AHR Forum

An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited

ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN

Some twenty years ago, I introduced The Printing Press as an Agent of Change with a chapter entitled "The Unacknowledged Revolution." There, I noted that, although everyone seemed to agree that the consequences of the advent of printing were of great importance, they all stopped short of telling us just what those consequences were. To offer a full account far exceeded the capacities of any one individual. But even though the task could not be completed, I thought it should at least be begun. A beginning is what I attempted to provide.	1
As one might expect, not all my suggestions found favor. The most common objection was that I had exaggerated revolutionary aspects and downplayed evolutionary ones. Recent studies in book history continue to elaborate on this point.1 They note how manuscript book dealers anticipated the commercial practices of later printers and how the hand copying of books persisted long after printers had set to work.2 Concern with book format (stimulated by the transfer of texts onto screens) has also called into question the idea of a "printing revolution." Roger Chartier, for example, suggests that we ought to "reinscribe the emergence of the printing press" in a long-term history that encompasses the shift from roll to codex and from codex to screen.3 The replacement of handcopied codex by printed codex would appear as a very minor episode (a blip or hiccup) in such a long-term history. The same point holds good if we turn from book format to consider the history of reading. Previous assumptions about hearing and reading publics have been brought into question by studies (such as Paul Saenger's) showing that the separation of words and the habit of silent reading predated the advent of movable type.4 Since printing introduced no comparable changes, its significance is further reduced.	2
The shift from roll to codex and the development of different reading practices are certainly topics worth pursuing. But so, too, are the effects of printing on the flow of information, the collection of data, the retrieval of records, and the replication of images and symbols. My work was not intended to be framed by either the history of the book or the history of reading. Instead, I had in mind a broader, currently unfashionable, unit of study: Western Civilization (or "Western Christendom"—as it was known in the fifteenth century). I wanted to explore how the shift from script to print affected diverse institutions, traditions, occupations, and modes of thought and expression that were present in Western Europe during the late fifteenth century. I was particularly curious about the way changes affecting the transmission of texts over the course of many generations impinged upon historical consciousness. Thus I was concerned with a "long revolution" entailing cumulative effects, as well as a short one, entailing a rapid increase in output.5	3
Although current trends in book history have pointed away from such concerns, other fields ranging from the study of nationalism to that of art history have proved more receptive.6 Especially in literary studies, intriguing variations have been played on some of my themes.7 Indeed, the term "print culture" is being employed in so many diverse contexts that it is in danger of becoming a meaningless cliché.8 In addition, recent decades have also seen my work attract the attention of media analysts who hope to place the most recent information technologies in some sort of historical perspective.9 As a result, the afterlife of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change has been extended. A retrospective review essay has recently appeared on H-NET.10 New translations and new editions of my shorter illustrated version are, even now, forthcoming.11 It occurred to me a short while ago that perhaps the printing revolution should no longer be described as unacknowledged.	4
With the recent appearance of Adrian Johns's much praised, large prizewinning work, however, things have taken an unexpected turn.12 All those authorities who stopped short of spelling out the consequences of printing turn out to be wrong—not because they stopped short but because they assumed that the introduction of printing did have consequences.13 Rather like members of the NRA who insist that "guns don't shoot people, people do," Johns argues that printing did not preserve texts more securely than had hand copying. Only people using printing presses could do that.	5
Up to a point, this emphasis on the human element strikes me as commendable. Here, as in some other places, Johns agrees with me rather more than some attacks on my book might suggest.14 "Printing was of no more consequence than any other inanimate tool," I wrote, "unless it had been deemed useful by human agents, it would never have been put into operation in fifteenth century European towns."15 But of course, it was deemed useful and was put into operation in many European towns within a relatively short interval. In setting out to specify just what changes ensued, I paused over a problem that Johns also notes. "Print is often hard to analyze historically," he writes, "since it seems to be self-explanatory." "The effects of printing are by no means self evident," I wrote. "To track them down and set them forth is much easier said than done."16	6
On some of these effects, moreover, we are also in agreement. Thus we both take note of the new occupational groups who gathered in new printing shops and who brought new marketing and manufacturing techniques to book production.17 Johns offers a wealth of data drawn from English case histories to supplement my sketchier treatment of continental printers and publishers. I describe them as entrepreneurs; he calls them "undertakers"—the same word in two different languages. Johns also helps to substantiate my own suggestions by demonstrating how texts were molded as well as marketed in printing shops.18 Finally, we share in common a desire to encourage more interchange between historians of science and book historians.19	7
Although we are in agreement rather more than some reviews have indicated, there are significant points of disagreement. What follows will take up relevant issues20 under three headings: First come issues associated with impersonal processes. Johns denies that the wooden handpress had any intrinsic powers (guns don't kill people) and downplays the difference between script and print. I stress the difference between the two modes of duplication and believe the shift from one to the other affected significant historical developments. Second, we diverge on the "geography of the book." Johns's account of printing practices is restricted to England, whereas mine is cosmopolitan in scope. He thus omits consideration of continental distribution networks and of Catholic-Protestant divisions—both of which (in my view) affected scientific publication. Third, whereas I take the establishment of printing shops in fifteenth-century Europe as inaugurating a communications revolution, Johns believes the "so-called" printing revolution was a retrospective discursive construct that emerged only in the eighteenth or maybe in the nineteenth century. Here as elsewhere, Johns is precise about place but very imprecise about date.	8
Did impersonal processes come into play after the widespread adoption of letterpress printing? In my view, any complete account of "print and knowledge in the making" (to cite Johns's subtitle) must make room for changes in communications technology as well as for personal agency.21 Johns's vehement objections on this point seem to me wide of the mark. He brushes aside all consideration of how the use of printing affected the duplication of texts and images as being too abstract, "outside history," "placeless and timeless."22 I see nothing abstract or outside history about the rapid spread of printing shops throughout Western Europe and the concomitant increased output of texts. Quantitative change (increased output) is by its nature impersonal. But that is no reason to deny its historical significance. Far from being placeless or timeless, the early phases of the printing revolution lend themselves to being located and dated. So, too, does the subsequent movement of printing centers and the expansion of trade networks.	9
