Mercier and the Power of Print Culture

• Section III focuses on everyday life, culture, and politics.

Print Culture and the Modern World

• The modern world is unimaginable without printed materials like books, newspapers, and advertisements.
• Print has a history that shaped the contemporary world.

Development and Impact

• The notes address the development of print from East Asia to Europe and India
• The impact of its technology on social lives and cultures with its introduction

The First Printed Books

• Early print technology developed in China, Japan, and Korea using hand printing.
• From AD 594, books in China were printed, using paper invented there, by rubbing against inked woodblocks.
• Traditional Chinese accordion books were folded and stitched due to the inability to print on both sides of thin sheets.
• Skilled craftsmen duplicated calligraphy with remarkable accuracy.
• The imperial state in China was a major producer of printed material, using civil service examinations to recruit personnel.
• From the sixteenth century, the number of examination candidates increased, thus increasing the volume of print.
• By the seventeenth century, print diversified with the blooming of urban culture in China.
• Print usage by merchants increased for trade information, making reading a leisure activity.
• New readers preferred fictional narratives, poetry, autobiographies, and romantic plays.
• Rich women began reading and publishing, including wives of scholar-officials and courtesans.
• Western printing techniques and mechanical presses were imported in the late nineteenth century as Western powers established outposts in China.
• Shanghai became the hub of the new print culture, resulting in a gradual shift to mechanical printing, catering to Western-style schools.

Print in Japan

• Buddhist missionaries from China introduced hand-printing into Japan around AD 768-770
• The Buddhist Diamond Sutra, printed in AD 868, is the oldest Japanese book, containing six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations.
• Pictures were printed on textiles, playing cards, and paper money.
• In medieval Japan, writers were regularly published, making books cheap and abundant.
• Printing of visual material led to printing practices.
• In the late eighteenth century, urban circles at Edo (Tokyo) featured illustrated collections of paintings.
• The collections depicted an urban culture, including artists, courtesans, and teahouse gatherings.
• Libraries and bookstores contained various hand-printed materials with various types of information.
• Kitagawa Utamaro: Born in Edo in 1753, famous for ukiyo art.
• Ukiyo: Depictions of ordinary human experiences, especially urban ones.
• Prints influenced artists such as Manet, Monet, and Van Gogh.
• Publishers (Tsutaya Juzaburo): Identified subjects and commissioned artists.
• Skilled woodblock carvers pasted drawings onto woodblocks to reproduce the painter's lines.
• The original drawing would be destroyed, and only prints would survive.
• Tripitaka Koreana: Korean Buddhist scriptures from the mid-13th century.
• The scriptures had about 80,000 woodblocks
• They got recognition on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2007.

Print Comes to Europe

• Silk and spices from China flowed Europe through the silk route
• Chinese paper reached Europe in the eleventh century, enabling manuscript production
• In 1295, Marco Polo returned to Italy, bringing woodblock printing knowledge from China
• Italians produced books with woodblocks, spreading the technology to other parts of Europe
• Luxury editions were still handwritten on expensive vellum for aristocratic circles and rich monastic libraries
• Universities town merchants and students bought cheaper printed copies.
• Book fairs were held as booksellers all over Europe exported books to various countries as the demand for books rose.
• Production of handwritten manuscripts expanded to meet demand, with scribes increasingly employed by booksellers
• A bookseller would employ more than 50 scribes.
• Handwritten manuscripts couldn’t satisfy demand for books, due to expensive, laborious, and time-consuming copying.
• Manuscripts remained limited due to difficult handling
• Woodblock printing grew, and was widely used print textiles, playing cards, and religious pictures with simple texts by the early fifteenth century.
• Johann Gutenberg developed printing press in the 1430s in Strasbourg, Germany.

