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If you want to know what Schmalk is, read our articles.
If, however, you are interested in our history, read this.
Duh.
A brief but remarkable fragment, long believed apocryphal, was recovered in 2007 during the partial restoration of the eastern archive at the Bibliotheca Algenstein, where it had been misfiled under Wooden Agriculture Implements, 1450–1550. Its rediscovery sheds new light on a marginal but curiously resilient strain of subterranean typographic resistance which, though overshadowed by the canonical Gutenbergian narrative, nevertheless complicates and enriches our understanding of early print culture. The text is presented here in a reconstructed form, with all lacunae noted and speculative interpolations duly marked.
Dr. P. Malchus-Laurent
Primary & Apocryphal Sources
Zinn, Hermannus. Typographia Extra Moenia: Heretical Printing in the Forest Principalities. Lüneburg: Officina Imaginaria, 1512.(Original held in the Biblioteca Palatina until 1689. The Lüneburg Index classifies this as “pre-exilic satire.”)
Von Kreislauf, H.M. Typographia Interrupta: Die verlorenen Drucke Deutschlands. Basel: Verlag zur Drei-Zeit, 1937.(Suppressed in 1938; reissued in facsimile in Montevideo, 1954, with an introduction by the author's cousin.)
Codex Nigrensis. Fragmentary manuscript (c. 1472), shelfmark lost in 1830 fire. Last cited by Brother Anselm in De Ligno et Silentio (Hildesheim, 1599).
Punctus, E. & Inkjugulum, A. Colloquium inter Inkjugulum et Punctum.
Schmalkalden: Druckgemeinschaft, 1497.(Survives only in a hand-copied translation held in the private archive of E.T.A. Hoffmann, annotated with musical motifs.)
Anonymous. Hexaglossae Saturninae: A Palindromic Almanac. Reissued by the Society of Typographic Occultists, Vienna, 2001.(Decipherment ongoing. Contains no punctuation and is bound with reversible thread.)
Archivum Secretum Moguntinum. “Letter of Censure, re: Schmalkalden.” Entry 98.a.1474.(Access requires episcopal clearance and a certified oath of Mainzian neutrality.)
Malchus-Laurent, P. Deconstructing the Schmalkaldic Silence: A Semiotic Approach. University of Kempten Working Papers. (Unpublished. Circulated informally on CD-ROM at the 1998 Triennale for Shadow Histories.)
Corroborating Historical Works (Real and Cited in Good Faith)
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1979. (Especially useful for the idea of Mainzian control and the volatility of early print culture.)
Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. University of Chicago Press, 1998.(Chapter 2 offers useful context on the instability and improvisation of early print networks.)
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press, 1962.(See especially his meditation on “peripheral printings” and “silent revolutions.” Quote attributed: “Gutenberg made all men readers—Schmalkalden made them writers.”)
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen, 1982. (Chapter 4 explores the existential shift brought about by fixity in print. See also “ink as an ontological problem.”)
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press, 1989 (original 1962). (Used here to support the Druckgemeinschaft’s role as a proto-civic-public intervention.)