But Johns wants us to "forget" what we ourselves "know" about such developments. He urges us instead to consider how the people of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries constructed and construed the craft in their own setting and for their own ends (an unobjectionable piece of advice). He goes on to note (correctly) that earlier commentators admired printing "for its power to preserve in contrast to previous scribal arts." But he no sooner introduces this opinion than he discredits it with the (ad hominem and irrelevant) comment that it was a "contentious argument" from which "printers stood to gain." Having advised us to consider how early modern Europeans construed the craft, he then disregards his own advice. Although contemporaries made much of the contrast between hand copying and printing, he writes, "we ourselves may usefully draw some rather different distinctions." We ought to look "not just for differences between print and manuscript reproduction but for the different ways in which the press itself and its products have been . . . employed."23	10
It is here in particular that we come to a parting of the ways. All along, my concern has been to understand the difference between print and manuscript so as to comprehend the nature of the fifteenth-century change—not as something that belongs outside history but rather as a historic development firmly grounded in a certain time and place. Johns resolutely refuses to compare the output of copyists with that of printers and brusquely dismisses any suggestion that new features were introduced by printing. Not even the dramatic increase in the number of books made available after the mid-fifteenth century is deemed worth consideration.	11
"Talk of diffusion and dissemination," he writes, "will not now pass muster." One wonders why. Such talk was common enough among early modern commentators: God inspired the discovery of printing "to disseminate the truth in our century," wrote François Lambert in 1526.24 To be sure, this theme was more common among evangelical preachers than among natural philosophers, whose treatises had limited circulation.25 Nevertheless, the enrichment of reading matter, new encounters with contradictions, and new possibilities of cross referencing deserve consideration in a work purporting to be about "knowledge in the making." Johns apparently does not share my curiosity about the processes that led to the discrediting of long-held ancient theories (such as Aristotelian physics, Ptolemaic astronomy, or Galenic anatomy). Although he devotes a chapter to reading practices, he ignores the enlargement of libraries,26 the burgeoning of book fairs, and all the other developments that enabled individuals to gain access to more paper tools and visual aids. Nor does he consider how the dissemination of a single text might enable scattered observers to scan the heavens for the same signs on the same date.	12
As for standardization and preservation, Johns confusingly lumps both features under the rubric of "fixity"—a term best reserved for preservation alone. Apart from a grudging concession that "print did stabilize texts to some extent," he ignores the preservative powers of print entirely and thus has nothing to say about textual transmission or about any of the processes I discussed under the heading of "fixity and cumulative change."27 Earlier writers who hailed printing as "the art that preserved all other arts" receive no hearing. Thomas Jefferson's recognition that only by printing the laws of the land could one preserve them for posterity goes unremarked. So, too, does the systematic retrieval of ancient artifacts and languages. Similarly, the sheer accumulation of data that led to the outmoding of ancient authorities such as Pliny and Diascorides and that led also from one-volume encyclopedias to multivolume serial studies of specialized topics finds no place in Johns's book.28	13
Instead, he is almost obsessively preoccupied with standardization—a feature he persists in equating with "fixity." He conflates several different issues under this label and uses it when challenging the notion (which he attributes to me) that printing made texts more uniform, more accurate, and more credible. On the issue of uniformity, we do disagree, largely because Johns stresses the disadvantages of the handpress compared with later steam-powered machines, whereas I stress its advantages when set against copying by hand.29 We do disagree about uniformity. But the idea that simply printing a text could make it more accurate or more credible strikes me as absurd—too absurd even to be used as a straw man.	14
As I repeatedly suggest, in the hands of ignorant craftsmen, the printing of texts led to the multiplying of error (all errors being "compounded by pirated editions") and led also to the output of reversed images with misleading captions.30 But (as I also note) not all master printers were ignorant and careless. Some gained a reputation within the learned community for taking pains with illustrations31 and for employing knowledgeable copy editors and proofreaders ("correctors").32 Some (Regiomontanus comes to mind) were themselves experts in a given special field. "In the hands of ignorant printers driving to make quick profits, data tended to get garbled at an ever more rapid pace." But under the guidance of technically proficient masters, printing provided a means of transcending the limits imposed by scribal procedures.33 Since Johns refuses to consider the limits that were imposed by hand copying, he never comes to terms with this argument or with any of the specific examples that were provided to back it up.	15
He is so intent on contrasting the irregularity of early modern printed output with the standardized editions of today, he seems to forget that this contrast was not apparent hundreds of years ago.34 His discussion of why contemporaries must have distrusted all books—ranging from lowly almanacs to costly folios—has an anachronistic air. "Contemporaries had good reason to be wary," he writes, "their editions of Shakespeare, Donne, Sir Thomas Browne were liable to be dubious."35 "The first folio of Shakespeare" contained "non uniform spelling and punctuation . . . No two copies were identical . . . In such a world, questions of credit took the place of assumptions of fixity." In what world were readers concerned about non-uniform spelling? In a seventeenth-century world, or is a twentieth-century author projecting back into the seventeenth century such concerns? After all, no early modern reader had access to a Hinman collator. Even when readers referred to enhanced reliability, Johns writes, "it was often in the face of direct evidence to the contrary."36 That readers did refer to enhanced reliability provides a better indication of their views than does Johns's late twentieth-century opinion of what they overlooked.	16
In fact, Johannes Gutenberg's invention was celebrated from the first for its capacity to standardize texts, and there is ample evidence that it did so from the viewpoint of contemporaries who were dissatisfied with the varied versions produced by hand copying. "This godly and decent order of the ancient fathers hath been altered, broken and neglected . . . [H]eretofore there hath been great diversitie in saying and singing in Churches within this realme . . . [N]ow henceforth all the whole realme shall have but one bible."37 A 1485 missal was certified to be "through God's grace, identical in every copy sentence by sentence, word by word and letter by letter and to correspond precisely with the diocesan exemplar provided to the printer."38 As noted in my book, early printing methods led to the multiplication of variants, and errata had to be issued. But the very output of errata pointed to standardization as a feature of print.39 Johns misconstrues my argument and has me say that printing meant mass reproduction of precisely the same texts.40 I had instead objected to quibbling over the fact that early copies were not all precisely alike.41 To quibble in this way (as Johns does throughout) is to distract attention from the fact that printed copies were sufficiently alike to change conditions within the learned world, to make it possible, for example, for scholars to correspond about a common text—such as Copernicus's De Revolutionibus—while referring to the same passages.42	17
