Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Chapter 1. First Impressions
Prologue: Some Foundation Myths
Initial Reactions: Pros and Cons
Chapter 2. After Luther: Civil War in Christendom
Printing as a Protestant Weapon
Pamphlet Warfare: ''The Media Explosion'' of the 1640s
Chapter 3. After Erasmus: Propelling the Knowledge Industry
Celebrating Technology/Advancement of Learning
Overload: Lost in the Crowd
Chapter 4. Eighteenth-Century Attitudes
Prelude and Preview
Literary Responses: Mystic Art/Mercenary Trade
Politics in a New Key: The Atlantic Revolutions
Chapter 5. The Zenith of Print Culture (Nineteenth Century)
The Revolutionary Aftermath
Tories and Radicals in Great Britain
Steam Presses, Railway Fiction
Chapter 6. The Newspaper Press: The End of Books?
Chapter 7. Toward the Sense of an Ending (Fin de Sie'cle to the Present)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

About the Author

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Michigan. In addition to The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, her books include its abridgment, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, and Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution.

Reviews

"Eisenstein's research is impressive, reaching far and wide across languages and centuries. Her knowledge of the history of publication engages the wealth of recent scholarship and extends as far back as Roman copyists. . . . Her breadth enables her to identify topoi and their mutations; to observe long-term trends, diminishing ripples, and delayed reactions; and to distinguish what is new or newly dressed in authors' concerns and readers' complaints." (Journal of Scholarly Publishing)