Tag: printing press

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Weekly Response #5

The History of Printing and Printing Processes, dives heavily into the dates and years for important momentous occasions in the history of printing human languages into text. The first record of a text being put onto a piece of wood can be seen in China around 800 C.E. The article then describes the first printing press, The Gutenburg Press, emerging in Germany around 1420. This was the first known practice of mass producing a piece of literature, The Bible. The most interesting aspect of this timeline of the are of printing is the heavy industrial influence it had in the 1800’s. Many countries, Germany, France, and Scotland, started producing machinery and steel tools to help print literature at a higher volume. The stereotyping and rotary web-feed letterpress all were momentous steps in the printing world because it exponentially increased the accessibility of literature worldwide.  The first example of a mass produced book was The Bible. This is important to me because the bible was such an influential piece of literature that may have actually sped up the creation of the Gutenburg press.

 

 

Bellis, Mary. “The History of Printing and Printing Processes.” ThoughtCo, Jun. 14, 2018, thoughtco.com/history-of-printing-and-printing-processes-1992329.

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Jessica Colasacco Week 5 Blog Post

For this weeks blog post, I decided to focus on Elizabeth Eisenstein’s “Defining the Initial Shift.” In this article, she focuses on outlining the major role that print media had on field of written history. She claims, “Unlike the shift from stationer to publisher, the shift from scribe to printer represented a genuine occupational mutation” (Eisenstein 238). For centuries, people used to have to trust the mind of scribes, which would write down what they had heard. While doing my New York Public Library Oral History project, I was able to understand the troubles a scribe might have gone through. They were not able to replay a story multiple times; they had to write down the story as they remembered it. This might have caused multiple problems, especially if the scribe had misunderstood the story.

With the invention of the printing press, writers of history were then able to print their stories for the masses. This allowed writer to write their own stories and reports to actually report what they saw and have it printed for all to see. A very popular example of this is the bible. The stories were always verbally told, but once the printing press became popular, the stories were able to be printed for the masses. Although this is a good thing for the history of writing, it also allows for fake stories to be printed and replicated for others to see.

 

Sources:

Elizabeth Eisenstein. “Defining the Initial Shift: Some Features of Print Culture.” The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.