The art of copying

There is a story doing the rounds on the internet about a young monk who arrives at a monastery and is asked to help...

There is a story doing the rounds on the internet about a young monk who arrives at a monastery and is asked to help other monks in copying old canons and laws of the church by hand. He notices, however, that all of them are copying from copies, not from the original manuscript. So, he tells the head abbot that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, or dropped a word or a letter, it would be repeated in all the subsequent copies.

The head monk gets the point. He goes down into the dark cave underneath the monastery where the original manuscripts are held in a vault that has not been opened for centuries. Hours go by and nobody sees him. The younger man gets worried and goes down to look for him. He sees him, poring over originals, banging his head against the wall and wailing, “Somewhere, we dropped the R. The word was CELEBRATE.”

Except that the practice of copying texts by hand was not a joke, but a

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serious constraint in the early years of our civilisation. H.G. Wells says in The Outline of History, “For hundreds of generations the full power of writing was not revealed to the world, because for a long time the idea of taking prints of a first copy did not become effective.”

Block printing was, until then, not known and moveable type centuries away. Even in the great library in Alexandria (300 BC) precious texts, written on papyrus “were not in pages but rolled, and in order to refer to any particular passage a reader had to roll back or roll forward very tediously, a process which wore out books and readers together.”

And, before an author could “turn back to what he had written previously, he had to dry his last words by waving them in the air or pouring sand over them; he had not even blotting paper. Whatever he wrote had to be recopied again and again before it could reach any considerable circle of readers, and every copyist introduced some new error.” Like the monks who dropped the R!

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