The Devil and the Printing Press

If you ever visit the British Library, head downstairs as if you’re going to the cloakroom then loop around towards the loos. Chained to the wall, opposite the gents, is one of the most beautiful and powerful inventions in human history, tucked away and looking slightly lonely. It’s a printing press, the same machine that facilitated the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the dawn of the Enlightenment…

Photo by me.

The tympan and frisket, the two-part tongue that lolled out to gobble up metal type, paper and ink, is folded away and silenced. The little paws of soft leather that rolled the ink evenly onto the letters are now tucked neatly at its side. The crushing screw of the press that could force ink and paper together at the pull of a handle isn’t creaking with exertion. It’s resting with the stillness of an antique pew.

Once upon a time, the printing press was arguably the most powerful instrument in Europe and, like all huge leaps in progress, it was met with both enthusiasm and scepticism. Its ability to replicate information and disseminate ideas at previously unimaginable speeds gave it a kind of magical aspect, magic that could be used for good or evil. It’s perhaps this moral ambivalence that explains why so many expressions associated with the business of printing have a supernatural theme.

Printer’s Devils

Printer’s Devil outside a former print shop in York. Image courtesy of Wikimedia and Malcolmxl5.

Apprentices in the printing shop were nicknamed ‘printer’s devils’ in part because they were boys and, therefore, prone to mischief. It was also a reference to the occupational hazard of getting covered with ink.

For pale-skinned Europeans, dark skin had long been associated with devils, a fact which would eventually contribute to the dehumanising rhetoric used to justify the transatlantic slave trade. I suspect that the printing press itself inadvertently exacerbated this association because black was the easiest colour to use when printing illustrations. Think of the range of colourful devils you see in medieval manuscripts and paintings, reds, greens, blues etc. You don’t often see these colours in printed pictures from the 1400s-1700s because It was time-consuming and expensive to print a page using more than one colour. Black was the default ink, and when illustrators wanted to distinguish between the skin colour of humans and the skin colour of spirits they chose solid black for the latter.

Colourful painted illustration Litigatio Christi cum Belial from 1461. Woodcut from The History of Witches and Wizards (1720)

Early modern people weren’t stupid, they understood that human beings with dark skin were maligned by these associations whether or not the original intention had been racialised abuse. Shakespeare’s black characters, Othello and Aaron (from Titus Andronicus), are called devils. There was supposedly an incident (although I can’t find a good contemporary source) when a young boy of African descent who worked in the printing shop of Aldus Manutius in Venice was victimised because of this association. When rumour spread that Manutius was employing a devil, he encouraged the townsfolk to come and pinch the poor lad to see for themselves that he was flesh and blood.

But being a printer’s devil could be an unpleasant job even if you weren’t being racially abused. The rounded leather balls used for dabbing the ink evenly onto the metal letters had to be kept soft and supple. A bucket of urine was always on hand to soak them overnight, and if an apprentice was cheeky or careless, he’d find the bucket promptly dumped over his head.

The Printers Workshop, 1568 by Jost Amman. In the foreground the copies pile up. At the press itself, the man on the left removes the last page from the tympan. The man on the right rolls the ink onto the typeface ready for the next clean sheet. In the background, two men pick out letters as they set new lines of text.

The Hellbox

Type was made from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony and could be melted down and reforged. This was useful because over time the little stamps would chip, break, or wear down.

Moveable type in the process of being set. the strips of metal you can see in the sections of the wooden case are letters lying on their side. Photo by Willi Heidelbach.

The furnace in which these old letters would be dissolved was called a ‘hellbox,’ a name that lent a dark whimsicality to the idea of broken fragments being consigned to the flames like sinful souls. It also suggested the Christian theme of redemptive sacrifice since a bad letter could be remade as a good one once it had been purged and cleansed of its faults.

I would love to hear from experts in East Asian print history about whether metaphors of reincarnation more appropriate to Buddhist and Daoist philosophy were ever applied to this kind of process. Its worth pointing out that moveable type was invented in China by Bi Sheng (990-1051) who first used ceramic, and tin was in use in China from around 1300, over a hundred years before Gutenberg got there in the mid 1400s.

Then again, the ‘hellbox’ would have been more useful to Western European printers who used the same 26 letters of an alphabet over and over again, leading to wear and tear, whereas East Asian printers used a much larger set of stamps for unique characters. There would have been common words which were often reused, but you didn’t have quite the same turnover as the poor worn down letter ‘e’s being regularly consigned to the flame.

Photo by @Nastypenguin, Dreamstime.com

Faust the Printer

In an astonishing coincidence (or was it?) one particular printer, Johann Fust (1400-1466), sometimes spelt ‘Faust,’ shared his name with the Johann Faust of legend, the scholar-turned-magician who had sold his soul in return for demonic power. For those concerned about the new wave of information about to crash upon the intellectual life of Christendom, there was surely something ominous about the interchangeability of these figures. Fust had been one of the funders of the original Gutenberg press so the suggestion of dangerous knowledge-seeking had been there from the very start.

Although there is no evidence that Fust was ever actually arrested for witchcraft nor that he faced accusations of devilry during his life, confusion about the association between his name and that of the fabled conjuror meant that such stories sprang up after his death. Here we return again to the fact that most books used only black ink: Fust had sold books which used the unusual red ink which the people of Paris supposedly thought was real blood. Come to think of it, most reports of superstitious reactions to Fust’s work seem to centre around his time in Paris and are repeated by German authors so I suspect a little ‘aren’t the French stupid’ bias has got into these accounts.

Fust with his printed Bible. Anonymous artist, Stadt Staufen, Public Domain.

Print and the Devil Today

Archaic printing terms from the time of Gutenberg endure far longer than you’d expect. This article is written in ‘upper case’ and ‘lower case letters,’ not because those terms relate to anything I can see on my keyboard, but because of the layout of the physical wooden cases in the print ship where both versions of a font were kept as separate sets of stamps. Some of the supernatural associations we’ve explored have also survived, there’s even an episode of The Twilight Zone called ‘Printer’s Devil’ which makes the most of the Faustian connection and tells the story of a newspaper editor whose soul is coveted by the forces of evil.

Printing is perhaps no longer called a ‘black art’ and we’ve thankfully moved on from associating black skin with devilry, but the power of mass-produced words remains a threatening spectre in the modern world. So if you’re considering a career in publishing — be careful! And remember to keep your wits about you if you ever pass that strange machine sitting quietly by the British Library loos.

Thank you so much to dgerbo for becoming my latest paid subscriber! I really appreciate your support and thank you for the book recommendation!

You never quite know what will happen in my Monday articles, but if you’re interested in the history of magic, horror, theatre, storytelling and the generally weird and wonderful, consider paying to subscribe to keep me writing or like, share, comment, and recommend for free to help my substack grow. Want to chuck me a few coins but can’t commit to a subscription? My tip jar is here— thank you for your support!