 | Studies in bibliography |  |
I
In 1970 Alfred A. Knopf, one of the leading publishers of quality trade
books in the United States, in association with the leading newspaper of
record, the New York Times, published a handsome book called A Short
History of the Printed Word. Warren Chappell designed as well as wrote the
book, bringing to a focus his substantial experience as an illustrator and
book designer.[2]
The bold frontispiece includes, in calligraphy, the motto |
Figure 1. Calligraphic frontispiece, and title page, Warren Chappell,
A Short History of the Printed Word (1970).
"LITTERA SCRIPTA MANET," and below it, in print, an ascription and translation:
"HORACE: The written word remains" (Figure 1). The motto appears
as white letters against a black ground, but the image may have resulted
from a photographic reversal of letters inscribed in black ink on a white
ground. Though evidently not typeset but hand-designed, the lettering of
this motto suggests not handwriting but the monumental qualities of Roman
letters carved in stone. Because such inscriptions supplied printing in
the West with its repertoire of capital letters, the motto speaks here for the
virtue not only of handwriting (probably the original referent), but also of
the printed word that succeeded handwriting in Western culture—as Chappell
explained (20, 22), and with the results that he celebrated. In fact, the
manual calligraphy of this frontispiece mimics (though with considerable
freedom of layout) the capital letters of the metal typeface, Trajanus, which
Chappell had designed more than thirty years earlier; and which, in its
name, saluted Trajan's column in Rome (c. A.D. 114), the originary source
of Roman capitals.[3]
Chappell's frontispiece artfully mediates script and printing,
Chappell credits the claim to Horace, but Horace did not write it. It will
not be found in the standard concordance to Horace, nor in the electronic
edition.[5]
But the mistake is a motivated one; for Horace did write the famous,
self-reflexive, self-fulfilling conclusion to his Odes, "[e]xegi monumentum
aere perennius":
I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramids'
royal pile, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, or the countless
chain of years and the ages' flight. I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of
me shall escape the death-goddess.[6]
These written words have indeed remained, long surviving the poet, as he
boasted they would. And that extraordinary boast became a literary common- |
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum.
non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam. . . .
Writing as such was not essential to the durability of poetry: ordered, formulaic oral poetry
like Homer's could survive in performance, to all appearances substantially unchanged, for
a long time. But Horace was boasting of what he had written.
"Not marble, nor the guilded monument, / Of Princes shall out-liue this
powrefull rime."[8] Only poetry remains to posterity.
But the paradox of this poetic topic—that fragile writing, if well written,
can outlast even monumental stone—is not really the point of Littera scripta
manet. The earliest known formulation, apparently already proverbial as
Adam Murimuth used it in his chronicle of the reign of Edward III, which he
completed in 1347, is "Res audita perit, litera scripta manet."[9]
Caxton used
a similar formula when he introduced the phrase to print: "Vox audita perit /
littera scripta manet."[10]
The balanced maxim draws a contrast not between
the considerable durability of stone and the even greater durability of writing,
but between the dissipation, the instant loss, of the sounds of the spoken word,
and the fixity and durability of the written word. That is, the contrast is not
merely comparative ("writing lasts longer than a monument") but absolute,
and all in the favor of writing. Several formulations insist on the same sharp
contrast: "Litera scripta manet, verbum ut inane perit": "The written letter
remains, as the empty word perishes."[11]
"Littera scripta manet, volat irrevocabile
verbum": The written word remains, the spoken word flies away, not
to be recalled.[12]
"[V]ox emissa volat, litera scripta manet": "While words
It has been suggested that "litěra scripta manet" is "a portion of a mediæval
pentameter."[14] Maybe; but it wasn't something that Horace wrote.
The surfacing of this maxim in the late middle ages coincides with the
consolidation of bureaucratic power by scribes and secretaries. As a kind of
advertisement, the maxim promoted the careers of those who were invested in
writing, not speech; it is easy to imagine why a scribe first wrote it down.
Chappell translates littera scripta manet as "the written word remains," but
the phrase is littera scripta, not verbum scriptum. Words are spoken before
they are written; but letters come into being as they are inscribed, or printed,
or electronically coded; and the adepts of writing technologies have always
had a stake in their success.[15]
Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, A New York Times Book
(New York: Knopf, 1970). Copyright by The New York Times. For information about Chappell
see Paul A. Bennett, "Designer, Artist, Illustrator: Warren Chappell," Publishers'
Weekly 1 Oct. 1955: 1586-88, 1590; and Sonia Benson, "Chappell, Warren, 1904-1991," Something
About the Author 68 (1992): 48-51.
Trajanus was first issued, in an incomplete format, by the German type foundry D.