Gutenberg and the Printing Press

• Gutenberg was the son of a merchant and grew up on a large agricultural estate.
• He mastered polishing stones and goldsmithing, acquiring knowledge to create lead molds for trinkets.
• Drawing on his knowledge, Gutenberg adapted the olive press for a printing press, using molds to cast metal types for alphabet letters.
• By 1448, Gutenberg perfected the system.
• The Bible was the book that Gutenberg printed around 180 copies and it took three years to produce; this was fast for the time.
• The new technology did not entirely displace the existing art of producing books by hand.
• Printed books closely resembled handwritten manuscripts in appearance and layout, imitating ornamental styles.
• Borders were illuminated by hand with patterns, and illustrations were painted.
• Space for decoration in books catered to the rich with decoration
• Each purchaser could choose the design and painting school that would create illustrations.
• Between 1450 and 1550printing presses were set up in Europe.
• Printers from Germany traveled to seek out the labor
• Twenty million copies of printed books flooded European markets in the century.
• In the sixteenth century, about 200 million copies appeared.
• Hand printing shifted to mechanical printing bringing on the print revolution.
• Gutenberg Printing Press: He developed metal types for 26 characters of the Roman alphabet and devised a way of moving them to make different words.
• The Gutenberg printing press could generate 250 pages on one side each hour.
• Gutenberg Bible: Gutenberg printed about 180 copies but only above 50 survived.
• Borders in press were designed, painted, and illuminated manually by artists.
• Elites preferred the lack of uniformity.

The Print Revolution and Its Impact

• The print revolution transformed lives, knowledge, authorities and institutions
• It enabled the use of popular perceptions and new ways for understanding things.
• New public emerged for reading, as printing reduced the cost of books, time and effort for mass copies, enabling an ever-growing audience
• Books created a new culture with the introduction of restrictions based on the elites
• The oral community was familiar with religious texts, ballads, and tales with People collectively, reading individually
• Oral culture: Knowledge transferred orally with stories and performances. It would be Chapter 8 that they did not read books.
• Literate: Transition to be read, but there were still a few limitations to literacy
• Printing, in popular illustrated publications to the common people's tastes
• Tavern-Songs: Sung and recited gatherings in villages.
• Blurred: Merged printed traditions from books with oral cultures.
• Hearing and reading publics emerged
• J.V. Schley, L'Imprimerie, 1739: Images celebrating the coming of print in Europe.

Religious Debates and the Fear of Print

• Print led to more debate and discussion
• People who disagreed with religious authorities could print and circulate thoughts
• Not everyone welcomed printed books, fearing control, rebellion, and the destruction of “valuable” literature; Religious authorities and artists criticized because this anxiety was circulating
• Martin Luther's "Ninety-Five Theses" was printed (1517) to criticize practices practiced by the Church
• The beginning of reformation was sparked because of Luther’s published document ideas. The translated writings of this Testament were widely translated as new intellectual atmospheres.

Print and Dissent

• Distinct interpretations led religious reading to faith’s working people.
• Miller Meocchio was questioned and executed during the Roman Catholic Church’s inquisition.
• As a result, the Catholic Church imposed controls, booksellers from Prohibited Books (1558).
• Erasmus had deep fears of new books flying around the world

The Reading Mania

• Literacy rates in Europe rose during the seventeenth and eighteenth.
• Churches taught literacy to artisans and peasants.
• Some European regions show literacy rates of 60%.
• Virtual Reading Mania: Print shops produced ever-increasing books
• Forms of cheap books were developed
• Religious and entertaining reading material became affordable for all
• Chapbooks were popularized in England
• Journals: More information and developments were brought up
• Scientific discoveries and scientific diagrams were more accessible to the people (Compilations of ancient scripts increased common science)
• Scientists like Issac Netwon influenced new writings.
• In 1791, James Lackington, talks about the poor reading.

Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world!

• Mid-eighteenth conviction: A way books are used is how they enable freedom.
• Louise-Sebastien Mercier: "People's opinions are how despots get swept; tyrants will cower before the virtual writer"

Print Culture and the French Revolution

• Print popularised Enlightenment thinkers' ideas, providing critical reviews of tradition, superstition and despotism, thus raising reason and rationality.
• Secondly, print lead to new dialogue and debate, the public had more reasons to question ideas. The outcome: social revolution.
• At the release by mid-1780, literature mocked morality with great questions about social order.
• Voltaire: Also exposed to church propaganda.
• Print opened doors to new mindsets with different thinking.