That such correspondence was conducted about the same work from many diverse locales ought to go without saying. But the far-flung distribution of a given work represents the sort of impersonal process that Johns resolutely ignores (or dismisses out of hand—like "talk about dissemination"). He is determined to apply to printing the thesis developed by his mentors, Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, with regard to crediting reports of scientific experiments.43 He depicts all early modern books—"from lowly almanacs to costly folios," "from the humblest ABC to the most elaborate encyclopedia"—as being so unreliable that no reader would credit their contents without foreknowledge of the conditions under which they were printed.44 It is difficult to imagine real readers of ABC books being concerned about such matters. There is no evidence that they were. As for larger reference guides, Johns seems oblivious to the new mode of data collection and feedback that was entailed in the publication of successive editions of works on topics ranging from astronomy to zoology.45	18
He discounts the possibility that one might credit (or discredit) a given work by examining its contents, by comparing and contrasting it with other works in the same field, even without knowing the foreign auspices under which it was published.46 He makes no room for the way encounters with conflicting testimony, contradictory theories, and alternative diagrams47 led to the checking and rechecking of results by observers and investigators. The story of how certain works by Johannes Kepler "previously read and thrown aside" were reappraised and eventually won credit is instructive in this regard. So, too, is the challenge, issued as an open letter by Pierre Gassendi, asking European astronomers to observe a forthcoming transit of Mercury on November 7, 1631, and to check their findings against Kepler's Tables.48	19
Neither large-scale data collection nor a far-flung book trade can be easily reconciled with the model proposed by Johns's mentors in their study of Robert Boyle's experiments.49 It seems plausible that reports of an experiment conducted in a given laboratory might be rendered credible by agreement among "gentlemen" who knew each other well enough to trust each other's words.50 Laboratory experiments were by their nature "local in character." But when Johns asserts that all "cultures of the book were local in character," he seems to be applying the Shapin-Schaffer model to unsuitable materials. The products of a far-flung book trade cannot be confined to a single "citadel," as Johns calls the Stationers' Hall. He argues that "texts could not easily transcend locale," but the atlases, ephemerides, logarithm tables, and other paper tools that were used throughout a cosmopolitan commonwealth of learning did transcend locale. Gassendi's challenge was scarcely "local in character."51	20
It seems misguided to dwell on the problem of assigning credit to a given reference guide without considering how printing enabled scattered readers to send in corrections and supplementary data (even seeds and specimens) to authors, editors, and publishers who conducted a far-flung, wide-ranging correspondence and incorporated new material in new editions of a given work. In the sixteenth century, Abraham Ortelius's correspondents ranged from Muscovy to Wales. Two centuries later, Linnaeus was receiving reports, seed packets, and specimens from the whole world. Such interchanges were conducted not between gentlemen who knew and trusted each other but between authors and their invisible public at large.	21
I entreat the assistance of all those who wish well to the progress of learning and beg they will favor me . . . with extracts of curious books, with such original pieces and accounts of new inventions and machines and any other improvements . . . as are fit to be communicated to the public. In which case I shall either mention their names or observe a religious silence as they shall desire.52
Johns also imputes to me the strange belief that, after printing, "scholars no longer had to concern themselves with the fidelity of their representation."53 I had suggested, instead, that they were more concerned than ever with this issue and cited a comment attributed to Rabelais, when he was editing medical texts for the Lyonnaise printer Sebastian Gryphius, who wanted to complete publication in time for a book fair in 1532: "One wrong word may now kill thousands of men!" I also noted how one error caused the printer of the so-called "Wicked" Bible of 1631 to be fined.54 In several passages, Johns equates "fixity" with "credibility" and (in a remarkable leap) with "civility."55 But the notorious case of the so-called "Wicked" Bible (all copies of which commanded, "Thou shalt commit adultery") showed how "fixity" could render an edition incredible. The same point applies to several other Bible editions that became infamous for their standardized errors.56	22
Johns compounds confusion by stretching the term "piracy" to cover every kind of printed output that was not specifically authorized. His "taxonomy of practices labeled piratical" includes "abridgement, epitomizing, translation …, plagiarism, libel."57 It seems odd to stigmatize translation in this way. Most of William Caxton's output consisted of translation, and so did that of many of the English printers who came after him. Were all books translated from Latin or French into English to be considered "pirated"?58 In any case, it is a mistake to assume that all unauthorized (pirated?) editions were less trustworthy than those that had been duly licensed. Few unauthorized editions of the Latin Vulgate were as corrupt and full of errors as the fully authorized Bible of Pope Sixtus V.59	23
With regard to geographic scope, Johns doesn't go far enough across the Channel to justify his generalizing about either early modern printing or early modern science. What he describes as his "richly detailed historical approach" is impoverished by his restriction of focus to the very special case provided by the English experience. His readers are too often left unaware that he is describing English variations on themes sounded earlier on the continent.60 Throughout, he conveys the mistaken impression that "England was one of the earliest nations to develop a sophisticated and commercial culture of printing and publishing"61 —a statement that is likely to astound Venetian scholars. That England lagged behind the continent is well documented.62 But chronological precision is not Johns's strong point.63 His treatment moves back and forth over an indeterminate interval and, for the most part, skips over the first century of printing. One would never guess from his account that early English presses were largely manned by foreign craftsmen or that the importation of printed books from the continent continued and increased even after English printers became more numerous.64 He takes no notice of the continental printing shops that provided Latin books for English readers, offered sanctuaries for English authors, and most important—given his special concern with natural philosophy—provided Copernicus, Vesalius, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Harvey, et al. with publication outlets.	24
Johns echoes my observation that historians of science make much of publication dates such as 1543 or 1688 yet stop short at the doors of the printing house.65 His insular outlook leaves him vulnerable to the same criticism, for he passes by the doors of every continental printing house that was responsible for the publications that gave the "century of genius" its name. By doing so, he misses an opportunity to connect Catholic-Protestant divisions with scientific communications. "That publication will be forthcoming is too often taken for granted," I wrote. "It is simply assumed that intermediaries . . . will do what is needed. But the necessary services hung in the balance for many virtuosi three centuries ago."66 "Hanging in the balance" alluded to the way censorship inhibited printers from undertaking certain jobs—not only because they feared long delays and uncertainties but also because of more severe measures, including imprisonment and death. I cited Eugenio Garin's description of the "silent battles" that were fought over the Index of Prohibited Books: "It is difficult to understand the atmosphere of suspicion and suppression which dominated the world of culture in the age of Galileo. Heresy was ferreted out from dictionaries and traced in the collections of apothegms . . . believed to be hidden in the very names of printers and had to be exterminated there." I also noted that historians since Garin have done much to illuminate these battles and to make them more difficult to ignore.67 Yet Johns ignores them all. He makes no mention of the Index of Prohibited Books despite the asymmetry it introduced into the European book trade and its repercussions in England.68 His several chapters on the Royal Society take no note of how its reputation was enhanced by the opportunities it extended to foreign virtuosi (such as Marcello Malpighi) who found publication outlets closed in their native lands.69	25
