This work makes plain the evolution, impact and development of the printed word as we know it. Covering the earliest forms of the letters of the alphabet, to graphic technology today, this revised edition should appeal to designers, students and typophiles.
"Read better, write better, communicate better by learning how to use the power of the printed word. A unique compilation of practical advice and information from the pros: thirteen nationally known figures whose very success has depended on their ability to communicate." -- Back cover.
Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have "made things happen" in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people. In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry James, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller––even the notorious Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler––by knowing what they have read. He shows how books that many of these people have consulted, in some cases annotated with their marginal notes, can offer tantalizing clues to the evolution of their character and the development of their thought.
Books, and the printed word more generally, are aspects of modern life that are all too often taken for granted. Yet the emergence of the book was a process of immense historical importance and heralded the dawning of the epoch of modernity. In this much praised history of that process, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin mesh together economic and technological history, sociology and anthropology, as well as the study of modes of consciousness, to root the development of the printed word in the changing social relations and ideological struggles of Western Europe.
This ultimate travel guide for bibliophiles explores the most literary towns across the globe—full of charming bookshops, fairs, festivals, and more. The so-called “Book Towns” of the world are dedicated havens of literature, and the ultimate dream of book lovers everywhere. Book Towns takes readers on a richly illustrated tour of the forty semi-officially recognized literary towns around the world and outlines the history and development of each community, and offers practical travel advice. Many Book Towns have emerged in areas of marked attraction, such as Ureña in Spain or Fjaerland in Norway, where bookshops have been set up in buildings including former ferry waiting rooms and banks. While the UK has the best-known examples at Hay, Wigtown and Sedbergh, author and dedicated book collected Alex Johnson visits such far-flung locations as Jimbochu in Japan, College Street in Calcutta, and major unofficial “book cities” such as Buenos Aires.
One of the most puzzling lapses in historical accounts of the rise of the West following the decline of the Roman Empire is the casual way historians have dealt with Gutenberg's invention of printing. The cultural achievement that followed the fifteenth century, in which the West moved from relative backwardness to remarkable, robust cultural achievement is unimaginable absent Gutenberg's gift and its subsequent widespread adoption across most of the world. In this book, Richard Abel describes the historical background of the radical cultural impact of the printing revolution. He begins from the eighth century to the Renaissance noting the viability of the new Christian/Classical culture. While it proved too fragile to endure, those who salvaged it preserved elements of the Classical substance together with the Bible and all the writings of the Church Fathers. The cultural upsurge of the Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries which resulted in part from Gutenberg's invention, is a major focus of the work. Abel aims to delineate how the Cultural Revolution was shaped by the invention of printing and its impact on the rapid reorientation and acceleration of the evolution of the culture in the West. This book provides insight into the history of the printed word, the roots of modern-day mass book production, and the promise of the electronic revolution. It is an essential work in the history of ideas.
Widely regarded as the most important narrative of seventeenth-century New England, William Bradford's Of Plimmoth Plantation is one of the founding documents of American literature and history. In William Bradford's Books this portrait of the religious dissenters who emigrated from the Netherlands to New England in 1620 receives perhaps its sharpest textual analysis to date—and the first since that of Samuel Eliot Morison two generations ago. Far from the gloomy elegy that many readers find, Bradford's history, argues Douglas Anderson, demonstrates remarkable ambition and subtle grace, as it contemplates the adaptive success of a small community of religious exiles. Anderson offers fresh literary and historical accounts of Bradford's accomplishment, exploring the context and the form in which the author intended his book to be read.
Explores how a variety of print media—religious tracts, newsletters, cartoons, pamphlets, self-help books, mass-market paperbacks, and editions of the Bible from the King James Version to contemporary “Bible-zines”—have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War