They felt cheated, defrauded, deprived after so many years of power, and for that reason their reactions in the networks were brutal: insults, ridicule, various vilifications in the cloisters, the courts, the Salamanca classrooms. Academics and friars - academic friars - told whoever wanted to hear them that this ingenuity was an invention of Satan, a way to degrade knowledge and undo it: that anyone could publish a text without revision or legitimation, without the expert's stamp. Others were even more apocalyptic: they said that the worst thing was that there were beginning to be books in that vulgar language, Spanish, which until then had been happily limited to gossip from greengrocers and inn brawls and related traffic, a jargon of walking around the house, not as the true language of culture, the usual Latin. And that it was the fault of that infernal machine and that why the Lord had abandoned us and that it was terrifying that everything was so fast: that 20 years before they did not exist and suddenly there were almost 30 and where we will go to stop and mother.
No one knew. In 1490 Spain had not yet discovered anything but it already had all those printing presses. In 1470, it is true, there was none; It was then that a Juan Arias Dávila, Bishop of Segovia, wanted to catch up with the times and imported a German, a Johannes Párix, to come and do it here. We know very little about Párix: that he was born in Heidelberg, that he sold his trade throughout Europe, that his handwriting was called Roman, that the bishop brought it and installed it and there, in Segovia, he made the first printed book of these lands, a rock : the Sinodal de Aguilafuente , the minutes of a meeting of priests.
The wonderful thing, like so many times, was not the result but the procedure: the mobile type printing press that Johannes Gutenberg had invented 20 years earlier in Mainz. The tool was, as its inventor said, capable of making a Bible in half the time it took a monk to hand, but it cost him so much that he must have sold his formula — and still it was ruined. In return, printers began to swarm around the West, they settled on our idea of the world.
They were, lacked more, much criticized, resisted. The monks and scholars who until then controlled knowledge reproached them for their intolerable populism. But there would also be "popular" criticism. Those twisted objects were an invention of the power to separate people. They would be, in the current slang, a technology that breaks the ties that united our societies. Because, in the face of the habit of getting together on winter nights to listen to how someone told a story, the printed book was made to be read alone, locked in a room: it was an invention of the powerful to separate people, close that space for meeting and reflection, ending the breeding ground for rebellious viruses.
And that then, in the medium term, the book —and the consequent learning of reading— would produce irreparable damage by transforming a group cultural activity into a disaggregated, individual custom. The stories would not be received in common but, thanks to that invention, in isolation: the book, then, was a tool to keep us separate, dispersed, confined. The book, the most critical would say, was the best tool of that motto that orders to divide to reign. It would be, it was clear, the end of a culture.
The book lasted, but less than that kind of reasoning. It is a classic: whenever something new appears, there are conservatives who, in case of conservation or progress, are opposed just in case. Without them, the world would be more boring and surely much more livable. His objects are changing; their behavior, little. By a miracle of survival, those who now defend the book are the same who attacked it five centuries ago. And its targets today will be, tomorrow, its cloths of tears.