One wonders what Malpighi or Galileo would have thought about Johns's favorable account of the "regulatory constraints" that he deems "necessary to guarantee trust, order and propriety" in the craft. His description of how arguments were resolved within the citadel of Stationers' Hall and of the benefits of such procedures as registering, licensing, and the granting of royal privilege is remarkably rose colored.70 "Faith in print and its products," he writes, depended on these procedures. In Stationers' Court, "the genuine was distinguished from the counterfeit, the authorial from the unauthorized and the printable from the unprintable."71 One becomes increasingly puzzled as to how later generations ever managed to carry on after the lapse of licensing and the weakening of the Stationers' Company.	26
No doubt, privileged printers approved of regimes that granted them exclusive rights to print a given work. But when Johns asserts that "the vast majority of printers and booksellers in cities like London and Paris" supported licensing and similar measures even though this entailed suppressing "texts of which the state disapproved" (my italics), his claim seems much too sweeping.72 It treats the fluctuating policies of diverse regimes that ranged from Mary Tudor to Oliver Cromwell to Queen Anne (from François I to Louis XVI) as if they were all the same. Moreover, it tells us nothing about the views of printers and booksellers in numerous cities that were unlike London and Paris—such as Venice, Basel, Strasbourg, Antwerp, and Amsterdam.	27
While painting his rosy picture of English conditions, Johns finds fault with my portrayal of printers and booksellers as being the "natural enemies" of such regimes.73 But the bookmen that I depicted in this manner were not London stationers, whose activities (it must be noted) were really quite marginal to the far-flung continental book trade of early modern times. Nor were they the privileged printers of Paris. They were, rather, the more freewheeling entrepreneurs who "had good reason to avoid well ordered consolidated dynastic realms and to fear the extension of central control from Rome." By taking advantage of late medieval political particularism, by operating in quasi-independent principalities, loosely federated provinces, and city-states, they could turn out banned books and profit from black markets despite strong censorship edicts issued by officials serving Habsburg and Valois rulers.74 This pattern became even more pronounced after the Bourbons replaced the Valois, French replaced Latin as the cosmopolitan language, and the Huguenots were expelled from France. The French-language press that served a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters and offered publication outlets to the most celebrated writers of the Enlightenment was not run by the privileged printers of Paris.75 As Robert Darnton puts it, a "fertile crescent" of printing shops located just across French borders testified to the preference of eighteenth-century printers and publishers for locales (especially in the Dutch Netherlands) where they could evade many constraints on their trade.	28
This preference was exhibited by many of the printers who served natural philosophers. In the sixteenth century, there was Vesalius's Basel printer, Oporinus, who evaded Calvin's demand that Sebastian Castellio be extradited to Geneva and provided a refuge for John Foxe and others who fled from England during Mary Tudor's reign. In the seventeenth century (and presumably of special relevance to Johns), there was Louis Elzevir, of Leiden and Amsterdam, who enabled Galileo to evade his Italian captors and helped get the aging prisoner's final work smuggled out of Italy to be printed in Leiden.76	29
Interestingly enough, when Johns leaves the English scene briefly to criticize my treatment of Tycho Brahe and Galileo, he completely omits any mention of this final episode in Galileo's publishing career. He makes much of "Galileo, Courtier" and his fall from grace but stops short of describing the fate of the Discorsi—"Galileo's last and greatest book"77 —produced, after his imprisonment, by "Galileo, physicist."	30
Similarly, his account of Tycho Brahe stops short with the astronomer dying, leaving his papers unpublished. Tycho is depicted as being an atypical case because of his noble birth, his complete control of printing operations on his island home, and the protection later given him by Rudolph II's court.78 After his death, Johns writes, his works fell out "of court circles" and "descended into the hands of the book trade," where they "stood at risk of piracy and imitation" and were likely to be read in different ways by different people for different reasons.79 "Their accreditation became far more insecure."80	31
But this fall "out of court circles"—this "descent into the book trade"—was not entirely without benefit. It included the reworking of Tycho's data and the expansion of his star catalog by a low-born assistant whose several publications are oddly omitted from Johns's account, even though they figure in most histories of science.81 This was of course Johannes Kepler, who procured supplies of paper, supervised the punch-cutting of symbols and the setting of type, and finally, in the guise of a traveling salesman, set out in the company of other presumably low-born tradesmen to peddle his finished Rudolphine Tables at the Frankfurt Fair.82	32
Johns comments unfavorably on "the disconnected air" exhibited by my account and complains that I place "printing outside history."83 Yet it is his account that places Tycho's work "outside history" by isolating it on the Dane's remote island kingdom and by assuming it could only be contaminated once it entered a more public domain. It is his account that has disconnected Tycho from his assistant who struggled to produce the Rudolphine Tables amid the disorders of the Thirty Years' War.	33
The "descent into the book trade" after Tycho's death also saw another of Tycho's low-born assistants, who had started out as a clerk in the Dutch herring trade, embark on a successful career as a globemaker and map publisher. This was William Janszoon Blaeu, who died in 1638 as the owner of the largest printing establishment in Amsterdam. It contained nine presses for letterpress printing, six for copperplate work, a type foundry, and rooms set aside for engravers. There was also a book shop in a different location.84 It was Blaeu who gave the Nova of 1572 the long-lasting name of "Tycho's star" by marking it in gold on his celestial globe—by "fixing" it, in short. Blaeu published a third edition of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus in 1617 just after it had been put on the Index.85	34
Blaeu is mentioned by Johns but only in a dismissive manner. He appears as a personage favorably regarded by Joseph Moxon because he had once worked for Moxon's idol: Tycho Brahe. Johns implies that Moxon's admiration was misplaced. He belittles Moxon's admiring reference to Blaeu's improved new press design and says it was not much used in England. (That it was widely adopted on the continent is relegated to a footnote.) Johns even casts doubt on whether Blaeu did design a new press and speculates (wrongly) that Moxon was the only one to credit Blaeu with the new design.86	35
As was the case with many other technically proficient master printers who were located too far across the Channel to be included in Johns's account, Blaeu was strenuously involved in the hurly-burly of the book trade. He furnished simplified latitude tables, vernacular pilot guides, and printed sea charts to sailors. He even offered a money-back guarantee that his printed cards "were better than any hand-copied ones." He engaged in cutthroat competition with another Dutch map publisher as to who would be the first to display new observations of the Southern skies brought back from Dutch expeditions to the East Indies.87 Dutch publishers who jostled each other on boat landings to obtain fresh reports from seamen did not conduct themselves in accordance with the civility Johns attributes to English stationers. They contributed to the knowledge industry, nevertheless.	36
