förförståelse om författare som levde under antiken/medeltiden för att läsningen ska flyta på bra. Vi vanliga dödliga får stanna, anteckna och bruka Google flitigt.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at the scholarship of select European humanists during the early modern era. However, I think some people will find the title and synopsis to be misleading regarding the contents of the book.