Customer Reviews

The Book in the Renaissance

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A sweeping survey of the first 150 years of the European printed book ("book" here covers all printed texts including pamphlets and single leaf broadsides), from its invention by Gutenberg in 1450-55 to the end of the sixteenth century. During that time, printing spread from a single location in southern Germany to every corner of Europe and beyond, resulting in an estimated 350,000 different editions. The focus of the book is on the book as a business - "Printers were businessmen, and books were a commercial venture" (p. 129) - and, as the book progresses, on the Reformation (which resulted in an explosion of printing of Luther's pamphlets) and the subsequent wars, political conflicts and intrigues. Pettegree discusses what was printed, where and why; how the books were distributed and marketed, etc., tying this to the important historical and religious events of the sixteenth century. Along the way, he covers the expansion of printing to provide news and entertainment, the increase in printing in the vernacular, the birth of literary salons and women authors, the early printing of popular music, renaissance schools, emblem books, scientific works, botanical illustration, maps, printing in England, Scotland, Spain, Scandanavia, Eastern Europe, and Mexico, censorship and the Index, and a variety of other topics. Seemingly, nothing significant is omitted.

In his analysis, Pettegree provides numerous important and new insights into the history of the early printed book. The book is dense with facts and specific examples. It includes many excellent illustrations of early printed books, including fine title pages. It contains extensive footnotes to sources, although unfortunately they are not at the bottom of pages of text, but at the back, indexed by page runs.

Surprisingly, the author starts off the book with a significant error. He states that Gutenberg may have based his invention on the "model" of block books, short religious works in which both the text and images were printed from single woodcuts (p. 23). In fact, scholars have rejected the idea that block books were precursors of movable type books and have confirmed (through analysis of watermarks and owners' annotations) that virtually all surviving block books had been printed in the 1460s and later and none predate work on the Gutenberg Bible (1450). (See Allan Stevenson's "The Problem of the Blockbooks" and the other articles included in Blockbücher des Mittlealters, Gutenberg-Museum, Mainz (1991)). The illustrated "block book Bible" shown in fig. 4 and supposedly printed "c. 1430" actually is known as an "Apocalypse" and was printed c. 1465-70. The author also suggests that work on mechanical printing may have begun in the 1430s (p. 21), without mentioning that the early sources on which that is based are problematic and have been the subject of lengthy and inconclusive debate.

Although I saw no other major errors, I did note a few minor ones. For example, type was inked using stuffed leather balls or pads with attached handles, and not "soft sponges" as the book states (Fig. 6). (See, e.g., Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), p. 126.) The statement that the sixteenth century Giunta printing business in Florence "was a branch office of the family's Venice business" (p. 254) is incorrect; the two businesses were separately formed in the fifteenth century by a pair of brothers from Florence and were independently operated by them and their respective heirs following distinct strategies, devotional works in Venice and humanistic works in Florence. Although the two businesses entered into several partnerships, "direct participation of the Florentine firm in partnership with the Giunti of Venice ended in 1517." (Pettas, The Giunti of Florence, p. 112.) The reference to "Bohemia (now the Czech Republic)" (p. 112) is awkward, seemingly suggesting that Bohemia simply changed its name; something like "Bohemia (roughly the western part of today's Czech Republic)" would have been more accurate. And, although he discusses Aldus' famous small octavo editions (p. 61), he neglects to mention that Aldus began their printing in 1501, leaving their chronology unclear to the reader.

Notwithstanding these small imperfections, this is a major addition to the early history of the book and clearly the most comprehensive study (in English at least) of the inter-relation of sixteenth century printing with the Reformation and religious turmoil of that period Pettegree's work will be indispensable to those fields.

This is a wonderful book, the the Kindle edition, aside from being overpriced, does not include any of the many pictures from the book. Amazon should have a warning about this.

This book author's fine work has been dealt a poor hand by its publisher. I was very surprised to find that the Yale University Press honors an outstanding work on the early history of books and publishing with so shoddy a modern product. The "Hardcover" in this instance is some slim cardboard drawn over what is essentially a rigid perfect bound text. I had understood that a "Hardbound", or Case bound, book would be comprised of a substantial cover drawn over smythe sewn pages. The result of such a process being an easy to read publication, the pages generally lie flat, resulting in a book that is easy to use and quite durable.
This current edition by the Yale University Press combines text margins which are so slim that the text disappears into the gutter with pages being glued together in a rigid block, all of which results in it becoming necessary to physically break the back of the book block in order to read the text.
It is truly a shame to produce such a shoddy product covering what is in effect an outstanding effort covering the formative history the art of the book with a book that is completely lacking in normal cased book production values.

I had to read this for a course in graduate school and was very pleasantly surprised to learn the source of so many conventions regarding the printing of--and thinking about--books. Pettegree writes clearly and keeps things moving. The book looks imposing, but you can knock it off in a weekend. OK, maybe a long weekend. Wonderfully free of jargon, as well.

For anyone interested in learning about the history of the printed book and the Reformation, this book is a must. Mr. Pettegree shows how the printed book fueled the Reformation, and also how the Reformation fueled the printed book. In a way, therefore, we're left with a which-came-first question, as, prior to the Reformation, publishers had a tough go, and number of them went out of business. Though it might be hard for us to believe today, in the Fifteenth Century many people were reluctant accept to the printed book and felt it was drastically inferior to a beautifully hand-written one.

The printed book, Mr. Pettegree tells us, is a product not just of invention - Mr. Gutenberg's - but also of capitalism and of religious revolution. The printed book had to survive in the marketplace, and eventually it did. Would it have done so without the Reformation and then the Counter-Reformation? Certainly, it would have, but at how much of a slower pace? So much slower that the Renaissance, and all the good that came with it, happened a century or two later? How much different, then, would the world look today?

These are questions I wish Mr. Pettegree devoted more time to. True, he would have been speculating to some degree, but to me the most interesting history is written by authors who, based on solid evidence, offer theories about the causes and effects of events that become history.

Today we are in the dawn of a new publishing revolution: ebooks. Will ebooks - which many readers are reluctant to accept - affect the course of history? If so, how will they? Mr. Pettegree gives us some insight, but, in my opinion, he doesn't go far enough in drawing the parallels between printed and electronic books, and also between the Fifteenth and Twenty-first Centuries.

Finally, The Book in the Renaissance is easy-to-read history. Mr. Pettegree writes and organizes his material very well.

I highly recommend this book.

What I have learned from this well written book is that there is nothing new in the world of books and printing, and that all of the debate over ebooks was debated at the inception of printing.

This book is very readable even though it imparts in depth information about the spread of printing. I also learned that good business practices had a lot to do with what got printed.

It is an invaluable resource to anyone interested in the history of books. The book also arrived earlier than promised, which was nice.

The book received was a pre-publication un-edited version. It had been written in with a blue ink pen and sections had been highlighted in yellow. If I had know this book's condition I would not have purchsed it.