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ness.”43 Concomitantly, with the growth of available information in printed form it became impossible for scholars to memorize significant portions of all relevant information on key topics, and more and more necessary to con- sult books for reference, and to keep notes or commonplace books, instead of primarily using a few essential works as information to be memorized.44
As more books became more readily accessible at lower cost in the second half of the fifteenth century, they stimulated the growth of literacy. Com- mon sense supports this, but the evidence of surviving early imprints is also very powerful, confirming the connection of printing to education from the earliest beginnings of the new technology. Probably the most widely printed title in the fifteenth century was the small Latin grammar book by the Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus entitled the Ars minor, a staple of medieval education. When I checked in January 2011 the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue of fifteenth-century imprints listed 436 different editions of this small work under the author Donatus, nearly all of which very heavily used, and nearly all of which existed in only fragmentary form. Printing this small but essential work was one of the earliest projects of the first printers, both in movable type and even by the blockbook process, and because so many of the surviving imprints are fragmentary it is reasonable to deduce that there were probably numerous other printings of this text for which we have no surviving examples. At least 24 different editions were issued in Mainz during Gutenberg’s lifetime, most of them set in Gutenberg’s pro- to-typeface, named the DK-type after Donatus and Kalendar (also called the type of the 32-line Bible), or in the type of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible. Of these not a single complete example has survived from the printing office of Gutenberg or his immediate successors. These early works of only 28 pages seem to have been nearly read out of existence. All the known fragments of
43 Darnton, “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” republished in Darnton, Kiss of the Lam- ourette (1990), pp. 154–87.
44 For a detailed study of the workings and function of memory among medieval scholars see Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990). For a contrasting view, emphasizing notetaking as a means of information management and retention, see Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010), especially pp. 75-76, quoted in the database at this link.
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