Page 106 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

in the New York Times, one of the hottest selling fields in eBooks is romance novels, which are also top-sellers in paperback. It turns out that many buyers prefer ordering romance novels online to buying them in public locations such as drug stores where they might run into people they know. Many also prefer to read these on an eBook reader, especially in public places like buses or trains, so they don’t have to expose the racy nature of the novels, typically advertised graphically on covers of paperback editions.
In the fifteenth century portability does not seem to have been an advan- tage of print over manuscript. The format of early printed books was typ- ically copied from manuscript formats, of which certain devotional works were designed to be easy to carry. Other early printed books, often bound in heavy bindings of leather over oak boards with metal bosses and clasps, were hardly intended to be portable, especially if they were chained to read- ing desks—a common fifteenth-century library practice. Indeed, the heavy wooden boards covered with leather and reinforced with metal provided a sturdy base to which chains could be firmly attached. The first printer to publish a series of non-devotional works in the more portable and less ex- pensive octavo format was Aldus Manutius, beginning with his edition of Vergil (1502). This edition was the first book printed entirely in italic types, which, in addition to graphic elegance, had a higher character count, allow- ing more text to be printed per page.
Nor was privacy an advantage that printed books had over manuscripts. If any literature that we would actually consider racy was printed during the fifteenth century, none has survived. In that very religious time what generally caught the attention of censors was heresy. Reflecting the tastes of their clientele, the first printers were generally conservative in their offerings, mostly sticking to accepted religious texts, schoolbooks, and editions of the classics. Nevertheless, such relatively obscure material as pagan love poetry, tame or not, might have been perceived as lascivious by prudish authorities, and could have been both highly commercial and a source of censorship problems for early printers.
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