Stempel AG (Frankfurt am Main) in 1939. In the forward to Trajanus, a specimen pamphlet
published by Haskell House in New York after the war (1948?), Chappell remarks that the
name had been supplied by the foundry. For exemplars see J. Ben Lieberman, Types of
Typefaces and How to Recognize Them (New York: Sterling, 1968), 120; and Christopher
Perfect and Gordon Rookledge, Rookledge's International Type-Finder (New York: Beil,
1983), 16-17.
A broadside keepsake reproducing Chappell's frontispiece design from A Short History
was issued by the Caxton Club (Chicago) for its meeting of March 1992.
In chapter 2, "The Alphabet," Chappell illustrated one typeface and nine historical
styles of script with the same motto, "Littera scripta manet." He used the same strategy in
Littera Scripta Manet: My Life with Letters (New York: privately printed for The Typophiles,
1974)—which also twice reproduced his calligraphic interpretation of the phrase, including
the ascription to Horace. See also Chappell's The Living Alphabet (Charlottesville:
UP of Virginia, 1975), 49.
Lane Cooper, A Concordance to the Works of Horace (Washington, DC: Carnegie
Institution, 1916). Q. Horati Flacci, Opera, ed. Fredricus Klingner, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner,
1959); rpt. PHI CD-ROM 5.3 (Los Altos, CA: Packard Humanities Institute, 1991).
The error has been noticed before: "[T]he text is misattributed: Horace comes close
(v. 390, Ars poetica), but no cigar: a respected Classicist suggests that instead, some wellintentioned
mediæval schoolmaster perpetrated these words, although we shall likely never
know for sure." Literary Texts in an Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library
Services, 31st Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing (Urbana: Graduate
School of Library and Information Science, U of Illinois, 1994), n. pag.
Chappell's Short History appeared in a second edition in 1999 (Point Roberts, WA:
Hartley), revised by Robert Bringhurst, who acknowledged that Chappell's "dates and
names were not always correct" (ix). Chappell's calligraphic frontispiece, with its ascription
to Horace, is omitted from this edition. On p. 273 Bringhurst notes that "[t]he phrase does
not appear in any of [Horace's] works."
Horace, The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett, Loeb Classical Library (1914; rpt.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978), 278-299 (3.30, the last ode of book 3), ll. 1-7:
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols.
(1916; rpt. London: Heinemann, 1966), 226-227 (15.871-879). Edmund Spenser, sonnet 75,
Amoretti and Epithalamion (London, 1595; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbus Terrarum,
1969). Robert Herrick, "The Pillar of Fame," Hesperides (London, 1648; rpt. Menston, Eng.:
Scolar, 1969), 398. Ian Donaldson surveys this topic with an ironic eye in "The Destruction
of the Book," Book History 1 (1998), 1-10.
Sonnet 55, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Never Before Imprinted (London, 1609; rpt. London:
Scolar, 1968). "[P]owrefull rime" does not specify written poetry (it might be oral); however,
the last line of sonnet 65 does so specify, in expressing the poet's desire "[t]hat in black
inck my loue may still shine bright."
Adam Murimuth, Continuatio chronicarum, published together with Robert de Avesbury,
De Gestis mirabilibus regis Edwardi Tertii, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson (London:
Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889), 3: "Quoniam, ut scribitur per antiquos, `Res audita perit, litera
scripta manet,' . . ." Murimuth invokes the maxim at the very outset of his chronicle as a
justification for bothering to write it; however, his authorities for the maxim—ut scribitur
per antiquos, "as is written by the ancients"—remain obscure.
The spelling litera, less correct by classical standards than littera, was common in medieval
Latin.
I owe thanks to George Sheets, Wolfgang Mieder, Tom Hill, F. R. P. Akehurst, and
Dennis Lien for helping me find early instances of this formula. Katherine Hedin and Professor
Sheets also gave me helpful advice on several legal details.
William Caxton, prologue to The Mirrour of the World (1481); The Prologues and
Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W. J. B. Crotch, Early English Text Society Original Series
176 (London: Oxford UP, 1928), 50. Caxton interpolates the observation into his translation
of a French manuscript, where it does not appear; see N. F. Blake, Caxton and His World
(London: Deutsch, 1969), 154-155.
H. T. Riley, A Dictionary of Latin and Greek Quotations, Proverbs, Maxims and
Mottos (London: Bell, 1902), 631a.
Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi: Lateinische Sprichwörter und
Sentenzen des Mittelalters in alphabetischer Anordnung, ed. Hans Walther, 9 vols. (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck, 1963-86), 2: 750 (no. 13903a).
Thomas Branch, Principia Legis et Æquitatis, ed. William Walter Hening (Richmond:
White, 1824); as cited in Latin Words and Phrases for Lawyers, ed. R. S. Vasan (Dons
Mills, Ont.: Law and Business Publications, 1980), 142.
| Studies in bibliography | |