The Gutenberg Revolution: A History of Print Culture

In this book, Richard Abel describes the earlier centuries that form the background to understanding the radical cultural impact of the printing revolution. He begins with the eighth century Carolingian Renaissance and the twelfth century Renaissance, noting the viability of the new Christian/Classical culture of the West. While both proved too culturally fragile to endure, those who salvaged those two earlier Renaissances preserved elements of 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#x19;s invention, is a major focus of the work.

Richard Abel and Gordon Graham, editors In the first third of the twentieth century, the publishing industry in the United Kingdom and the United States was marked by well-established and comfortable traditions pursued by family-dominated firms. The British trade was the preserve of self-satisfied men entirely certain of their superiority in the world of letters; their counterparts in North America were blissfully unaware of development and trends outside their borders. In this unique historical analysis, Richard Abel and Gordon Graham show how publishing evolved post-World War II to embrace a different, more culturally inclusive, vision.