Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Part one Gutenberg before Gutenberg
Chapter 1 The preconditions for a new economy of the media
The key space of modernity: the town
The market in education
The emergence of the political
Chapter 2 The economy of the book
Manuscript production
Change: the objects and practices
Chapter 3 The birth of the market
The market and its regulation
The religious paradigm, or the emergence of the masses
Writing: work and the professions
Part 2 The age of start-ups
Chapter 4 The development and logics of innovation
Paper and papermaking
Xylography
Punches, forms and moulds
Chapter 5 Gutenberg and the invention of printing
Historical portrait of a city
Strasbourg
The return to Mainz
Chapter 6 Innovation
Techniques: innovation in processes
Practices
The society of the workshops
The invention of the graphosphere
Part three The first media revolution
Chapter 7 Printing conquers the world
The spread of the innovation
Ranking the cities
Conjunctures and specializations: the market and innovation
Chapter 8 The nature of text
The book system
The meaning of the text
The 'book-machine'
Chapter 9 The media explosion
A new paradigm: production and reproduction
The Reformation and printing
Regulation: imposing order on books
Printing and governments
Conclusion
Chronologies
Semiology and virtuality
Gutenberg's Europe
Notes
Abbreviations
Index
Frédéric Barbier is Director of Research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and Director of Studies at the École pratique des hautes études, Paris.
"Combining meticulous scholarship with persuasive comparisons
between the print and the digital revolutions, Frédéric Barbier has
made the most important contribution to the field since Elizabeth
Eisenstein�s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change."
Peter Burke, Cambridge University
"The great strength of this book is that it roots Gutenberg�s
invention so firmly in the mediaeval craft society from which it
emerged. Gutenberg was able to draw on a range of pre-existing
techniques and developing markets; without these transformations,
so meticulously explored here, the print revolution might have been
still-born."
Andrew Pettegree, St. Andrews University
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