The material I covered in last night’s class was a little lighter than I had anticipated. This is the first time I’ve split up the material on print into two sections to correspond with the textbook’s chapter structure: early print and mass print.
If you want to follow up on some of the material we covered, here are some resources I would recommend.
- Chinese block printing predates Gutenberg by about 1,000 years.
- Gutenberg’s Movable Type, among other things, dropped the price of a Bible to about an average clerk’s wage for three years.
- Visit the Gutenberg Bible at the Morgan Library and at the New York Public Library.
- Listen to this BBC program on Diderot’s Encyclopedia and read the Preliminary Discourse by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. If you listen to this whole program, you’ll hear that the French Revolution was not in fact a result of the French Enlightenment. That was news to me.
- And if you want to get a sense of the emergence of print in England, listen to this other program from the same series on print in the seventeenth century.
As my friends would say… ABC: Always Be Curious.