Printing and Elizabeth Eisenstein

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein may justly be said to have given form to an entire field of learning, at least in the English-speaking world, with her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). That field is generally referred to, inadequately, as "the history of the book," an anglicization of the French histoire du livre. The inadequacy is illustrated by the name of the organization formed not long after the appearance of Eisenstein's work to provide a venue where scholars and others interested in the field could come together for discussion: sharp, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. Publishing a poem, acquiring reading skills as a child, and superintending the business of a newspaper may not seem at first glance to be related activities, but they have been joined for the past five hundred years by the medium of printing, or so Eisenstein and other sharp members would argue.

In her latest publication Eisenstein reflects on the reception of that medium, which she shows has been praised for its beneficent contributions to human happiness and denounced as the very essence of evil—sometimes by the same organization or individual. The Roman Catholic church hierarchy, for example, welcomed printing as a means of standardizing liturgies, which in manuscript form were becoming disparate. Indeed the author of a student manual declared in 1475 that "printing was dedicated by the special grace of God to the redemption of the faithful." But when, after the Reformation, various Protestant groups began issuing liturgies of their own, as well as translations of the Bible in all the European languages, the hierarchy realized that printing could be a threat as well as a blessing, and instituted the famous Index librorum prohibitorum. Protestant printers quickly surmised that presence of a work on the Index might be used as an advertising device for selling books to their Protestant readers. Blessing or curse? It all depended on whose dog was bitten and whose dog did the biting.

Selling books. Soon—very soon— after Gutenberg's masterstroke and the ensuing proliferation of printed books, complaints began to be heard about the commercialization of the process. Erasmus himself, who had once boasted that "my books will be read in every country in the world," later complained of the "swarms of new books"; the "very multitude of them is hurtful to scholarship, because it creates a glut, and even in good things satiety is most harmful."

By the eighteenth century, as Eisenstein demonstrates, there had been created a legend of printing's golden age—the age of Erasmus and his printer, Aldus Manutius. But when Alexander Pope, an admirer of Erasmus, looked around his own London he saw, or said he saw, grubby printers and fraudulent booksellers, purveying their tawdry wares solely for profit and employing apprentices appropriately called "printers' devils." Eisenstein includes telling illustrations from The Grub-Street Journal and elsewhere to make her points. (The illustrations throughout the book are well selected and handsomely reproduced.) Pope famously denounced all this in the Dunciad; but, as Eisenstein notes, he also profited handsomely from the sale of his published writings.

The young Benjamin Franklin was in London at that very time, working as one of those grubby printers in the shop of Samuel Palmer, publisher of The Grub-Street Journal. Another young printer, William Parks, labored in a shop just two or three hundred yards away. It seems likely to this reviewer that in the small world of London printing and publishing, Franklin and Parks knew each other. At any rate, when Parks emigrated to North America—the same year that Franklin returned—he began publishing newspapers, first in Maryland and then in Virginia, and performing jobbing work, as all American printers did. He issued the first poem printed in Virginia, "Typographia: an Ode, on Printing," by John Markland, a Virginia lawyer. Parks and Franklin collaborated on several matters over the years, such...