[112]
See Christopher de Hamel, “Putting a Price on It,” introduction to
Michael Olmert, The Smithsonian Book of Books (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Books, 1992), 10.
[113]
James Carroll, “Silent Reading in Public Life,” Boston Globe,
February 12, 2007.
[114]
Gutenberg was not the first to invent movable type. Around i050, a
Chinese craftsman named Pi Sheng began molding Chinese logographs out
of small bits of clay. The clay type was used to print pages through
handrubbing, the same method used to make prints from woodblocks.
Because the Chinese didn’t invent a printing press (perhaps because the large
number of logographic symbols made the machine impractical), they were
unable to mass-produce the prints, and Pi Sheng’s movable type remained of
limited use. See Olmert, Smithsonian Book of Books, 65.
[115]
See Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 84-93.
[116]
Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael
Silver- thome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 100.
[117]
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,
one-volume paperback ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980),
46.
[118]
Michael Clapham, “Printing,” in A History of Technology, vol. 3,
From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, c. 1500-c. 1750, ed.
Charles Singer et al. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 37.
[119]
Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 50.
[120]
Ibid., 49.
[121]
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas
Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 161.
