5 ms·

Labourer: £2/year max 7 Books: £5 An average labourer in the UK today would make about £17,000pa, making these books the modern equivalent of about £42,500 or

Labourer: £2/year max 7 Books: £5 An average labourer in the UK today would make about £17,000pa, making these books the modern equivalent of about £42,500 or £6,000 a piece. Obviously this was at a time before mass printing was available, but this really puts into perspective just how absolutely unattainable information was for the average person back then. Remarkable.

ip26 7y ago
I don't think that's quite right, bound books were a luxury good but you still had much cheaper vellum, scrolls, and so forth.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Vellum is more expensive than paper. The cheap alternative to bound books were pamphlets, generally stitched, and often comprised of a single sheet of folded paper. An octavo pamphlet could run 16 pages (8 impressions per side). I don't know if longer materials (32 - 64 pages) were produced, though I suspect these were printed on multiple pages. Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice, a 32-page pamphlet, has printers marks for four sides ('B', 'C', and 'D' noted on pages 9, 17, 25, respectively), as an example, which would likely correspond to two double-sided octavo signatures: https://www.designersinsights.com/designer-resources/understanding-and-working-with-print/ https://www.designersinsights.com/designer-resources/underst... https://archive.org/details/agrarianjusticeo00pain https://archive.org/details/agrarianjusticeo00pain
  - ip26 7y ago
    Even in 1000AD? Low grade vellum could be made by anyone at home. Was paper in industrial production by that point? Paine was not a medieval writer.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      The period addressed by the article is ~1260 - 1520. So 1000 CE is out of scope. Even were it: - The typical person was illiterate Households would not be producing writing materials in any quantity. - Animal products are expensive, period. Non-animal alternatives would be used where possible. - For short-term writing surfaces, wood, stone, clay, and at some point (possibly later in time) slate were used. The Greeks used wax-coated boards (few of which, for obvious reasons, survived). - Woven textiles were a significant form of recordkeeping, such as the Bayeux Tapestry (11th century). - Notable legal documents, such as the Magna Carta, were written on parchment (animal skins). - Other surfaces included fired pottery, birch bark, and (in east Asia) bamboo. It's not so much that vellum was cheap, as that paper simply didn't exist before ~1000. Over the next ten centuries, processes for production and reductions in price increased not only the prevalence of paper, but the total amount of written material. Gutenberg's press coincided with new, cheaper, papermaking processes. Even so, many of the original works printed by Gutenberg were on vellum, including about a quarter of the original Gutenberg Bible. In all of Europe as of 1400, estimates are that there were on the order of 50,000 books. Not title, but volumes in total. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#/media/File%3AEuropean_Output_of_Printed_Books_ca._1450–1800.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#/media/Fil...
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      I wasn't mentioning Paine as an example of a mediaeval writer, but as an example of a pamphlet whose construction I'd noted, was curious of, and had surmised the printing logistics of. There are several problems with your assertion. The most relevant is simply that written materials were rare. Unbelievably rare. The library of the University of France in the 10th century contained a total of fewer than 2,000 books, and was among the largest in Europe. I noted pamphlets as an alternative to books: multiple pages, formed by simple folds, stitches, or staples. And ... not widely produced until the 16th century. See: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4371 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4371 The methods however did not appreciably change until mechanised processing and printing in the 19th century, mostly after 1850. I recommend, again, Hamilton Holt's excellent, short, informative, and readable Commercialism and Journalism which describes the explosion of popular print in the latter half of the 19th century, from the perspective of 1909: "Since 1850, the [printing] industry has increased over thirty-fold..." https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/6 https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/6 As of 1000 CE, if you wanted to distribute something widely in print, you'd probably ... use a single-page woodblock (or woodcut) prints. Though even that didn't become widespread until the 1300s, and then, was impressed not on vellum, but cloth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#In_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#In_Europe You might wish to aquaint yourself with some of the actual history here, and grasp for intent rather than trivial and incidental characteristics. https://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?cat=36 https://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?cat=36
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        s/University of France/University of Paris/
jrpt 7y ago
I mean, you're not wrong, but also they would gather in groups and have one person read aloud to the rest. So even if you were poor and illiterate you could still learn from written works.
- simonsarris 7y ago
  There was once the job of the lector, who would be hired to read to employees doing menial tasks all day, like a living audiobook subscription.
  - koolba 7y ago
    This job still exists: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2017/10/12/the-people-who-read-to-cuban-cigar-factory-workers https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2017/10/12/the-people...
  - stebann 7y ago