Because such printers and publishers were not of gentle birth or subsidized by noble patrons or hemmed in by licensing regulations, their publications were deemed to be untrustworthy. Gentlemen "soaring above the commercial fray produced works of higher quality than would be possible in an environment of ruthless competition." Only "virtuous people" were capable of "veracious printing." Johns cites such arguments in favor of granting privileges with approval.88 But an environment of ruthless competition did not necessarily result in the output of cheap or shoddy goods. It also spurred some publishers of reference works to turn out improved products and thus to gain a reputation for providing updated reports among the specialists they served.89 The atlases that were produced from the days of Ortelius to those of W. J. Blaeu's son Joan showed how one might profit by exploiting the new mode of data collection, however much one failed to "soar above the commercial fray."	37
Finally, periodization problems need to be addressed. Given his disinterest in distinguishing between script and print and his indifference to the cosmopolitan book trade, it is not surprising that Johns is prepared to dismiss the printing revolution as nothing more than a discursive construct. It is not surprising, but it is puzzling that he regards the construct as so belated—as a "retrospective creation" produced "in the eighteenth century . . . to serve as the cusp separating Descartes, Bacon, Newton and modernity from corruption, superstition, ignorance and despotism." Here as elsewhere, uncertainty about chronology prevails. At one point, we are told that the construct was first fully articulated by Condorcet and was "a result of the French Revolution"; another passage tells us that Turgot preceded Condorcet, so "its first clear manifestations" get put back to the mid-eighteenth century. But we are also told that both Turgot and Condorcet drew their inspiration from Francis Bacon, which means that the early seventeenth century contained some relevant elements. At yet another point, special significance is assigned to the development of lithography and the mechanization of printing processes, so full articulation is postponed until the mid-nineteenth century.90	38
Nevertheless, Johns's chief emphasis is on Condorcet and the French Revolution: "The ideology . . . of a printing revolution was . . . not only a result of the French Revolution: it was perceived as . . . necessary in order to render that revolution both permanent and universal."91 Now it is undeniable that Condorcet and his associates assigned a pivotal historic role to the printing press. The culminating event was the petition to exhume Gutenberg's remains for entombment in the Pantheon alongside Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.92 But there is also evidence that Renaissance humanists and Protestant publicists had regarded the invention of printing as a historical turning point well before the eighteenth century had dawned.	39
Oddly enough, Johns is not entirely unaware that his construct had antecedents. Although his insular outlook and lack of interest in religious history leads him to bypass those Lutherans who claimed that printing had emancipated Germans from bondage to Rome,93 he does pause over John Foxe's "enormously influential" work and notes how a new edition was issued in 1641. "Provided with such emphatic testimony," he writes, "no English Protestant could doubt the providential import of printing . . . [as] a pivotal moment in a vast predestined scheme of doom and salvation."94 But Foxe's views on the benefits of the invention are no sooner mentioned than they are set aside in favor of fifty pages given over to disputes about the identity of the inventor.	40
For reasons that are unclear, Johns assigns great significance to arguments over who invented printing. He believes that "identifying the originator of printing" was "one of the most important problems in early modern historiography."95 So many similar foundation myths and priority disputes (who "discovered" America, who "invented" the telescope) gave rise to prolonged debate that it is hard to see why this one is so important.96 The long section Johns devotes to the disputes over Gutenberg versus Coster (and Caxton versus Corsellis) serves to distract attention from the early formation of the construct. It also avoids coming to terms with my point of departure for the printing revolution (viewed as a historical development and not as a "construct"). This point of departure is not what happened (or did not happen) in one printing shop in Mainz (or elsewhere) but the establishment of many shops unknown in Europe before the mid-fifteenth century and found "in every important municipal center by 1500."97 Even while attributing too much importance to the "naming" of the single inventor, Johns pays too little attention to those numerous other early printers whose identity was never in question.98 This leads to his bizarre conclusion that the "printing revolution" was not "complete" until the nineteenth century, when, presumably, claimants other than Gutenberg (and Caxton) were discredited. "In a sense, the invention of printing was not complete until the cultural identity of its inventor had crystallized." "With the crystallization of certainty in its inventors came a crystallization of certainty in print itself. And with that came the printing revolution."99	41
In the emphasis on debates about naming the "true" inventor, Johns's priorities are at odds with those of John Foxe. Foxe changed his mind about the identity of the inventor from one edition to another. But he did not regard the issue as important. In his section "The Benefite and Invention of Printing,"100 he noted that "what man soever was the instrument" was unimportant compared with "what end and purpose . . . what utility and necessity" the invention served. He went on to describe all that printing did to spread true knowledge and defeat the forces of darkness:	42
hereby tongues are known, judgement increaseth, books are dispersed, the Scripture is seen, . . . times be compared, truth discerned, falsehood detected . . . and all (as I said) through the benefit of printing. Wherefore I suppose, that either the pope must abolish printing, or . . . he must seek a new world to reign over: for else as this world standeth, printing will doubtless abolish him.101
It is puzzling how anyone who has not only read Foxe but also acknowledged his "enormous influence" can postpone until the eighteenth century "the earliest clear manifestations of the concept of the press as a unique force for historical transformation"—especially since historians have long noted a resemblance between Condorcet's treatment of printing and that of John Foxe.102	43
Furthermore, world historical significance was attributed to printing even before Martin Luther set the pattern for Protestant celebrations. Johns not only misconstrues Foxe, he ignores all the other relevant writings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that were later reworked during the Enlightenment.103 In this regard, he keeps company with Michael Warner, who also dismisses earlier tributes to printing and also views the printing revolution as an eighteenth-century construct. Warner makes the misleading claim that "early printers in no way distinguished their work from hand produced documents," thereby overlooking numerous self-congratulatory colophons.104 "Who dares glorify the pen made book / when so much better brass-stamped letters look."105 Not only early printers and editors but also cardinals, patricians, and Sorbonne professors hailed printing as a "divine art" almost as soon as the first Bibles had come off the Mainz press.106 Of course, there were competing narratives.107 Careless printers were denounced just as careless scribes had been; authors complained of greedy publishers, and satirists depicted drunken printing workers. Nevertheless, the wooden handpress was soon assigned a prominent place among the other inventions and discoveries (new stars and new colonies) that signified the dawning of a new age. A series of prints issued in the 1590s entitled Nova Reperta illustrated the primacy assigned to printing, gunpowder, and the compass well before Francis Bacon's time.108 Given such a well-documented early modern context for the construct, it seems both arbitrary and absurd to relocate it centuries later.	44
Although Johns implies some acquaintance with "the historian's craft," he seems to be unfamiliar with its protocols and thinks nothing of jumping over hundreds of years. "If it amounted only to the claim that the familiar printing revolution happened four centuries later than any one has hitherto thought," he writes, "then my argument would not in the end be all that disquieting. Such a claim would imply no more than a reconsideration of the chronology of what would in essence remain the existing story."109	45
