- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Headline Review; New edition edition (3 Feb 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747245053
- ISBN-13: 978-0747245056
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.7 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,270,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Frank McLynn, New Statesman
'Much fascinating detail on medieval German social history...this is a very good introduction to Gutenberg and his world'
Robin Blake, Financial Times
'An intelligent narrative marked by engaging enthusiasm'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This isn't heavy-going stuff but rather a very readable history of the invention of printing (we tend to forget how deeply this affected western history) and Gutenberg (about whom, ironically perhaps, there aren't that many primary sources).
John Man is obviously very passionate about the subject, and his enthousiasm is catching. A fine history book!
John Man is obviously very passionate about the subject, and his enthousiasm is catching. A fine history book!
7 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I have had the privilege of seeing pages of a Gutenburg Bible. There is only one complete Bible that remains in a private collection, and the balance are part of the inventories of museums or places like The Library of Congress. An exceptional example can be found at The Morgan Library in NYC, and thanks to a special group of people the work can also be viewed on the internet. To give an idea of the value of one of these Bibles, the last single page I saw at an antiquarian book show was priced at $30,000. If an entire book were to come to auction the price it would bring would be measured in many millions of dollars. William Gates, CEO of Microsoft, paid in excess of $35,000,000 for the Leicester Codex, a one of a kind notebook from the pen of Leonardo Da'Vinci. That is the record ever paid for a single, "book".
As momentous a contribution that Gutenburg gave the world details about his life are few. Even when he had established himself as a printer of some renown, there are many years, and even groups of years that are blank, or filled by only supposition. There are times that the recording of a lawsuit is all that are available to document where he was at a given point in time. And as with many inventions that have changed the course of history, there are the usual arguments over who actually invented what, and then there are the pretenders that history had accepted for centuries.
Those expecting a biography of the inventor will not be satisfied by this book. This is less the fault of the writer than the lack of documentary evidence about the subject. What the reader is given in great detail is a description of history before during and after the printing press became a reality. The Bible that is so routinely associated with the name of Gutenburg has certain volumes that are not only exceptional for the type but also for the decoration that was produced. The fragment of the picture on the cover only hints at the beauty of these books.
And this is the greatest criticism I have of this book. The work of Gutenburg was visual, and in many examples exceptionally beautiful. I cannot reconcile these facts with a book that offers a single black and white photograph of one page of this historic Bible. The invention of the press that Gutenburg created is exceptional, and exceptionally complicated. All the reader is offered is a brief description on how complicated it is, and two pages with a handful of drawings that raise more questions than they answer. The author should have let readers decide how much effort they wished to invest to understand this invention rather than presuming readers would be pleased with the barest of details.
If you have never read anything about this topic, the book will serve you better than if you already have knowledge in excess of the name of the man and what he created. The author also makes note of the idea that someday all books could be in electronic form and stored in, "hyperspace". I hope he meant cyberspace.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Great history of Gutenberg and his life and times
15 Feb 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
_The Gutenberg Revolution_ is a highly informative book, not just about the man, Johannes Gutenberg, but about his machine, his time, and his legacy. Several chapters are devoted to the history and politics of late-medieval Germany, and they provided wonderful context for the overall story.
I learned a great deal from this book, however, the writing style was slightly annoying. Man, the author, tries to chat with his reader, and while it was interesting some of the time, I felt it was overdone, and that the book began to suffer because of it. Sentences like "So: Here we go", do not belong in a history book. Other than that tendency, I really did like the book. I am very interested in the History of Books, and this is one of the few sources (in English) written about the father of modern printing; so for that reason, I value it.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
And we think we live in disheavled times...
25 Nov 2003
Format:Hardcover
The changes that occurred in Europe in the middle of the 15th.
Century were monumental in the advance of civilization.This change was extremely quick;essentially taking place in only a decade or so. All the requirements were in place ,such as writing,presses inks,papers,techniques of working with metals for making type,etc.All that was missing was the will to pull all the things together to produce books using movable type instead of hand reproduction.