    That's how the anarchist, modern liberal and socialist ideas spread through Europe. You had this guys doing a manual job while someone was reading for them the classics and the new books on Politics and Philosophy, then you had a powerful and organized working class. Amazing.
    - gibybo 7y ago
      Why did the factory owners pay for (or at least allow) those sorts of books to be read? Wouldn't they view it as against their interests?
      - simonsarris 7y ago
        I think most lectors were paid by workers pooling some of their money, not by a factory owner.
      - stebann 7y ago
        The capitalist didn't always know what was going on in their factories. Besides that, workers used to pay somebody to read for them, or they would select someone from their own group.
nine_k 7y ago
Libraries existed. Most valuable books were routinely chained to desks or shelves, so you could not have a chance to grab it and run.
- Jaruzel 7y ago
  Ah, but would the lay person have been allowed into them? Also, wouldn't most of the volumes in the libraries have been written in Latin and thus unreadable outside of the Church. If I recall correctly, most early libraries were situated inside monasteries.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    > Also, wouldn't most of the volumes in the libraries have been written in Latin and thus unreadable outside of the Church. Well I'm not sure that's going to be an issue if we're talking about the accessibility of the text to an illiterate person. An illiterate person can't read. So we need to consider the situation only of literate people. Interestingly, in medieval Roman countries, texts intended for public reading were written in Latin, but the lector would read it in somewhat formal popular language. This is not hugely different from the situation available in English speaking countries prior to the 1980s, when most bibles were written in a grammatically, lexically and phonetically very foreign language. Even today, our texts are still phonetically very foreign. And for general texts it was common - Greek, Arabic, Chinese - all written very differently than spoken a century ago. A literate French-speaker in the medieval period would not have reacted to a Latin text as a foreign language. They would just have read the text with equivalent contemporary pronunciations. A recently produced text would in many cases use more customary language too, so they wouldn't need to remember the dated bookish words. (And actually, in medieval England, there were scientific/theological texts produced in English. You surely couldn't read and understand them today because the language has changed too much, and they went out of fashion so they weren't maintained. But they existed.)
    - UncleSlacky 7y ago
      The King James Bible also deliberately used a style that was already archaic at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Style_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Style_and_c...
dredmorbius 7y ago
Somewhere I'd run across a reference to the price of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (published 1776), in terms of a general workingman's wages. As I recall it was on the order of about 1/5 a typical annual income. This being in the late 18th century, 300 years after Gutenberg, with a well-established printing trade. Books remained staggeringly expensive. The progress made in printing over the course of the 19th century boggles the mind. As of 1800, typical presses were still made of wood, and though printing was generally in quarto or octavo pages (4-8 impressions per side of paper), a pressman might turn out 120 - 180 impressions an hour, and I believe that's generous. The improvements from there were: - Cast-iron rather than steel presses. Greater strength, lighter weight, improved efficiency and mechanism. Print rates doubled. - Steam-powered presses. The pressman no longer was responsible for physically pressing each image. - Rotary presses. Rather than Gutenberg's repurposed wine-press design, type was placed on a drum, with sheets fed through the mechanism. - Electric drive. Like steam, but less steamy and more sparky. - Web presses. Rather than individual sheets, a continuous sheet of paper. This is where paper-on-rolls came into being. - Speaking of which, paper manufacturing was improving, and costs falling, all through this period. - At the same time literacy rates were increasing from ~10-25% ~1700 to 95%+ by 1900. The people could now read. - Typesetting enhancements, including oil-based inks, offset-type (where the print impression is a 3rd generation from the type originally used to cast the intermediate slug), linotype, multi-colour presses, improved engraving (for images), and eventually photo-lithography. By the end of the century a high-speed electrically-powered Linotype web press could achieve a million impressions an hour or more. Compare with webserver hit rates and their improvement from 1990 - 2020.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  And after that: - Inkjet - Laser - Amazon
  - quietbritishjim 7y ago
    That's not really compatible to improvements in printing technology. Printing on home inkjet or let was and still is hugely more expensive and slower per page than buying a mass produced book or newspaper, and Amazon didn't introduce any printing technology unless you were referring to e-ink used in Kindle (but they didn't invent it).
mch82 7y ago
Amazing! I’ve been wondering, why is it that few people study research methods outside of Ph.D. programs? My guess is that until very recently most people didn’t have access to research material... it was all at university & private libraries. Also, this highlights how lucky we are to have Wikipedia. I’m not that old and my parents had to save quite a lot for us to have an encyclopedia at home. Few of my friends did. It cost as much as a computer.
- fullstop 7y ago
  My parents saved up and got Britannica, and it was great not having to go to the library to do school work. A few years later we got a PC with Encarta and almost never used the paper tomes again. It blew my mind that you could fit that much on a PC and I instantly knew that Britannica was going to have to adapt to emerging technologies or die.

