Seeing the Book Arts of Houston gave me an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the venue hosting the exhibit, the Printing Museum. The Printing Museum used to be on the north edge of Montrose in the middle of a residential neighborhood, but they’ve moved to a new building at the corner of Elgin and San Jacinto. The new building feels less cluttered and crowded than the old one, but to be honest, this impression might be because of the super-crowded—like fire-hazard-level crowded—Zinefests that were held at the old Printing Museum. That might be coloring my recollections of the old location. Anyway, I have fond memories of some exhibits in the old location. But the new location seems to off to a great start.
The thing about the Printing Museum is that the museum part is only a relatively small part of what they do. They offer over 30 classes in various crafts associated with book-making and printing. You can learn to make paper, letterpress, and bookbinding. You could literally learn how to recreate a civilization from scratch! Useful knowledge to have when society collapses.
But let’s look at what you see when you visit. They have exhibits of books, text, and printing presses which are a little confusing but cool to look at.
Let’s start with a tiny bit of papyrus with Greek writing on it, dated from 300 BCE - 350 BCE.
Papyrus is a kind of paper made from the lower stems of the papyrus plant that grew in Egypt, and was the default material for producing scrolls in the ancient Mediterranean. Paper as we know it wasn’t invented yer when this fragment was produced.
Almost since the beginning of literacy (and probably since the beginning of speech), it has been necessary to translate one language into another. That can be tricky if the two languages have entirely different ways of writing. When the Ptolemies ruled Egypt after the conquests of Alexander, they had to rule over a people who didn’t speak of write Greek. Around 196 BCE, Ptolemy V announced his ascension to the throne with a bilingual stele, known as the Rosetta Stone. It had been lost for well over a millennium when it was found by some of the scientists that Napoleon brought with him on his 1798 expedition to Egypt. The top part is in hieroglyphic script, the second section in Demotic script—these are two ways of writing out the ancient Egyptian language. Then the bottom level is Greek. This artifact was how we learned to read hieroglyphs. The Printing Museum displays a replica of the Rosetta stone.
Also on display is a scroll (which is how books were made in the classical world) and a reader for it. Imagine some Greek scholar at the Library of Alexandria poring over it two thousand years ago.
Over a thousand years later, books start looking more like books we know.
This is an Ethiopian bible from the 13th century. It was, of course, produced by hand. Movable type existed in China then, but hadn’t reached the West yet.
That all changed in 1452 when German inventor Johannes Gutenberg created the first movable-type printing press in Europe. (It was an eventful century—the last remains of the Roman empire fell to the Ottomans a year later, and forty years later, Columbus sailed to the Americas. Those events ushered in the modern world, for better or worse.) There is a replica of Gutenberg’s press at the Printing Museum.
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