The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe

ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN, The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1979, 2 vols., 8vo, pp. xxi, 794; vol. 1, £30; vol. 2, £25; or £50 the set. Bookmen have never managed to achieve an agreed definition of their field of study. Bibliography has been claimed on the one hand by mere, but useful, enumerators of authors and titles and on the other by lofty textual critics and scarcely less elevated literary ones. The librarians appropriated the subject as part of their professional mystery, only to abandon it for the siren lure of silicon chip and management studies. There were the chaps whose austere and sole delight was to reveal, exclusively to each other, the intricacies of press-figures, skeleton-formes, turned chain-lines, pin-holes, and compositorial analysis. Others devoted their labours to charting the evolution of type design, the careers of publishing houses, or the distribution of paper-mills. Some even deserted the medium for the package, in spite of the late Harry Carter's contemptuous dismissal of the ancient craft of bookbinding as "a species of cobbling". Over the last fifteen years many of these traditional and sometimes competing kinds of bibliography have been drawing together into a new historical genre represented by a growing volume of monographs and journal articles and complete with the now obligatory French label as a seal of academic respectability histoire du livre, best translated perhaps as "the historical sociology of the book". It will come as no surprise to learn that the French inspiration and first embodiment of the enterprise came in a series called Histoire et civilisation du livre, sponsored by the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Centre de Recherches d'Histoire et de Philologie in Paris.' The general editor, and a notable contributor, Henri Jean Martin, was a pupil of, and later a collaborator with, no less a scholar than the social historian and co-founder of Annales, Lucien Febvre. The flavour of the new bibliographical history ("la bibliologie retrospective" is a recently used alternative label) may be caught from the title of Martin's own contribution to the series, Livre, pouvoirs et societe 'a Paris au XVII siecle.2 English-language readers had their first substantial taste of the new French confection in 1976 with the publication of David Gerard's translation of Febvre and Martin's L'apparition du livre under the title The coming of the book: the impact of printing 1450-J800.3 Much of the factual material in that book was from well-known secondary sources but the arrangement and conclusions revealed the authors' intellectual allegiance. English readers received a salutary jolt from a crisp demonstration, in their own language, of how provincial and underdeveloped British book production and distribution was, during the centuries before the eighteenth, compared with that of continental Europe. The Annales method was exemplified by the emphatic use of economic, geographical, and, admittedly fragmentary, statistical evidence. A final chapter on 'The Book as a Force for Change' struck a new though not entirely unprecedented note in English bibliography by examining the influence of