As the estimates of book production in Keith Houston’s The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time and Stephen Fry’s documentary The Machine that Made Us make clear, the technology of hand press printing that emerged in Germany around 1450 enabled the proliferation of written communication to an increasing number of people in Europe and its colonies. This proliferation of books was accompanied by an increase in population in Europe from 80 million in 1500 to 450 million in 1800 and an increase in the world’s population from 200 million to 1 billion during the same period. Looking back at five hundred years of printing as a whole, it is hard to imagine how the spread of libraries and bookstores (and even schools) into urban areas throughout the world would have occurred without mass printing, and in so doing printing delivered books and literacy to millions of individuals even as the absolute numbers of people living on less than $5 a day increased (quadrupling in the last 50 years) within the midst of degrees of wealth and abundance the world has never before witnessed.

The spread of printing arguably democratized institutions by giving new social classes access to the benefits of learning, literature, and education through an expansion of reading and literacy. Yet there is also an interesting correlation between the domination of the “West”, where written communications through printing to some extent scaled with the increase in population, and the subordination of other global regions, where written communications were constrained by traditional block printing and manuscripts. While it is clearly an exaggeration to claim that Gutenberg’s movable type and type mold printing was responsible for Western Imperialism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, or capitalism itself, there might still be some room for conjecture regarding the impact of printing on both the Protestant Reformation and as Robert Darnton argued in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History the spread of Enlightenment thought through growing networks of publishers, book shops, and readers. Additionally world literacy stood at around 10% in 1800 when hand press printing gave way to mechanized printing and in the space of two hundred years world literacy as a whole increased to 85%, an average inversion rate of 3.75% per decade.

We might also wonder about the extent to which we could attribute printing to the emergence of the “public” and the “public sphere” as Jurgen Habermas theorized in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. We could equally consider printing as one of the key enablers along with other communications technologies such as audio and (motion picture) video technologies of the integration of world cultures and the popularization of the notion of the “global village”. Finally, it would not be entirely unreasonable perhaps to consider that most of world’s written literatures would not have developed along the lines with which we are familiar through the evolution of literary genres such as poetry, the short story, the novel, and perhaps even history and our sense and understanding of the past.

Despite the increase in democratizing access to written communications, printing has along with other complex technologies created a minority of makers of culture and a majority of consumers of culture, resulting in the rise in social status of authors and writers as an elite intelligentsia of intellectuals, experts, and technocrats. As Sarah Werner shows in Studying Early Printed Books, the technology of early modern book making in Europe involved a team of specialists involved in a “series of decisions driven to both small and large degrees by production demands and economic pressures”. As a result, printing has allowed all of us to be readers of books but only some of us to be the makers of books. It could be argued that a social division between culture makers and culture consumers has emerged as community based traditions of story telling, music, singing, oral verse, and popular theater diminished. It remains to be seen whether the next sea change, reflected in the convergence of increasingly accessible digital media authoring tools and internet-based social media, will return to society the culture making capabilities that the market based application of printing took away.

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