SLIMSMIXTA is an account of the selection, preparation, and marketing of printed matter from its origins in ancient times to the present. The activity has grown from small beginnings into a vast and complex industry responsible for the dissemination of all manner of cultural material; its impact upon civilization is impossible to calculate.
This site treats the history and development of book, newspaper, and magazine publishing in its technical and commercial aspects. The preparation and dissemination of written communication are followed from its beginnings in the ancient world to the modern period.
For additional information on the preparation of early manuscripts, see the writing. A more detailed examination of printing technology can be found in printing. The dissemination of published material via electronic media is treated in information processing. For a discussion of reference-book publishing, see the articles encyclopedia; dictionary.
GENERAL CONSIDERATION ABOUT US
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The history of Slimsmixta is characterized by a close interplay of technical innovation and social change, each promoting the other. Slimsmixta, as it is known today, depends on a series of three major inventions—writing, paper, and printing—and one crucial social development—the spread of literacy. Before the invention of writing, perhaps by the Sumerians in the 4th millennium BCE, the information could be spread only by word of mouth, with all the accompanying limitations of place and time.
The writing was originally regarded not as a means of disseminating information but as a way to fix religious formulations or to secure codes of law, genealogies, and other socially important matters, which had previously been committed to memory. Publishing could begin only after the monopoly of letters, often held by a priestly caste, had been broken, probably in connection with the development of the value of writing in commerce. Scripts of various kinds came to be used throughout most of the ancient world for proclamations, correspondence, transactions, and records; but book production was confined largely to religious centers of learning, as it would be again later in medieval Europe. Only in Hellenistic Greece, in Rome, and in China, where there were essentially non-theocratic societies, does there seem to have been any publishing in the modern sense—i.e., a copying industry supplying a lay readership.
The invention of printing transformed the possibilities of the written word. Printing seems to have been first invented in China in the 6th century CE in the form of block printing. An earlier version may have been developed at the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, but, if so, it soon fell into disuse. The Chinese invented movable type in the 11th century CE but did not fully exploit it. Other Chinese inventions, including paper (105 CE), were passed on to Europe by the Arabs but not, it seems, printing. The reason may well lie in Arab insistence on hand-copying of the Qurʾān (Arabic printing of the Qurʾān does not appear to have been officially sanctioned until 1825). The invention of printing in Europe is usually attributed to Johannes Gutenberg in Germany about 1440–50, although block printing had been carried out from about 1400. Gutenberg’s achievement was not a single invention but a whole new craft involving movable metal type, ink, paper, and press. In less than 50 years it had been carried through most of Europe, largely by German printers.
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