Such a claim may well appeal to a "postmodern" sensibility. But the idea that two stories remain essentially the same when placed four centuries apart is, for this (old-fashioned?) historian, very disquieting indeed. The establishment of printing shops across fifteenth-century Europe is the basis for one story. The industrialization of printing processes is the basis for another story. To conflate the two throws time out of joint even while altering the "familiar printing revolution" beyond all recognition.	46
The Nature of the Book has attracted numerous accolades and prizes. It is an impressive work in many respects. But it does a real disservice to historical understanding by treating the shift from script to print as inconsequential. As I wrote some twenty years ago, "Consequences entailed by a major transformation have to be reckoned with whether we pay attention to them or not. In one guise or another they will enter into our accounts and can best be dealt with when they do not slip in unobserved."110 Historians who come of age in the twenty-first century should not have to contend with an unacknowledged revolution once again.	47
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein is a professor emerita at the University of Michigan, where she held the Alice Freeman Palmer Chair of History from 1975 to 1988. Since then, she has been a fellow at the Humanities Research Center of the Australian National University as well as at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behaviorial Sciences (Palo Alto). Her Lyell Lectures, delivered while she was visiting professor at Wolfson College, Oxford, were published in 1992 as Grub Street Abroad. An abridged, illustrated version of her major work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, with the title The Printing Revolution, has repeatedly been reissued as a "Canto Book," most recently in 2000. In 1999, Eisenstein conducted a seminar at the Folger Library exploring attitudes toward early printing and is now working on a book on this topic. Notes This is a revised version of a paper first given, at the invitation of Jonathan Rose, to a conference organized by graduate students, "The History of the Book—The Next Generation," held at the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Drew University, on September 16, 2000. I owe thanks to Margaret DeLacy, William Sherman, and the AHR readers for suggesting revisions. 1 This objection often seems to be aimed at exaggerated claims that are not of my making. See, for example, some of the recent essays in Books and the Sciences in History, Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, eds. (Cambridge, 2000), section 1. (This volume, to which Adrian Johns contributes, is a by-product of a conference run by the History and Philosophy of Science group at Cambridge University.) See also interview by Krassimira Daskalova with Robert Darnton, SHARP News (Summer 1994): 3; and my comments, SHARP News (Winter 1994–95): 5. 2 Anthony Grafton, "The Humanist as Reader" (citing the work of Richard and Mary Rouse), in A History of Reading in the West, Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. (Amherst, Mass., 1999), 186–90. See also Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993); François Moureau, ed., De bonne main: La communication manuscrite au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1993). 3 Roger Chartier, "Texts, Printing, Readings," in The New Cultural History, Lynn Hunt, ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), chap. 6, pp. 154–71. 4 Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, Calif., 1997); "Silent Reading," Viator 13 (1982): 367–431. See also Bernard Knox, "Silent Reading in Antiquity," Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 9 (1968): 421–35. 5 For various meanings of the term "revolution" and my use of it, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, "On Revolution and the Printed Word," in Revolution in History, Roy Porter and Mikulá Teich, eds. (Cambridge, 1986), 186–206. 6 See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983); Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven, Conn., 1997). 7 A few titles that come to mind: Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989); Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton, N.J., 1987); Joseph Loewenstein, "The Script in the Marketplace," Representations 12 (Fall 1985): 10–14; Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, 1995); Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville, Va., 1993). A collection of essays appeared just before my cut-off date of 2000: Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of Media in Early Modern England, Michael D. Bristol and Arthur F. Marotti, eds. (Columbus, Ohio, 2000). 8 My own use of the term has been deemed "curiously metaphysical" in a recent review in Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (Fall 1999): 150. (Ironically, "Eighteenth-Century Print Culture" is used as an umbrella title to cover miscellaneous topics in this same special issue of the journal.) I had used the term quite specifically to contrast diverse procedures employed by scribes and manuscript dealers with those employed by printers—substituting "scribal culture" and "print culture" for the more recondite terms "chirographic culture" and "typographic culture," used by Walter Ong. See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979), 9 n. 18. 9 James A. Dewar, "The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead," RAND Paper 8014 (Santa Monica, Calif., 1998). 10 This long review by Shannon E. Duffy appeared in June 2000 as part of the "H-Ideas Retrospective Reviews Series" on the Internet. Available on the World Wide Web at www2.h-net.msu.edu/~ideas/. 11 The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe was reprinted in 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990, and 1992; reissued as a "Canto Book" in 1993 and again in 2000. It has been translated into ten languages. 12 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998). 13 Actually, Johns seems unaware that previous accounts did stop short and believes that historians have "always" tried to track down changes wrought by printing "in all parts of early modern life." Adrian Johns, "Science and the Book in Modern Cultural Historiography," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29, no. 2 (1998): 175. 14 In his favorable review of Johns, John Feather, "Revolutions Revisited," SHARP News (Autumn 1999): 10–11, contrasts my unfortunate preoccupation with "impersonal influences" with the "real world" and "real people" described by Johns. 15 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 703. 16 Johns, Nature of the Book, 325; Eisenstein, Printing Press, 7. 17 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 22–23. 18 At one point, Johns goes almost too far in attributing important functions to a single master printer—holding him responsible for shaping "the kinds of knowledge—and hence the kinds of social order—available in early modern England." Johns, Nature of the Book, 323. 19 When he writes about relating science to book history, Johns too often assumes the undeserved mantle of a pioneer. He passes over previous work and never mentions the name of George Sarton, who had linked the two fields in the 1950s. 20 For the purposes of this essay, I am singling out issues that seem relevant to Johns's chosen field of the history of science and will set aside other topics covered in my book. 21 Eisenstein, Printing Press, xv. 22 Johns, Nature of the Book, 19. 23 Johns, Nature of the Book, 5. 24 Johns, Nature of the Book, 43; Jean-François Gilmont, "Protestant Reformations and Reading," in Cavallo and Chartier, History of Reading in the West, 213. 25 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 453, 694. 26 As George Sarton noted long ago, the large library is just as much a scientific instrument as is the telescope or cyclotron. Eisenstein, Printing Press, 519. Its importance as "a place where science is carried out and where knowledge is produced" has recently been restated and documented by William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995), 49. There is no index entry to libraries in Johns's book and, as far as I can tell, no reference to them. 27 Johns, Nature of the Book, 36; Eisenstein, Printing Press, 113–26. 