The Coming Of The Book Summary

In The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, French historian Lucien Febvre explores the printing culture and revolution while enlisting fellow history professor Henri-Jean Martin’s help with the work’s execution. Matter of fact, Febvre came up with the work’s concept, but it was Martin who finished the book a year after the former’s death. A scholarly work, The Coming of the Book embarks on the large scope of the printing process’s impact on booksellers, governments, universities and the individual over the course of four centuries. Though boasting of a large index filled with factual information on people, places and dates, the content of the book relies heavily on the analysis of such facts by categorical topics rather than a chronological order. The overall design of the book illustrates Febvre’s broad approach to history. Not simply a history of printing, The Coming of the Book offers an extended comprehensive description of the
Here we get the genesis story of the invention of printing and the controversies about who gets credit for it. Next, we move onto the technical issues, which arose experimentation before the standardization of printing. Such standards, including font and format, would not come to fruition for decades. Once this occurred, however, the authors explain the uniformity in both the physicality of the books and the thoughts behind the words. The institutions of the book trade also evolved over numerous decades. The book studies all aspects of the book trade including fairs, as “the selling of books at fairs was an established custom from the earliest times, and persisted for centuries” (226). Furthermore, they explore the business side of books such as its financing and marketing, problems with censorship and