Pens and Heads

Blair Worden

• The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making by Adrian Johns
  Chicago, 707 pp, £14.50, May 2000, ISBN 0 226 40122 7
• Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England by Kevin Sharpe
  Yale, 358 pp, £25.00, April 2000, ISBN 0 300 08152 9

‘We Should Note,’ Francis Bacon enjoined in his Novum Organum, ‘the force, effect, and consequence’ of three inventions which were unknown to the ancients, ‘namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.’ Since Bacon’s time almost everyone has agreed that the social and cultural impact of printing must have been huge. Only in the past half century, however, has it begun to be studied and measured. The movement of enquiry began in France in the 1950s, when the Annales school counted print runs and estimated the breadth and social composition of readerships. More recently, the ‘history of the book’, as it has come to be called, has assumed less statistical, more subtle and more intensive forms.