Table of Contents

• 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
• GutenbergAs Europe
• Notes
• Abbreviations
• Index

About the Author

FrA (c)dA (c)ric Barbier is Director of Research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and Director of Studies at the A cole pratique des hautes A (c)tudes, Paris.

Reviews

"Combining meticulous scholarship with persuasive comparisons between the print and the digital revolutions, FrA (c)dA (c)ric Barbier has made the most important contribution to the field since Elizabeth EisensteinAs The Printing Press as an Agent of Change."
Peter Burke, Cambridge University

"The great strength of this book is that it roots GutenbergAs 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