This period was totally different from what we know today.A very few people owned and controlled everything.There were very few books,none available to anyone except the upper classes and academics.This mattered little, as few commoners read anyway.Europe was ravished by wars and every so often breakouts of the Black Death.The ruling class ,in conjunction with the Church ruled and controlled everything.Gutenberg's introduction of movable type printing provided the vehicle that changed all that.
More than just dealing with printing, this book is excellent in describing how society operated and how changes in printing on a mass scale, effected changes that resulted in society being turned upside down forever.It took something like this to advance out of the Middle Ages;just like it took electricity to create the Industrial Age.
What I found so good about this book is that ,unlike most history books that describe what happened,this author shows why these things happened.
The author has dealt with all this in a very readible manner.
Century were monumental in the advance of civilization.This change was extremely quick;essentially taking place in only a decade or so. All the requirements were in place ,such as writing,presses inks,papers,techniques of working with metals for making type,etc.All that was missing was the will to pull all the things together to produce books using movable type instead of hand reproduction.
This period was totally different from what we know today.A very few people owned and controlled everything.There were very few books,none available to anyone except the upper classes and academics.This mattered little, as few commoners read anyway.Europe was ravished by wars and every so often breakouts of the Black Death.The ruling class ,in conjunction with the Church ruled and controlled everything.Gutenberg's introduction of movable type printing provided the vehicle that changed all that.
More than just dealing with printing, this book is excellent in describing how society operated and how changes in printing on a mass scale, effected changes that resulted in society being turned upside down forever.It took something like this to advance out of the Middle Ages;just like it took electricity to create the Industrial Age.
What I found so good about this book is that ,unlike most history books that describe what happened,this author shows why these things happened.
The author has dealt with all this in a very readible manner.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Een onbedoelde splijtzwam
5 Jan 2010
Format:Paperback
Dit is een erg leuk boek voor typo- en bibliofielen. John Man, ook bekend van boeken over Genghiz Khan en Attila, vertelt het verhaal van de uitvinding van de boekdrukkunst. Het aardige is dat hij dit doet vanuit verschillende invalshoeken; Gutenbergs biografie (voor zover reconstrueerbaar), de ontwikkeling van niet-geschreven tekst vanaf de Chinezen tot het Duitsland van de 15de eeuw, de techniek van het drukken met 'movable type' van het stansen van de letters tot het mengen van de inkt en het vergelijken van culturele factoren die of een stimulans, of een blokkade vormden voor de uitvinding van de boekdrukkunst. De aardigste these die Man aannemelijk maakt, is echter de constatering dat de ideologie achter de uitvinding, behalve een economische, een katholieke was. Voor de boekdruk werden alle teksten met de hand gecopieerd. Het corpus van christelijke teksten, met name de bijbel, was na de vaststelling van de orthodoxie in de 4de eeuw door overschrijffouten in de kloosters tot op zekere hoogte onbetrouwbaar geworden. De handgeschreven bijbels, waarvan er in het hele middeleeuwse christendom maar een paar duizend in omloop waren, verschilden onderling teveel, hetgeen allerlei theologische en interpretatieproblemen opleverde. Gutenberg wilde met zijn vinding aan al die verschillen een einde maken; hij streefde naar 1 bijbel die in alle kerkelijke instellingen hetzelfde was. Man probeert vervolgens aannemelijk te maken dat de kerkhervormer Nicolaas van Cusa hetzelfde doel nastreefde; eenheid in de kerk door eenduidigheid van de kerkelijke teksten. Hoewel er geen bewijs is dat Nicolas en Johann elkaar ooit hebben ontmoet, is Man's idee dat beide elkaar beinvloed hebben, aannemelijk. Met dit verhaal belicht Man een aspect van de uitvinding van de boekdrukkunst dat vaak over het hoofd wordt gezien. De explosieve ontwikkeling van het drukken van boeken wordt juist vaak geduid als een van de belangrijkste voorwaarden voor de reformatie. Des te aardiger dat dit boek aannemelijk maakt dat de oorspronkelijke motivatie juist de eenheid van het christendom beoogde. Kijk zelf op [...]
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