printing press

6 min read 2021-12-28 04:28:40

How the First “Viral” Media Spawned a Peasant Uprising in Germany

The Protestant Reformation was a period of religious and political upheaval spawned by corruption in the Roman Catholic church. With the dissolution

1 min read 2021-12-14 19:00:03

More fuel-efficient, better mileage I paid special attention to the Pilgrims and Plymouth colony for a reason. Even though I can’t be certain that

2 min read 2021-12-02 23:49:35

And then…I don’t find evidence of the Pilgrims setting up their printing press in Plymouth. Not surprising, really, when you think about it.

1 min read 2021-11-25 19:00:46

I should’ve drawn the press closer to the crack. But, wait!—the Pilgrims had brought a printing press with them, one of those Gutenberg presses

1 min read 2021-10-25 19:33:40

Jonathan Swift. One of the perks of being a pamphleteer was you got to wear big wigs. Satire : a way of using humor to show that someone or something

1 min read 2021-10-22 19:00:49

Daniel Defoe If you were a young writer just starting out during Brit lit’s Augustan Age (late 1600s – early 1700s), pamphlets were the way to

1 min read 2021-10-20 19:00:46

The printing press encouraged literacy, which almost all by itself brought on the Renaissance and shaped modern Western Civilization. Those pamphlets

1 min read 2021-10-12 20:48:19

The printing press was the first mass medium. I’m expanding the definition of ‘medium’—how you stick pigment to a surface—to include the

1 min read 2021-09-23 21:01:47

If he’d burnt her omelet we’d need an egg-citation. Standardization is a feature of civilization. The great empires standardized measurement,

1 min read 2021-09-22 21:42:39

I want to take a second to recap. I don’t think I’ve done a sufficient job of telling you how the mechanized printing press, movable type,

1 min read 2021-09-17 19:02:45

I’d like to zoom ahead a few centuries for just a minute. Last post was about the brilliant type designer Francesco Griffo and how ownership of his

1 min read 2021-09-16 19:00:37

Francesco Griffo Manutius got type-design-superstar Francesco Griffo to cut type for his lowercase/minuscule Greek letters. Greek minuscules had been

1 min read 2021-09-15 20:41:30

Aldus Manutius The brains behind all this innovation was one guy: Aldo Manutio, or Aldus Manutius in Latin. Latin & Greek weren’t completely

1 min read 2021-09-10 18:57:03

The story so far: books were shooting out of the printing presses; they cost way less than hand-written manuscripts; they’re written in vernacular

1 min read 2021-09-08 19:10:03

Okay, maybe not so serene. I did this image a while back for a Pittsburgh Public Theater production of an old commedia dell’arte play. Venice,