The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

List of Illustrations
Preface

Chapter 1. First Impressions
Prologue: Some Foundation Myths
Initial Reactions: Pros and Cons

Chapter 2. After Luther: Civil War in Christendom
Printing as a Protestant Weapon
Pamphlet Warfare: ''The Media Explosion'' of the 1640s

Chapter 3. After Erasmus: Propelling the Knowledge Industry
Celebrating Technology/Advancement of Learning
Overload: Lost in the Crowd

Chapter 4. Eighteenth-Century Attitudes
Prelude and Preview
Literary Responses: Mystic Art/Mercenary Trade
Politics in a New Key: The Atlantic Revolutions

Chapter 5. The Zenith of Print Culture (Nineteenth Century)
The Revolutionary Aftermath
Tories and Radicals in Great Britain
Steam Presses, Railway Fiction

Chapter 6. The Newspaper Press: The End of Books?

Chapter 7. Toward the Sense of an Ending (Fin de Sie'cle to the Present)

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments