River of Ink: [An Illustrated History of Literacy] - Hardcover

Thomas Christensen's previous books include "New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas, A Bilingual Anthology," "The U.S.-Mexican War, " and "The Discovery of America and Other Myths" as well as translations of books by such authors as Laura Esquivel, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar, Alejo Carpentier and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. He is director of publications at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and lives with his wife in Richmond, CA.

As the fifteenth century was drawing to a close, William Caxton,
England’s first printer, traveled to the Flemish city of Bruges. Today
the city, with its late medieval architecture and meandering cobbled
streets, seems a museum piece, but then it was a lively trading center
where Italians, Germans, Spaniards, and others met and exchanged
goods — and ideas. Arts and culture flourished, and new technology
was everywhere. Visitors were assured of eating well thanks
to the invention of drift nets, which resulted in an abundance of
seafood. Followers of Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling were filling
the city with paintings in a medium new to northern Europe,
oils. And the printing press with movable type — the machine on
which Johannes Gutenberg had printed his 42-line Bible a couple
of decades before—was changing the intellectual life of the city.
(Printing on movable metal type was well established in Korea, and
information about it could have traveled through the vast Mongol
empire to West Asia, and from there to Europe.)

There in Bruges, at a table overlooking a foggy canal, over a
meal of mussels and ale, Caxton would discuss the new printed
texts with scholars and artists who were arriving from all across
Europe. Among those joining him would have been Colard
Mansion, a Flemish scribe who printed the first book using copper
engravings, as well as the first books in English and French.
Also at the table would have been Anthony Woodville, the second
Earl Rivers, an English Francophile and translator,
had recently completed a translation of a French text called Dits
Moraulx des Philosophes. The book was a compendium of the wisdom
of ancient philosophers. Would Caxton have a look at it?