28 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 115–16, 487. 29 See pertinent passage about the lack of uniformity that characterized early printing and how printed editions nevertheless still had some measure of uniformity when set against the even more diverse output of copyists. Eisenstein, Printing Press, 11. 30 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 108, 258. 31 On illustrations, see Eisenstein, Printing Press, 53–54, 85–86, 259, 262–63, 266–69, 367, 469, 569. Although William Ivins's recognition of the importance of the "exactly repeatable pictorial statement" has found favor among many specialists (especially historians of cartography), he is ignored by Johns, who makes much of printers' blunders—such as the reversed images of the lunar surface depicted in Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius (Nature of the Book, 21–24)—but says nothing about the degradation of images that were repeatedly hand copied. The care taken to obtain gifted illustrators is indicated by the supervision exercised to get the woodblocks made in Titian's workshop carried over the Alps to the Basel printing shop of Oporinus, where De Fabrica was seen through the press. Eisenstein, Printing Press, 569. For a recent authoritative treatment of description and reportage via the printed image, see David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470–1550 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), esp. 240–59. 32 As is true of most other studies of reading practices, Johns's chapter on that topic has remarkably little to say about proofreading. The seminal article by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine on Gabriel Harvey, "Studied for Action," Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 30–78, similarly takes no note of how differently Harvey must have read when he served as a proofreader for John Wolfe. 33 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 109, 486–87. 34 Johns, Nature of the Book, 30. 35 Johns, Nature of the Book, 30. One wonders why the works of Shakespeare and John Donne are introduced in a study concerned with assigning credit to technical texts. 36 Johns, Nature of the Book, 31. When he cites Edmund Halley: "since the invention of printing the survival of exactly the same texts had been virtually assured," it is only to indicate disagreement with Halley's opinion (p. 425). 37 The preface to The Book of Common Prayer, 1549 (English Short Title Catalogue, STC 16274). 38 Paul Needham, "Haec Sancta Ars: Gutenberg's Invention as a Divine Gift," Gazette of the Grolier Club (New York) 42 (1990): 106. Needham makes clear that churchmen were attracted to printing because they appreciated its capacity to standardize liturgies. See also the account of the standardization of English liturgical texts by John Wall, "The Reformation in England and the Typographical Revolution," in Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim, eds. (Newark, Del., 1986), 208–22. 39 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 80. 40 Johns, Nature of the Book, 10 41 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 81. Other evidence also suggests that he skimmed my work rather hastily before launching his attack. Compare his complaint about my "persistent" use of the anachronistic term "scientist" (Nature of the Book, 11) with my comment: "'scientist' is still a problematic creature, as current definitions suggest. In the early modern era, it may be a mistake to use the label at all." Eisenstein, Printing Press, 640. 42 Robert S. Westman, "Three Responses to the Copernican Theory," in Westman, ed., The Copernican Achievement (Berkeley, Calif., 1975), chap. 9, 285–345, 343. Owen Gingerich, "The Censorship of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus," Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 6, no. 2 (1981): 45–61. 43 "The Nature of the Book builds on Steven Shapin's identification of trust as a key element in the making of knowledge." Johns, 31. Johns's bibliography cites eleven publications by Shapin and eleven by Schaffer (who supervised Johns's graduate work) plus their joint work: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., 1985). 44 Johns, Nature of the Book, 30, 32. 45 For example, Conrad Gesner enlisted the help of some fifty correspondents in different regions and also solicited drawings and specimens when compiling his pioneering multivolume work on zoology: Historia Animalium (Zurich, 1551); Eisenstein, Printing Press, 98–99. 46 That credibility is not always independent of content (that what is said is as important as who said it) is pointed out by Peter Lipton, "The Epistemology of Testimony," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29, no. 1 (1998): 1–31—a critique of Steven Shapin's "social constructivist approach." 47 See, for example, the two illustrations, 1) of three diagrams of competing schemes concerning the motion of Mars, presented by Kepler (1609), and 2) concerning world systems presented in the frontispiece of Giovanni Battista Riccioli's Almagestum novum (1651)—both illustrated in my abridged version: The Printing Revolution (1993), 224, 228. 48 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 630–31. 49 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. 50 Plausible but, in my view, unpersuasive. A refutation of Shapin's view that experimental results could be certified by a "gentlemen's agreement" rather than by being subjected to testing and replication is offered by Mordecai Feingold, "When Facts Matter," Isis 87 (1996): 131–39. 51 Johns, Nature of the Book, 30, 625. 52 The Present State of the Republick of Letters (London, 1728–36), 6 vols., 1: preface. I previously cited this same passage in my Hanes Lecture at the University of North Carolina: "Print Culture and Enlightenment Thought" (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 7. 53 Johns, Nature of the Book, 10. 54 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 567–68, 81. 55 Johns, Nature of the Book, 624. 56 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 81 n. 115. 57 Johns, Nature of the Book, 33. 58 Johns's treatment of piracy in an age before copyright was established also has an anachronistic air. That authors often took refuge behind the pretense that their work was "pirated" is underplayed. There is one reference to Isaac Newton (Nature of the Book, 512–13) indulging in this pretense, but otherwise little is said about the way authors and publishers "cried wolf" in this matter. See, for example, Erika Rummel, "Professional Friendships among Humanists," in In Laudem Caroli: Renaissance and Reformation Studies for Charles G. Nauert, James V. Mehl, ed. (Kirksville, Mo., 1998), 35–45. 59 See Basil Hall, "Biblical Scholarship: Editions and Commentaries," in The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, S. L. Greenslade, ed. (Cambridge, 1963), 68–69. Thomas James (Bodley's first librarian) produced a four-volume Latin treatise on Sixtus V's version, including a 40-page itemized list of its mistakes and mistranscriptions. 60 Johns, Nature of the Book, 623. He seems surprised at how often the English printer Joseph Moxon invokes Vitruvian principles in connection with cutting letters (Nature of the Book, 80, 107, 144) without noting how Moxon was echoing earlier treatises on "geometrical alphabets" by continental calligraphers, engravers, and mathematicians—such as Felice Feliciano, Luca Pacioli, Geoffroy Tory, Albrecht Dürer, et al. (Eisenstein, Printing Press, 203 n. 108, 548–49). He singles out an English bookseller as the main producer of John Locke's work (Nature of the Book, 583) without noting that Locke's debut in print and subsequent celebrity as the author of an Essay on Human Understanding was due to the earlier initiative of Jean LeClerc, who publicized Locke and his work in his cosmopolitan francophone journal the Bibliothèque universelle. See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1992), 62–64. 61 Johns, Nature of the Book, 41. 62 "Between Caxton's return [to England] and the end of the century there were fewer printers in the whole of England than might be found in a reasonably prosperous year in Paris or Venice." Martin Lowry, "The Arrival and Use of Continental Books in Yorkist England," in Le livre dans l'Europe de la Renaissance, Pierre Aquilon and Henri-Jean Martin, eds. (Paris, 1988), 449. 