ip26 7y ago

I don't think that's quite right, bound books were a luxury good but you still had much cheaper vellum, scrolls, and so forth.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Vellum is more expensive than paper. The cheap alternative to bound books were pamphlets, generally stitched, and often comprised of a single sheet of folded paper. An octavo pamphlet could run 16 pages (8 impressions per side). I don't know if longer materials (32 - 64 pages) were produced, though I suspect these were printed on multiple pages. Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice, a 32-page pamphlet, has printers marks for four sides ('B', 'C', and 'D' noted on pages 9, 17, 25, respectively), as an example, which would likely correspond to two double-sided octavo signatures: https://www.designersinsights.com/designer-resources/understanding-and-working-with-print/ https://www.designersinsights.com/designer-resources/underst... https://archive.org/details/agrarianjusticeo00pain https://archive.org/details/agrarianjusticeo00pain
- ip26 7y ago
  Even in 1000AD? Low grade vellum could be made by anyone at home. Was paper in industrial production by that point? Paine was not a medieval writer.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    The period addressed by the article is ~1260 - 1520. So 1000 CE is out of scope. Even were it: - The typical person was illiterate Households would not be producing writing materials in any quantity. - Animal products are expensive, period. Non-animal alternatives would be used where possible. - For short-term writing surfaces, wood, stone, clay, and at some point (possibly later in time) slate were used. The Greeks used wax-coated boards (few of which, for obvious reasons, survived). - Woven textiles were a significant form of recordkeeping, such as the Bayeux Tapestry (11th century). - Notable legal documents, such as the Magna Carta, were written on parchment (animal skins). - Other surfaces included fired pottery, birch bark, and (in east Asia) bamboo. It's not so much that vellum was cheap, as that paper simply didn't exist before ~1000. Over the next ten centuries, processes for production and reductions in price increased not only the prevalence of paper, but the total amount of written material. Gutenberg's press coincided with new, cheaper, papermaking processes. Even so, many of the original works printed by Gutenberg were on vellum, including about a quarter of the original Gutenberg Bible. In all of Europe as of 1400, estimates are that there were on the order of 50,000 books. Not title, but volumes in total. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#/media/File%3AEuropean_Output_of_Printed_Books_ca._1450–1800.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#/media/Fil...
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I wasn't mentioning Paine as an example of a mediaeval writer, but as an example of a pamphlet whose construction I'd noted, was curious of, and had surmised the printing logistics of. There are several problems with your assertion. The most relevant is simply that written materials were rare. Unbelievably rare. The library of the University of France in the 10th century contained a total of fewer than 2,000 books, and was among the largest in Europe. I noted pamphlets as an alternative to books: multiple pages, formed by simple folds, stitches, or staples. And ... not widely produced until the 16th century. See: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4371 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4371 The methods however did not appreciably change until mechanised processing and printing in the 19th century, mostly after 1850. I recommend, again, Hamilton Holt's excellent, short, informative, and readable Commercialism and Journalism which describes the explosion of popular print in the latter half of the 19th century, from the perspective of 1909: "Since 1850, the [printing] industry has increased over thirty-fold..." https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/6 https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/6 As of 1000 CE, if you wanted to distribute something widely in print, you'd probably ... use a single-page woodblock (or woodcut) prints. Though even that didn't become widespread until the 1300s, and then, was impressed not on vellum, but cloth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#In_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#In_Europe You might wish to aquaint yourself with some of the actual history here, and grasp for intent rather than trivial and incidental characteristics. https://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?cat=36 https://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?cat=36
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      s/University of France/University of Paris/

jrpt 7y ago

I mean, you're not wrong, but also they would gather in groups and have one person read aloud to the rest. So even if you were poor and illiterate you could still learn from written works.

simonsarris 7y ago
There was once the job of the lector, who would be hired to read to employees doing menial tasks all day, like a living audiobook subscription.
- koolba 7y ago
  This job still exists: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2017/10/12/the-people-who-read-to-cuban-cigar-factory-workers https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2017/10/12/the-people...
- stebann 7y ago
  That's how the anarchist, modern liberal and socialist ideas spread through Europe. You had this guys doing a manual job while someone was reading for them the classics and the new books on Politics and Philosophy, then you had a powerful and organized working class. Amazing.
  - gibybo 7y ago
    Why did the factory owners pay for (or at least allow) those sorts of books to be read? Wouldn't they view it as against their interests?
    - simonsarris 7y ago
      I think most lectors were paid by workers pooling some of their money, not by a factory owner.
    - stebann 7y ago
      The capitalist didn't always know what was going on in their factories. Besides that, workers used to pay somebody to read for them, or they would select someone from their own group.

nine_k 7y ago

Libraries existed. Most valuable books were routinely chained to desks or shelves, so you could not have a chance to grab it and run.

