![]() “It soon will change the countenance of the universe… Printing was only born a short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfection… Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtuous writer!”Įven the illiterate couldn’t resist the attraction of revolutionary Enlightenment authors, Palmer says. “ is the most beautiful gift from heaven,” continues Mercier. Public opinion has now become a preponderant power in Europe, one that cannot be resisted… one may hope that enlightened ideas will bring about the greatest good on Earth and that tyrants of all kinds will tremble before the universal cry that echoes everywhere, awakening Europe from its slumbers.” “A great and momentous revolution in our ideas has taken place within the last thirty years. ![]() Writing in pre-Revolution France, Louis-Sebástien Mercier declared: Increasing democratization of knowledge in the Enlightenment era led to the development of public opinion and its power to topple the ruling elite. The largest European library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total manuscripts. Palmer says that one hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much as a house and libraries cost a small fortune. The operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin. Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries. One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them. The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca. Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci. Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns. The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world. “If you printed 200 copies of a book in Venice, you could sell five to the captain of each ship leaving port,” says Palmer, which created the first mass-distribution mechanism for printed books. ![]() ![]() Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century. Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors. “What are you going to do with the other 197 copies?” “Congratulations, you’ve printed 200 copies of the Bible there are about three people in your town who can read the Bible in Latin,” says Palmer. Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market before Amazon introduced the Kindle. But as historian Ada Palmer explains, Gutenberg’s invention wasn’t profitable until there was a distribution network for books.
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