Customer Reviews

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

We have come to forget that the introduction of the printing press by Gutenberg mattered, or we have come to assume that it directly led to the Protestant Reformation. Eisenstein wondered how true that was, and what other changes the press wrought in European society in the couple of hundred years after the press was introduced. Start with the concept of authorship--once books could be reproduced in quantity, authorship mattered. Then consider the question of alphabetization and indexing. Then think of what happens when travel writers describe native dress--people start believing the books and variations become more extreme to meet the printed word. That's just the beginning. Eisenstein's book is not just an incredible work, well written, about the effect on our culture of the printing press. It is also the sort of book that makes one realize how unimaginable and vast the influence of any invention can have on a society. This book is critical for media studies, history, printing, typography, just to better understand our own society, or for the pleasure of a good, thorough, read.

If you suspect that the Internet is changing our world in profound ways, this book will stir insights into how technology can rapidly transform nearly every aspect of a culture. Unlike most commentators on the Renaissance, who take for granted the fact that printing brought about great change, Eisenstein focuses on *how* technology triggered and accelerated dramatic change. She focuses especially on the role of exposure to new points of view.

For example, collaboration of printers, scholars and publishers in the first great publishing house, the Aldine Press, brought together people who previously had little knowledge of one anothers' world-views. In order to work together effectively, they were forced to see through one anothers' eyes. Indirect access to new viewpoints had an even broader impact. The ready availability of books allowed a genius such as Copernicus to study cosmology without devoting years of his life as a mendicant scholar. Eisenstein observes that the the movements of stars and planets hadn't changed; the newly available data were the opinions of previous cosmologists. For the first time in history, one could compare and contrast cosmologies in one's spare time, without sacrificing years to visit scattered libraries.

Although Eisenstein makes no attempt to compare early modern Europe with today's world, a reader who is familiar with today's technological changes can hardly help but draw parallels. Gutenberg, the technical purist who was repeatedly sued for refusing to ship his product, acted out the role of the prototypical Silicon Valley inventor suffering from "creeping elegance." Gutenberg's typography has rarely been equalled, but he died bankrupt, his invention owned by the "venture capitalists" who funded him. Meanwhile, Aldus Manutius persuaded compromise among printers (technologists) and church scholars (the publishing establishment). The Aldine Press expertly packaged information into books and catalogs that were easy to sell. Like Microsoft, the Aldine Press became a dramatic business success by delivering excellence in packaging of others' inventions, not by making technical breakthroughs.

Although Eisenstein does not focus greatly on the seat of power in early modern Europe, the Holy Roman Empire, the church clearly suffered the greatest losses of influence as a result of the distribution of new ideas. Eisenstein recalls the protests of Martin Luther to the Pope, saying that he had no idea how so many people obtained his theses so quickly. The Wittenberg Door appears as an early Web site, allowing anyone, including publishers, to seize ideas that previous could not have achieved wide distribution. Eisenstein's readers will surely wonder which institutions in today's world stand to lose influence and power as a result of easy access to a variety of points of view via the Internet.

This was a great book! It gave me a real appreciation for how foreign the medieval way of thought is from current -- because of the printing press. If you've read Walter Ong's _Orality and Literacy_, this is similarly mind-blowing.

I will caution, however, that this is a very academic book. She spends a fair amount of time refuting people who disagreed with her. It is also designed for historians. I'm no dummy, but some stuff went over my head. (If you know the following phrases and people, you'll be fine: Plutarch, incunabula, Tridentine, Rabelais, Marlowe, the _Digest_, Cujas.)

I gave it five stars because it was definitely worth slogging through, but I wish I had gotten the abridged version instead.

I can't overstate how poor the writing in this book is. I found that it had extremely little to say. I can't recommend this book to anyone. I made it through 90 pages, and read parts of the next 100, and the beginnings of some later chapters, in the hope of finding some shred of information. I can only hope that my review will help others to avoid wasting their time (and money) as I have.

Eistenstein spends almost all of her energy commenting on what other historians have had to say about the effect of the printing press, and only very rarely does she state an actual effect that it had, or, really, any important fact of history. Again and again she says that the subjects she really cares about have not been addressed by anyone, but this does not inspire her to address these subjects. Instead, she reviews the literature -- oh, how she reviews it! This book consists almost entirely of Eisenstein's vague comments on assertions of other writers about the effect of the printing press. Since she doesn't feel anyone has written anything of great interest about the subject, this obviously does not go well. There's is lots of on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand here: Eisenstein warns us not to make too much of the differences between scribal culture and printing culture -- and also not to make too little! Only after much careful reading will you catch her describing those differences and their impact, and they are described only a very general way. There are no interesting stories about print shops, libraries, clerics, scholars, or printing technology. There are no stories about interesting people. There are no descriptions of the geographic spread of particular ideas. She does not bring to life the effect of having thousands of copies of a book available. There are no numbers for how many books a given person might have had access to before versus after the printing press. There are no numbers about changing literacy rates. We can go on naming interesting subjects all day -- the first 190 pages of this book have nothing interesting to say about any of them.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Eistenstein's book is its treatment of the Reformation. One reaches page 163 (the end of the "introductory" chapters) without her saying what she thinks the effect of printing on the Protestant Reformation was. The Reformation is widely considered by people who write about printing to be the most important cultural event influenced by printing, so this seems, at best, very poor organization. Does she have anything interesting to say about the Reformation at all? Looking ahead to page 303, where her chapter about the Reformation begins, I slogged through four pages, again with very little to say, until she raised a number of questions -- e.g. "How did it happen [so quickly that Luther's Theses] won top billing throughout central Europe?" Perhaps she is about to say something interesting? Instead, she concludes "These questions cannot be answered in detail here." And that, my friends, was the end of my patience.

Finally, this book compares very poorly to John Man's The Gutenberg Revolution. Man's book is mainly about the activities of Gutenberg himself, but along the way it does say a bit about the effect of the printing press. There's much more information to be had there than here.

No, Dr. E did not write in this book about the Internet at all but at least in pages 65-110, you can see the parallels. There is plenty here to chew on and yes, having both volumes together is a whopper but this is at the bare minimum a TOP 10 book for everyone in the Western world because it gets right to the heart of this reality we call "economics".

Excellent history and philosophy reading when you look at it from the right angle. It ranks up there with Drahos - Philosophy of IP, Kuhn's, Sorensen's thought experiments, Thoreau's selected journals, Dewey's how we think and Einstein's ideas and opinions.

First, a confession: I started skimming around page 30 and gave up altogether around page 70.

The book addresses a fascinating subject, but the writing is maddeningly repetitive. It is almost without the shaping and telling detail that makes history meaningful.
Productive reflection on what is important and why is almost absent.
If I had counted how many times the author asserts that no one has ever treated the topic adequately before, you would not believe the number.
In summary, I'm prepared to believe there is useful information hidden in there somewhere; I'm just not prepared to waste any more time trying to find it.

(I have given it two stars (rather than one) because a historian might find the references useful.)

I plan to buy the book after reading the Guttenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLaughan. His the medium is the message seems to connect quite well with the content of this book that as I read it in the Amazon summary. It seems that technology has the virtue of carrying inside it the potential of changing the world. One questions if there would have been a Reform without Guttenberg or at least to the extent of contributing to a long and bloody war in Europe in the XVI and XVII centuries. One also wanders about the current technology of the internet with its power to move people worldwide and its impact in the social and economic status of the world. We are living in moments of great change. I am sure I will relish this book.
By the way I just marked a star to get through my comment not as a result of an evaluation process.