63 "In the sixteenth century," he writes, "almost from the first introduction of printing, Tudor administrations had instituted measures" such as setting up the Stationers' Company (Johns, Nature of the Book, 189). The "almost" covers an 80-year interval. His book contains oddly anachronistic illustrations such as the fanciful mid-nineteenth-century depiction of "Benjamin Franklin in His Printing House," taken from a magazine of 1859 (p. 97), and the picture of "The Bookseller as Host," ostensibly illustrating a "social setting pioneered by Tonson around 1700 or earlier" (p. 121) but actually depicting a late nineteenth-century social setting, taken from a Harpers' Monthly of 1885. 64 See Lotte Hellinga, "Printing," and Margaret Lane Ford, "The Importation of Printed Books into England and Scotland," The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 3: 1400–1557 (Cambridge, 1999), 65–109; 179–205. 65 Johns, Nature of the Book, 42. 66 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 638–39. 67 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 670. 68 As I noted, the Index served to guide the publication programs of both John Wolfe and, later, Thomas Salusbury. Eisenstein, Printing Press, 416, 677. 69 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 664–65. 70 Johns, Nature of the Book, 38, 624. 71 Johns, Nature of the Book, 263. 72 Johns, Nature of the Book, 38. 73 Johns, Nature of the Book, 37. 74 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 139, 405, 442–47. 75 On the extraterritorial French-language press, see my Grub Street Abroad, passim; and special section on "L'édition en français hors de la France," in Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, eds., Histoire de l'édition française (Paris, 1984), 2: 304–67. In keeping with his neglect of Jean LeClerc, see n. 60 above, Johns underestimates the wide-ranging influence of the long-lived diverse francophone journals called Bibliothèques and takes the Royal Society's Transactions as the sole model for their "shortlived" English equivalents. Nature of the Book, 537. 76 Johns has two footnote references to an Elzevir (Nature of the Book, 138, 261) without specifying which member of the dynasty he means. Shortly after publishing Galileo and Descartes in Leiden, Louis Elzevir moved to Amsterdam to set up business there and to publish works by Hobbes, Bacon, Gassendi, and Milton, among others. David W. Davies, The World of the Elseviers, 1580–1712 (The Hague, 1954), 105. (I follow Johns's spelling of the variously spelled name.) 77 Galileo Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Stillman Drake, trans. (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), epilogue, 281. The term "Galileo, Courtier" comes from Mario Biagioli's book: Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, 1993), upon which Johns relies. 78 Johns, Nature of the Book, 14. 79 This seems gratuitous. As Roger Chartier makes clear, it is the fate of all printed matter to be read in different ways by different people for different reasons. Johns seems to believe that I attribute "iconic" status to Tycho and estimates that I make more references to him than "any other Renaissance figure" (Nature of the Book, 50–51 n. 7). A glance at my index entries for Galileo and Erasmus would show his estimate is wrong. 80 Johns, Nature of the Book, 18. 81 Johns mentions only one of Kepler's writings, namely his defense of Tycho, which was never printed. Nature of the Book, 17. 82 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 627. 83 Johns, Nature of the Book, 19. 84 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 627. 85 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 599–600, 676. 86 Apparently, Johns is following the appendix to the Oxford edition of Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683–4, Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, eds., 2d edn. (Oxford, 1962), 373, where the editors are skeptical about the "supposedly new press" and say Moxon is the sole authority for attributing it to Blaeu. Johns, Nature of the Book, 84. But Davies, World of Elseviers, 135, cites a report by Claude Joly (one of several foreign visitors to Blaeu's Amsterdam printing office) on a visit in 1646: "I went to see the Blaeu press which is considered the best in Europe." 87 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 480. 88 Johns, Nature of the Book, 258. 89 W. J. Blaeu's terrestrial measurements thus proved useful to Jean Picard. Eisenstein, Printing Press, 663 n. 90 Johns, Nature of the Book, 374, 373, 378. 91 Johns, Nature of the Book, 374. 92 For background and references to seminal studies by Hans Jürgen Lüsebrink and Gary Kates, see my 1996 Clifford Lecture: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, "Gods, Devils and Gutenberg: The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Printing Press," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture (Julie C. Hayes and Timothy Erwin, eds.) 27 (1996): 1–24. 93 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 304–05. 94 Johns, Nature of the Book, 329. 95 Johns, Nature of the Book, 331. 96 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 119–20. 97 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 44. 98 Individual printers were named and singled out for separate tributes in Conrad Gesner's multivolumed supplement to his Universal Bibliography, the Pandectae of 1548 (Eisenstein, Printing Press, 97–98). John Dee's familiarity with Gesner's volumes is noted by Sherman, John Dee, 48. 99 Johns, Nature of the Book, 375, 378. In keeping with his insularity, Johns gives more weight to ending the dispute about Caxton (which he credits to William Blades's nineteenth-century biography) than to what happened to Gutenberg and couples them both as "inventors" (p. 378). Of course, Caxton was not an inventor but rather an importer of the craft. As for the Coster-Gutenberg dispute, it has yet to be resolved to the satisfaction of Dutch schoolteachers. 100 "The Benefite and Invention of Printing" is the title of the section in the one-volume edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments that I cite [STC 11225] (1583), p. 707, paragraph 3. The title has been rearranged in the more accessible nineteenth-century edition of 1877 (rev. and corrected by the Reverend Josiah Pratt, intro. by John Stoughton), 3: 718, to read: "The Invention and Benefit of Printing." The need to check the later editions against the earlier ones is shown by Thomas Freeman, "Texts, Lies, and Microfilm: Reading and Misreading Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs,'" Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 23–47. 101 Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1877), 720. 102 Johns, Nature of the Book, 373. "The importance Condorcet attached to the invention of printing is curiously reminiscent of John Foxe"; Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston, 1948), 97. 103 Polydore Vergil, Guillaume Budé, François Rabelais, Jean Fernel, Jean du Bellay, Gerolamo Cardano, Jean Bodin, and Martin Frobisher are just a few of the writers who celebrated printing before Francis Bacon. Eisenstein, Printing Press, n. 51. References to others are offered by Needham, "Haec Sancta Ars"; Henri-Jean Martin, "Comment on écrivit l'histoire du livre," in Martin, Le livre français sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1987), 11–39; Raymond Waddington, "Meretrix est Stampificata," in Books Have Their Own Destiny: Essays in Honor of Robert V. Schnucker, Robin Bruce Barnes, et al. (Kirksville, Mo., 1998), 131–41. 104 Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 8. 105 This colophon, translated from Latin by Pollard and taken from Wendelin of Spira's 1470 edition of Sallust, is only one of numerous examples in Alfred W. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations (Chicago, 1905), 37. 106 Aeneas Silvius's letter of March 1455 to Cardinal Carvajal concerning a Mainz Bible he saw in Frankfurt is cited by Needham, "Haec Sancta Ars," 105, along with many other pertinent refer-ences. 107 Objections to the new craft, posed mainly by fifteenth-century Venetians, are described by Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), 26–41. Lowry himself holds Venetian printers in low esteem until Aldus arrives on the scene. 108 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 20–21 n. 51. Relevant prints are discussed and used to illustrate my Harold Jantz Memorial Lecture given at Oberlin in 1995: "Printing as a Divine Art: Celebrating Western Technology in the Age of the Hand Press" (Oberlin College Library, 1996). 109 Johns, Nature of the Book, 638, 628. 110 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 42.

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