[122]
Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 72.
[123]
Quoted in Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English
News- books, 1641-1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 187.
[124]
See Olmert, Smithsonian Book of Books, 301
[125]
Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 130.
[126]
Notes Eisenstein, “Reading out loud to hearing publics not only
persisted after printing but was, indeed, facilitated by the new abundance of
texts.” Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern
Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 328.
[127]
J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s
Reflections on the Brain (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 101.
[128]
Books also introduced a new set of tools for organizing and
conveying information. As Jack Goody has shown, lists, tables, formulas,
and recipes became commonplace as books proliferated. Such literary
devices further deepened our thinking, providing ways to classify and
explain phenomena with ever-greater precision. Goody writes that “it does
not require much reflection upon the contents of a book to realize the
transformation in communication that writing has made, not simply in a
mechanical sense, but in a cognitive one, what we can do with our minds and
what our minds can do with us.” Goody, The Domestication of the Savage
Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 160.
[129]
Darn ton points out that the radically democratic and meritocratic
Republic of Letters was an ideal that would never be fully realized, but as an
ideal it had great force in shaping people’s conception of themselves and
their culture. Robert Darnton, “Google and the Future of Books,” New York
Review of Books, February 12, 2009.
