engines of change?

Academic interest in the 'print revolution' remains strong and the past year has seen some of the more interesting writing about late Victorian publishing and reading, for example. This page highlights some works that we regard as fundamental or merely entertaining.

It covers -

• basic studies
• innovation and the politics of information
• impacts
• the two Rs
• printers and publishers

Other pointers occur throughout the profile.

     basic studies

For those seeking precedents for how 'connectivity' is reshaping the world we suggest Elizabeth Eisenstein's magisterial two volume The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1979) rather than the much-hyped but altogether too gnomic The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1962) by Marshall McLuhan.  

Skip the neo-Thomist mumbo-jumbo from Toronto and head for Walter Benjamin's 1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt in Illuminations (New York: Schocken 1985), Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge: Belknap 1987) and Technologies Without Boundaries (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge 2001) by Brendan Dooley & Sabrina Baron, Ronald Deibert's Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1997) or Theories of the New Media: A Historical Perspective (London: Athlone Press 2000) edited by John Thornton Caldwell.

Eisenstein's one volume The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1983) is a beautifully illustrated distillation of her masterwork. She argues that print was instrumental to the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, nationalism and individualism but did not cause any of them. All were emerging before the advent of the press but were not able to gain wide currency because of the tendency of scribal copies to degenerate. It is supplemented by Stephan Fussel's Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005).

Kai-wing Chow's Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2004), Denis Twitchett's Printing and Publishing in Medieval China (London: Wynkyn de Worde Society 1983), Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien's Written on Bamboo & Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books & Inscriptions (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2004), Mary Berry's Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2006) and Christopher Reed's Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism 1876-1937 (Vancouver: Uni of British Columbia Press 2004) are less elegant but of considerable value. Books & the Sciences in History (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000) by Marina Frasca-Spada & Nick Jardine offers a point of reference.

The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology In The First Age of Print (London: Routledge 2000) edited by Neil Rhodes & Jonathan Sawday, The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print & Digital Culture (Ann Arbor: Uni of Michigan Press 1998) edited by George Bornstein & Theresa Tinkle, George Atiyeh's The Book In The Islamic World (Albany: State Universities of New York Press 1995) and Johannes Pedersen's The Arabic Book (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1984) provide other perspectives.

     innovation and the politics of information

Insights into originality and copying are found in Anthony Grafton's Forgers & Critics (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1990) and Hillel Schwartz's The Culture of the Copy (New York: Zone 1996).

Mark Rose, in Authors & Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1993) examines the birth of copyright - originally restricted to printers, considered to be the true producers of books and the ones most hurt by cheap knock-offs. In considering the long debate before authors were given legal rights over their work in the eighteenth century Rose examines the disagreements - alive and well in cyberspace - about what is to be protected: an original idea or an original way of putting an old idea.

We have pointed in our intellectual property guide to other examinations of copyright as a precondition for the publishing explosion. Two highlights are the set of essays in Of Authors & Origins (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1994) edited by Griffith University's Brad Sherman and Martha Woodmansee's The Author, Art, and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1996).

Lucien Febvre & Henri-Jean Martin's The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 (London: NLB 1976) and Martin's The French Book: Religion, Absolutism & Readership, 1585-1715 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1996) are of similar importance to Eisenstein and replete with analysis about distribution channels, pricing, innovations in ink and press technology, and the weight of paper. Both works lack McLuhan's mystical delirium about print as the satanic force that exiled us from some edenic innocence, to which we are presumably returned by the 'new media'.

They are complemented by Brian Richardson's Printing, Writers & Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge 2001) edited by Brendon Dooley & Sabina Baron and Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1989) by Richard Brown.

     impacts

The history and impact of particular works, such as the Christian Bible and Mao's Red Book, are highlighted in a later page of this profile.

     the two Rs

Henri-Jean Martin also wrote The History & Power of Writing (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1994) a benchmark for the study of western writing from Mesopotamian clay seals to the advent of digitized text.

Roger Chartier's Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances & Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: Uni of Pennsylvania Press 1995) and crisp The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the 14th & 18th Centuries (Cambridge: Polity Press 1993) discuss the anxiety provoked by the proliferation of books in the late Middle Ages, akin to the current explosion of content on the Web, and efforts to bring them into some order and coherence. 

As a recent reviewer noted, "the ongoing tension between the ideal of total inclusion and the constraints of manageable selection and ideological control is manifest in these 'libraries without walls' and has remained with us ever since". Frederick Kilgour's The Evolution of The Book (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1998) and the delicious A Short History of the Printed Word (Vancouver: Hartley & Marks 1999) by Warren Chappell & Robert Bringhurst are less analytical.

     printers and publishers

The Nature of the Book: Print & Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago Uni Press 1998) by Adrian Johns builds on Eisenstein in considering publishing, printing, authorship, authority and readership in restoration England. He is particularly acute on contemporary myths of Gutenberg and the invention of printing, of interest as this year is the 600th anniversary of the printer's birth. His study is lavishly illustrated. 

There is a valuable cross-cultural exploration of New Paradigms & Parallels: The Printing Press & the Internet project. 

George Painter, biographer of Proust, Gide & Chateaubriand, produced the graceful William Caxton: A Quincentenary Biography of England's First Printer (London: Chatto & Windus 1976). It sums up what we know about the elusive Mr Caxton and the birth of British publishing. David Zaret's Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions & the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000) adds another dimension to works such as Lucille Chia's Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian, 11th to 17th Centuries (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Asia Center 2002) and Reed's Gutenberg in Shanghai.

Lee Erickson's The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature & The Industrialisation of Publishing 1800-1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1996) - a rather sobering study of why fat three volume novels swamped thin volumes of poetry - complements Peter McDonald's more readable British Literary Culture & Publishing Practice 1880-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1997). 

David McKitterick is editing the seven volume Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999-); similar projects are underway in Australia and Canada. The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has a detailed online resource on Book & Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa.

Among other historical studies we recommend the brilliant three volume The Enlightenment (New York: Knopf 1996) by Peter Gay - a definitive and compelling study of the interrelationship between 18th century ideas, authors, readers and publishers - and the more restricted publishing studies by specialist Robert Darnton. 

The latter's The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1982), The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie 1775-1800 (Cambridge: Belknap 1979), The Forbidden Best-Sellers of PreRevolutionary France (New York: Norton 1995) and The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France 1769-1789 (New York: Norton 1995) are exemplary. Richard Yeo's Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries & Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) is a more recent account. Carla Hesse's Publishing & Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1991) is also of value.

David Hall's Cultures of Print: Essays In The History of the Book (Amherst: Uni of Massachusetts Press 1986) has a broader scope.

Darnton is the inspiration behind the US HistoryE-book project of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the American Historical Association's Gutenberg-e Prizes project, concerned with electronic publication of new and old historical monographs. 

His essay A Historian of Books, Lost & Found in Cyberspace, complements his presidential address to the American Historical Association - An Early Information Society.  Darnton's thoughtful essays on The New Age of the Book and Paris: The Early Internet appeared in the 4 March 1999 and 29 June 2000 issues of the New York Review of Books.



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