Category Archives: Books

Watermarks and Their Impact on Copyright: A Zero Draft Response

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In the early days of book history, many of the books being printed were religious texts such as the Bible or the Mainz Psalter, which have no clear author.  So, rather than distinguish these texts by an author, they were distinguished by their printing house.  Fust and Schoffer, who worked alongside Gutenberg, distinguished the Mainz Psalter, their set of commonly sung church psalms, with a printer’s device, or “a logo representing the book’s house of origin” (Howard 34).  After Fust and Schoffer, Howard notes that many other printing houses followed suit.  This tradition may be traced back to the development of watermarks by printing houses in the earlier days of printing.  Howard notes that, over time, many printing houses developed watermarks to be printed on the paper created in that particular printing house.  This served to distinguish the work of each printing house from one another.  This seems to be, according to Howard, one of the first forms of ownership in book printing.

Had printing houses not felt the need to distinguish their works from one another, would publishing houses today feel the need to do the same?  Would copyright and ownership laws be any different?  These are the questions I aim to answer in my first paper of the portfolio.

Rare book collection

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As an art history major I was particularly interested in the Nuremberg Chronicle illustrations. I have studied Albrecht Durer, a famous german wood block printer, in the past, and it was great to actually see these works of his predecessors up close. It was interesting to hear that the book contained controversy revolving around the inclusion of Pope Joan. In fact, in the edition we were shown someone went through the trouble of defacing this image and writing in a latin phrase to debunk this version of history. I wonder if there were any written responses to this book. It is also interesting that so much work went into the creation of a book, over 1509 wood carvings, that was not fully approved by the church.

Additionally, I found myself very interested in the books themselves as artifacts. Each book had a story attached. One could learn a lot from learning about previous owners, the materials used in the creation, marks left behind, the publishing house, and even which pages were most read. I loved all of the history associated with the books we looked at. The little quirks such as the Pope Joan story or the inker who stopped halfway through the book really animated the discussion for me.

history of the book

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In the introduction section of Howard’s The Book, she writes “As with a person’s biography, the biography of technology is not limited to the object alone, but must encompass the history of people, places, and ideas that gave rise to the innovation”.  Before beginning to read the first chapter (Ancestors: Books before Print), I had never thought much about the history of the format of a book and how different eras and cultures each contributed to making “the book” what it is today. Upon reading this chapter I realized that I had just taken any history of books I had previously learned about for granted. I never considered the actual processes of making papyrus and parchment paper and I never thought about how unlike today, where no two people have the same handwriting, scribes were all trained to have the same handwriting because many times, multiple scribes would contribute to the same work.   With multiple scribes working on the same work, how is authorship divided?  Are any of them even considered authors considering they most likely weren’t the creative minds behind the work itself, but were instead the ones who brought the work to life through the rigorous process of printing? In this class I not only look forward to more closely looking at the various technologies that brought us to where we are today but also to looking more closely at the issue of authorship in this class.

Authorship and Its Importance

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During last week’s discussions, I was struck by the idea that, for a period of time, the author of a given work was not deemed important.  This was discussed briefly in “The Death of the Author,” by Barthes, who, in part, argued that the author of work should not be important and, in fact, only hinders discussions of the work.  I have been taught in my studies that the author of a work is extremely important; it can help illuminate parts of a work by allowing critics to compare a work by a given author to other works by that same author.  In doing so, critics, teachers, and students of literature can find similarities and differences between a given author’s works and, at times, come to interesting conclusions that would not have been possible had the author been unknown, as Barthes would seem to have it.  In this class, I hope to learn more about how the “author” became an integral part of a work through social and technological changes in writing and publishing.