Febvre & Martin 1958

Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. 1958. London: Verso, repr. 1984.

• NB that the first chapter is about the introduction of paper into Europe

Preface

• 9 These new books were to cause profound changes not only in the habits of thought but also in the working conditions of secular and religious scholars, the great readers of the time. The changes (we won't say revolution) soon broke the bounds of this original audience and made considerable impact on the world outside
  • alt title: "the book in the service of history"
• 10 ...We hope to establish how and why the printed book was something more than a triumph of technical ingenuity, but was also one of the most potent agents at the disposal of western civilisation in bringing together the scattered ideas of representative thinkers.
• 12 [by way of demarcating the end of their study] Between 1803 and 1814 Koenig built three types of machine which were the prototypes of the modern printing plant: the power-driven platen press, the stop-cylinder press and the two-revolution press. As early as 1791 an Englishman, Nicolson, had worked out the pricniple of the cylinder steam press with self-inking rollers. INventions like these of course greatly accelerated the output of books and prepared the ground for the newspaper, the most recent newcomer yet to the world of print.
  • which was already invented so it was a change in production and distribution models

Ch 8 The Book as a Force for Change

I: From Ms to Printed Book

• 248 Assuming an average print run to be no greater than 500, then about 20 million books were printed before 1500, an impressive [249] total even by 20th-century standards, and even more so when we remember that the Europe of that day was far less populous than now.
  • what was the result of this change?
• 249 One fact must not be lost sight of: the printer and the bookseller worked above all and from the beginning for profit.
• ...the majority, or very nearly, of books were religious and among them of course were many edition so fhte Scriptures. What subject [250] was more likely in the eyes of printers to sell at a time when most readers were clerics?
• another important category of pre-1500 texts: classics of philosophy and theology, which were mainly printed in university cities
  • e.g., Aristotle mostly printed in Venice, Augsburg, Cologne, Leipzig; Lombard's Sententiae in Basel
• 251 and books printed for the use of priests
• 252 The reading public was extended by the sheer numbers of books which reached wider and wider audiences with increasing ease. Printing also made for a more exact knowledge of the Latin language and of the authors of classical antiquity.
  • printing just preceded the diffusion of Italian humanism throughout Europe
• 253 The crucial role of printing in relation to humanist studies up to the last years of the 15th century was not so much to give a wide circulation to those texts which had recently been rediscovered...as to make generally known, by multiplying the number of copies that were available, those texts which had been most commonly used in the middle ages as an introduction to classical literature.
  • printing not as recuperative (yet) but mainly distributive (what's a better word for that?)
  • continuity with middle ages contra the "re-birth" model of the Renaissance: e.g., the continued popularity of Boethius, who "represented a perfect blend of classical and medieval thought" (254)