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P r e f a c e This book deals with attitudes toward printing and printers expressed by observers in the Western world during the past five centuries. As far as I know, no one has yet explored this topic. The field is much too large to be covered in a single book. Its chronological range extends too far, some might say, to be covered even in a multivolume collaborative work. Surveying developments over the course of many centuries, however, does make it possible to observe continuities and ruptures that are hidden from view by special studies of a more limited scope. A case in point is offered by Michael Warner, who has called for a ‘‘history of the way we think about and perceive print.’’1 In keeping with this project, Warner provides a fascinating close-up view of the role played by print in shaping an Anglo-American republican ethos. But his sharply focused treatment of an eighteenth-century political ideology is accompanied by a blurred and distorted presentation of previous developments . The views of early printers are wrongly characterized (see below). Puritan attitudes are lumped together as reflections of a vaguely defined ‘‘traditional culture of print.’’ The untraditional aspects of early print culture are ignored, along with significant links between seventeenth-century Puritans and eighteenth-century republicans. By extending coverage to encompass many centuries, I hope to bring out neglected continuities as well as to indicate significant ruptures. What follows is intended merely as a suggestive sketch. It is highly selective, drawing material from only a few regions and social sectors, and is loosely organized along chronological lines. Anyone who attempts to trace views of printing over the course of centuries has to confront one problem at the outset, namely, the transformation of printing processes themselves. A sixteenth-century commentator who referred to the art of artificial writing had in mind a wooden handpress and the inking of carefully aligned pieces of metal. By the nineteenth century, printing meant steam-driven rotary presses and linotype machines. Thereafter, the x preface press was replaced by photographic processes, and ‘‘hot type’’ was superseded by ‘‘cold.’’ A literal-minded historian of technology might argue that, although sixteenth-century commentators and twentieth-century ones both refer to printing, they are in fact referring to entirely different things. A similar point pertains to the role of the printer. There’s a world of difference between the multifarious activities undertaken in a single printing house under the guidance of a single master printer during the first century after Gutenberg and the diverse tasks performed by different specialists in the many different branches of a later book trade. Fortunately, this argument need not detain us for long. The views to be discussed here seem to have been relatively unaffected by the several mutations printing and printers have undergone. Indeed, the persistence of similar reactions to similar problems is striking. Some hark back to the earlier age of scribes, and some were carried over into later considerations of new communications technologies. In 1946, Harold Nicolson, who had been speaking on the BBC to an audience estimated at some twenty million, wrote in his diary that he had ‘‘no sense of audience.’’ ‘‘To whom am I talking?’’ he asked. An audience of readers had been replaced by one of listeners, yet the sense of estrangement from an invisible public remained.2 A book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death3 raised alarms about the effects of television. Concern about the public’s preference for entertainment over instruction long preceded television. The same point applies to reports of violent crime. Torture, rape, and murder were prominently featured in sixteenth-century street literature and in Jacobean plays.4 Disdainful remarks about sound bites are now often coupled with respectful comments about print journalism. When print journalism monopolized the scene, however, it was accused of mindlessness and warmongering (see Chapter 6). As these examples may suggest, looking at the way previous generations viewed printing may help us place current debates about new media in some sort of historical perspective. Current reactions to new media may also lead to a more sympathetic understanding of previous reactions to older ones. I must confess, however, that I have more difficulty sympathizing with negative than with positive views of Gutenberg’s invention. I imagine that a similar bias is shared by many of my readers: that they regard printing in a positive light—if not as a divine art...

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