Books have had a good run for 500 years. What does the future hold?

The book’s hegemony has lasted for nearly 500 years. Not a bad run. At times it has seemed unassailable: it has spread worldwide, adapted and thrived. But that success was by no means guaranteed.

When Johannes Gutenberg perfected mechanical type and mechanised print in the middle of the 15th century, he probably had high hopes for his new iteration of mass knowledge-sharing and storytelling. What might not have been immediately obvious to him, however, was the scale for literary chaos his industrialisation of the printed word was about to unleash.

There has always been a close association between words and mischief. Hence the conjuration by medieval manuscript makers of Titivillus: part patron-demon, part everyday scapegoat. He was a useful way for scribes to disguise their very human failings, and a necessary psychological crutch to help them get out of bed day after day to face their vellum.

Over time, Titivillus travelled from the scriptorium to the print shop, where he could have almost limitless fun. Printing was complicated in ways that manuscript production wasn’t, and the little devil could now replicate errors in hundreds of books at once. This was his chance to go viral, and he seized it.

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The language of print reveals just how intrinsic mistakes were to the mechanisation process. Like the adage of Inuit people having multiple words for snow, it demanded a rich lexicon for things going wrong: type can be ‘botched’, ‘battered’, ‘bottle-arsed’, ‘off its feet’ – and mixed-up letters are said to be ‘squabbling’ amongst themselves like unruly toddlers. And Titivillus’s role as meddling devil is a metaphor that continued to be extended.

The youngest members of the industry – the apprentices – became known as ‘printer’s devils’. Broken and battered type was sent to ‘hell’, or to the ‘hell box’, where it had a final chance for redemption: to be melted down and re-cast to print another day.

While Titivillus was happy to meddle in the micro of typos, the words and sentences thus formed were preparing to go even bigger on blunders. As Petrarch observed, “Books have led some to learning, and some to madness.” From purple prose and ick lit (writing so bad you can’t help talking about it) to flagrant plagiarism and outlandish literary hoaxes, there’s something about books that brings out the most human in the human spirit.

Pilfering words and passing them off as your own, pretending to be someone or something that you’re not, discrediting entire literary movements, fuelling rivalries and jealousies that echo down the centuries. 

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Take the Ern Malley affair of 1944, when two Australian poets concocted a fictional modernist genius and 16 deliberately nonsensical poems, mailed them to a leading avant-garde magazine, and watched the editor hail them as a major new voice. When the hoax was exposed, Australian experimental poetry never quite recovered – though, Malley’s poems are now better remembered than the men who wrote them. 

It’s not just writers who can inadvertently evoke the chaotic spirit of Titivillus. Readers are at risk, too – often falling prey to that most virulent of conditions: bibliophilia. There’s a fine line between the romance of a personal book collection – throughout history a popular symbol of education and intellectual curiosity – and the fate of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the 19th-century bibliomaniac whose hoard was so vast that, when he died in 1872, it took 100 years to disperse. His grandson spent 50 years of his life supervising the sale. Marie Kondo might have had the right idea. 

Gutenberg’s invention highlighted the conflict between the old (the manuscript) and the new (the printed book). Today’s discord is even more profound: that former upstart is now under threat from a host of new technologies and trends. And the stakes are higher than ever.

Can the book survive the challenges of ebooks, audiobooks and AI? Are we ushering in a golden age of enhanced partnership between writers and readers; liberating and force-multiplying our human creativity with the speed, vision and precision of machine learning? Or will it cannibalise our creativity, collapse the publishing industry and destroy our storytelling abilities?

Perhaps the only thing we know for sure is that even if books one day disappear, stories will not, until we do. As the writer William Boyd noted, “Stories seem to answer something very deep in our nature, as if, for the duration of its telling, something special has been created, some essence of our experience extrapolated, some temporary sense has been made of our common, turbulent journey towards the grave and oblivion.”

The book as an object has always had its own story, and that will never change. The next generation of storytellers will build on what is already there, just as today’s stories weave in elements of yesterday’s. We’re moving towards a time where a word will always be retrievable, and hence never forgotten. The reading horizon will be limitless. And so will Titivillus’s reach.

Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and Misadventures in the World of Books by Rebecca Lee is out now (Profile, £20).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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