The Nineteenth Century

• Improved literacy in Europe, resulting in many children, women, and workers turning into readers.
• Children Education: Becoming compulsory, production became more textbook-reliant and industry for Publishing emerged
• Folk Tales: The German Grimm Bros. edited and published tales around villages by 1812. Elites and vulgar tales were excluded with the published version.
• Manuals: The publishing of manual magazines began with proper behavior for manuals.
• New Type of Women, with strong determination were emerging
• Libraries: Lending places for educating white working class people began in the Middle Ages.
• Workers in factories could now write on politics due to shortened works.
• The front piece of the Penny Magazine emerged
• Thomas Wood: Explained Newspapers read by firelights by people in poverty.
• Struggles to read occurred with such poverty.

Further Innovations

• By the late eighteenth century, the printing came to be built from a new material: Metal
• Power-driven: Technology improvements grew to higher levels
• Cylindrical Press's Innovation: perfected by Richard M. How, prints now made sheets of 8,000/hour
• Offset Press & Electrically Accelerated Printing: At turn of twentieth, operation's accelerated printing lead to more development- feeding. Also plates quality etc.
• Developed Product Selling: Continuously done by printing presses in order to maximize sales
• Serialised Nineteenth-Century novels and twentieth-century Series-Shilling novels

The Impact of Advertising

India and the World of Print

• See when began in India. Also how information and thoughts were known prior to the page
• The history writing page

Manuscripts Before the Age of Print

• Very old manuscripts with languages that were in the middle of sanskrit, persain or arabic.
• Manuscript Copy: Written on palm leaves (handmade) to preserve design
• Handled: Though there was an excessive amount of manuals they could be read easily.

Print Comes to India

• Jesuits Priests: Knoanki tracts were known to have been brought into India by the Portgue mission, but over the release tracts
• Early Pressing: With some 50 of books being printed some early press the pressing did not develop until the eighteenth century
• Commerical Paper: The magazine release was the work of commercial papers.
• Colonial Power: Colonial newspapers began and were the work of influence.
• By the mid-nineteenth Bengali newspapers were created. Krishnaji ran some and supported them in their beliefs of helping diffuse welfare

Religious Reform and Public Debates

• Intensified issues: Early nineteen-century causes
• Criticized practices: Ideas with some new varieties known to the society
• Shape Debate: These newspapers began the rise of the debated argument
• Intense: Social and religious matters made for controversy
• Texts and Papers: Bengal spread the need for these issues to be made known
• Roy published newspapers from his work views in Bengal

New Forms of Publication

• Printing enabled new forms of reading and writing
• Novels began developing in forms and styles in India to match the world
• Many visuals would eventually come to the shape to the 19th-century press.

Women and Print

• Womans living began to show. From feelings to expressions, the women were more intense.
• Enourmous: The growth of reading began to emerge on the middle class home
• Liberal: Educating women began more often from people to show the importance of women's
• New Journal: Syllabus began in all topics that showed home based schooling.
• While women were growing more expressive, not all families became linear and supported them.

Print and the Poor People

• The town of madease had very cheap books from the nineteenth centuries . Very poor and at markets to support a family
• Public: New books and stores were the outcome the 20th. The towns prospered, and that outcome
• Controverted with B.R. Rmakar: Caste's books had very cheap copies and new topics for publication.

Print and Censorship

• Early controls from the company: Directed on englishman in india hate for the actions of the company members. The thought that these measures were a way to protect its trade.
• Calcutta court with press freedom: encourage the release of british rule in 1835 press
• Revolt on 1857: the clamp down on the press was changed. The vernacular of the native became more asserted.
• Reports: Warned reports from the press that could be seized by the authorities.
• Numbers with misrule: Despite this the natives did not report with the constant oppression
• Tilak wrote sympathetically for revolutions. This lead to more arrests and revolts around the world.

Explore Mercier's views on the power of books and print culture to influence society and challenge despotism. Understand his perspective on progress and the impact of increased book demand. Questions cover Mercier's quotes, beliefs, and the effects of print on social classes and manuscript production.