The nights are drawing in and it’s time for a little #EYAFolklore, with our emphasis on the customs of the printshop!
Printing began to develop its own folklore from the very start. Developed in Europe during the mid-fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg, the process seemed unnatural to a culture used to copying out text by hand. Gutenberg’s first exhibition of bibles seems to have been greeted with the same suspicion and bewilderment as Andy Warhol’s multiple, identical screen-prints, and others in the trade played on its mystique. Their inky apprentices became known as “printer’s devils”, initiated into the trade secrets of type-casting and lay-out like members of a coven. Printers were even known to suffer at the hands of a demon called Titivillus (demon of scribes), an imp they blamed for bad spelling, blotchy work, or absent pages: a ghost that surely survives today, in the chance upsets of autocorrect. The fellow shown here was displayed at the entrance to a printshop in York and remains to this day.
Perhaps his presence also lived on in the most well-known piece of British printing folklore ‘banging out’ which was a regular feature at OUP before printing ceased at Oxford in 1989. Once a printer had served out the standard seven-year apprenticeship, and become a master of their craft, colleagues would assemble with pots, hammers, and any piece of handy metal-work to make a deafening racket of congratulations – which was also a well-known ritual for dispersing bad luck or evil spirits like Titivillus. In German-speaking countries, the tradition was a little different and a little wetter, with apprentices baptised with a dunking in a large basin of water. Both of these images are taken from OUP’s staff newsletter The Clarendonian.
All this tradition might not be entirely fanciful. Gutenberg couldn’t make his invention pay and it was acquired by a better businessman, Joachim Fust, whose family later changed their name to Faust. So, like it or not, printers and readers are still entwined in that long-ago Faustian bargain, and the remnants of folklore that gathered around it intrigue us still, as we face our own publishing mysteries in the age of AI.
