Category Archives: History

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.

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.