Johns 1998

Adrian Johns. The Nature of the Book. Chicago, 1998.

Notes

Library Quarterly 69.3 (July 1999), 367-8
367 Contrary to the famous thesis of Elizabeth Eisenstein's classic but contested The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the invention of printing did not simply result in "fixed" authoritative texts. While printing and natural philosophy developed hand-in-hand, their relationship was also based on the fact that print introduced an element of instability into the burgeoning world of authoritative experimental knowledge. One might not agree that books make scientific revolutions, but it is clear that controlling print production was a key element in presenting the ideas that shook Europe in the ages of Copernicus and Newton.
368 ...how intellectual ideas were directly influenced by questions of printing.

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94.2 (June 2000), 296-9
296 Johns interlaces the insights of individual chapteres to weave a pervasive challenge to the prevailing view (attributed to Elizabeth Eisenstein[...]) of print as harbinger of uniformity, credibility, and stability.
"Instability, conflict, and piracy have always been relegated to the historiographical periphery" (161)
297 Beginning from Tycho Brahe's printing house and paper mill on his island of Hven, Johns emphasizes both the significance of printing for spreading new knowledge and the ceaseless difficulties faced by natural philosophers in their engagements with agents of print.
- spread ≠ stability
298 Johns concludes that if there was a revolution fostered by print, it is probably best discovered in the area of reading practices, though the industrialization of print in the C19 also represents an important shift, as the speed of production and number of copies produced escalates dramatically. The present book, however, devotes most of its energy to undermining our assumptions and demonstrating very real uncertainty about the development of print culture in early modern England, rather than offering a new synthesis.
By making print culture scholars more aware that their history is a remarkable, powerful construction, The Nature of the Book both offers another model for how to conduct such history and attests to the means whereby print, and print culture history, shape society.