In the original dustsheet. Grey cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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        This is a great book of necessary reading.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come.

The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.

To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.

What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis’ exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.

Reviews

• “An accomplished and detailed survey of life between the brackets.” –Wall Street Journal

• “A refreshingly sanguine take.” –Houman Barekat, The Guardian

• “Provocative and fizzing with ideas.” –Alan Rusbridger, Prospect

• “The Gutenberg Parenthesis follows the development of printing and its impact on society right up to the present day … Jarvis’s tempo is … fast and compelling, sweeping the reader along from Gutenberg to the present digital predicament facing society.” –Richard Ovenden, Financial Times

• “Jeff Jarvis is the ideal guide for this fast-paced history of communication. Shrewd, witty and always generous to his fellow authors, this book is crammed with pointed observation and profound reflection on the present and future of information culture. As print transitions to the digital age, Jarvis explores the potentialities and dangers of unbridled access to information as a realist who sees a path to sanity as our media turbulence finds a new normal.” –Andrew Pettegree, Wardlaw Professor of History, University of St. Andrews, UK

• “Jeff Jarvis magisterially charts how the invention of printing shifted power from individuals and communities to experts and the undifferentiated ‘masses, ‘ and then brilliantly shows how the internet is reversing this half-millenium shift. Information in print became a controlled commodity with enforced scarcity that reinforced language and institutional borders and power. Initially extending the reach of thought, printing shaped that thought; the medium became the message, on steroids. Digital now makes possible and even insists upon richer, less controlled exchange of ideas, including fakes. What we need, Jarvis makes clear, is not censorship of our chaotic global conversation but clear goals, guardrails, and institutions to ensure inclusion, accuracy, and privacy. We are all facing this together, and are now all on notice to take up Jarvis’ challenge.” –Anthony Marx, President and CEO, New York Public Library

• “Jeff Jarvis’ The Gutenberg Parenthesis invites disenchanted media users to scour the history of print for lessons that may help us build a better future for media. No one has thought as nimbly as Jarvis about how communications shape societies, and his polemic gives hope for these disenchanted times.” –Leah Price, Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA

About the Author -Jeff Jarvis holds the Leonard Tow Chair in Journalism Innovation and directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. He was creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, a media columnist for The Guardian, and president and creative director of Advance.net. He blogs at Buzzmachine.com, cohosts the podcast This Week in Google, and is the author of five books: What Would Google Do? (2009), Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (2011), Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News (2014), and Magazine (forthcoming, 2023) in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

      Posthumous portrait of Gutenberg. No contemporary depictions survive.

Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (c. 1393–1406 – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and craftsman who introduced letterpress printing to Europe with his movable-type printing press. Though movable type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg invented the printing press, which later spread across the world. His work led to an information revolution and the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It also had a direct impact on the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and humanist movements, as all of them have been described as “unthinkable” without Gutenberg’s invention. His many contributions to printing include the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type; the use of oil-based ink for printing books; adjustable molds; mechanical movable type; and the invention of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw presses of the period. Gutenberg’s method for making type is traditionally considered to have included a type metal alloy and a hand mould for casting type. The alloy was a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony that melted at a relatively low temperature for faster and more economical casting, cast well, and created a durable type. His major work, the Gutenberg Bible, was the first printed version of the Bible and has been acclaimed for its high aesthetic and technical quality.

Described as the “man of the millennium”, Gutenberg is often cited as among the most influential figures in human history. He has been commemorated around the world and is a frequent namesake. To celebrate the 500th anniversary of his birth in 1900, the Gutenberg Museum was founded in his hometown of Mainz.

William Caxton (c. 1422 – c. 1491) was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England in 1476, and as a printer to be the first English retailer of printed books.

His parentage and date of birth are not known for certain, but he may have been born between 1415 and 1424, perhaps in the Weald or wood land of Kent, perhaps in Hadlow or Tenterden. In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a wealthy London silk mercer.

Shortly after Large’s death, Caxton moved to Bruges, Belgium, a wealthy cultured city in which he was settled by 1450. Successful in business, he became governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London; on his business travels, he observed the new printing industry in Cologne, which led him to start a printing press in Bruges in collaboration with Colard Mansion. When Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV, married the Duke of Burgundy, they moved to Bruges and befriended Caxton. Margaret encouraged Caxton to complete his translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a collection of stories associated with Homer’s Iliad, which he did in 1471.

On his return to England, heavy demand for his translation prompted Caxton to set up a press at Westminster in 1476. Although the first book that he is known to have produced was an edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, he went on to publish chivalric romances, classical works and English and Roman histories and to edit many others. He was the first to translate Aesop’s Fables in 1484. Caxton was not an adequate translator, and under pressure to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible, he sometimes simply transferred French words into English; but because of the success of his translations, he is credited with helping to promote the Chancery English that he used to the status of standard dialect throughout England.

Printer’s mark of William Caxton, 1478. A variant of the merchant’s mark

In 2002, Caxton was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll.