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Divine Art, Infernal Machine

The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending
by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein
Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending. Univ. of Pennsylvania. Dec. 2010. c.336p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780812242805. $45. LIT
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Eisenstein's seminal The Printing Press as an Agent of Change traces the history and effects of early printing in western Europe. Now Eisenstein explores Western attitudes toward the evolution of print over the centuries, starting with responses to Gutenberg's invention and continuing through the advent of the ebook. Just how little opinions about publication, in its evolving forms, have changed over the centuries both startles and amuses. Eisenstein reveals 16th-century texts that complain of information overload and of readers preferring lurid entertainment. Glorifying the best of a previous era by condemning the worst of one's own age is not new. Critics have long prematurely buried the book as a moribund media, a trope familiar to us today. While Eisenstein's previous work was crucial to historians of the printed book, her new one has a metafocus on reactions to publishing rather than on the spread of printing from movable type. Taken together, the books paint a robust historical portrait of our greatest invention.
VERDICT This not only makes for fine survey material for undergraduate mass media or cultural history classes but is recommended for all serious readers in media history and the history of cultural opinion and all concerned with placing today's concerns over print vs. digital in their historical context.
Reviewed by Megan Curran, Univ. of Southern California Lib., Los Angeles , Nov 15, 2010
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