Jaruzel 7y ago
Ah, but would the lay person have been allowed into them? Also, wouldn't most of the volumes in the libraries have been written in Latin and thus unreadable outside of the Church. If I recall correctly, most early libraries were situated inside monasteries.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  > Also, wouldn't most of the volumes in the libraries have been written in Latin and thus unreadable outside of the Church. Well I'm not sure that's going to be an issue if we're talking about the accessibility of the text to an illiterate person. An illiterate person can't read. So we need to consider the situation only of literate people. Interestingly, in medieval Roman countries, texts intended for public reading were written in Latin, but the lector would read it in somewhat formal popular language. This is not hugely different from the situation available in English speaking countries prior to the 1980s, when most bibles were written in a grammatically, lexically and phonetically very foreign language. Even today, our texts are still phonetically very foreign. And for general texts it was common - Greek, Arabic, Chinese - all written very differently than spoken a century ago. A literate French-speaker in the medieval period would not have reacted to a Latin text as a foreign language. They would just have read the text with equivalent contemporary pronunciations. A recently produced text would in many cases use more customary language too, so they wouldn't need to remember the dated bookish words. (And actually, in medieval England, there were scientific/theological texts produced in English. You surely couldn't read and understand them today because the language has changed too much, and they went out of fashion so they weren't maintained. But they existed.)
  - UncleSlacky 7y ago
    The King James Bible also deliberately used a style that was already archaic at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Style_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Style_and_c...

dredmorbius 7y ago

Somewhere I'd run across a reference to the price of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (published 1776), in terms of a general workingman's wages. As I recall it was on the order of about 1/5 a typical annual income. This being in the late 18th century, 300 years after Gutenberg, with a well-established printing trade. Books remained staggeringly expensive. The progress made in printing over the course of the 19th century boggles the mind. As of 1800, typical presses were still made of wood, and though printing was generally in quarto or octavo pages (4-8 impressions per side of paper), a pressman might turn out 120 - 180 impressions an hour, and I believe that's generous. The improvements from there were: - Cast-iron rather than steel presses. Greater strength, lighter weight, improved efficiency and mechanism. Print rates doubled. - Steam-powered presses. The pressman no longer was responsible for physically pressing each image. - Rotary presses. Rather than Gutenberg's repurposed wine-press design, type was placed on a drum, with sheets fed through the mechanism. - Electric drive. Like steam, but less steamy and more sparky. - Web presses. Rather than individual sheets, a continuous sheet of paper. This is where paper-on-rolls came into being. - Speaking of which, paper manufacturing was improving, and costs falling, all through this period. - At the same time literacy rates were increasing from ~10-25% ~1700 to 95%+ by 1900. The people could now read. - Typesetting enhancements, including oil-based inks, offset-type (where the print impression is a 3rd generation from the type originally used to cast the intermediate slug), linotype, multi-colour presses, improved engraving (for images), and eventually photo-lithography. By the end of the century a high-speed electrically-powered Linotype web press could achieve a million impressions an hour or more. Compare with webserver hit rates and their improvement from 1990 - 2020.

sansnomme 7y ago
And after that: - Inkjet - Laser - Amazon
- quietbritishjim 7y ago
  That's not really compatible to improvements in printing technology. Printing on home inkjet or let was and still is hugely more expensive and slower per page than buying a mass produced book or newspaper, and Amazon didn't introduce any printing technology unless you were referring to e-ink used in Kindle (but they didn't invent it).

mch82 7y ago

Amazing! I’ve been wondering, why is it that few people study research methods outside of Ph.D. programs? My guess is that until very recently most people didn’t have access to research material... it was all at university & private libraries. Also, this highlights how lucky we are to have Wikipedia. I’m not that old and my parents had to save quite a lot for us to have an encyclopedia at home. Few of my friends did. It cost as much as a computer.

fullstop 7y ago
My parents saved up and got Britannica, and it was great not having to go to the library to do school work. A few years later we got a PC with Encarta and almost never used the paper tomes again. It blew my mind that you could fit that much on a PC and I instantly knew that Britannica was going to have to adapt to emerging technologies or die.