Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Triumphs of the Printing Press
The book, however, does not pretend to be in any sense a full record of the work which has developed from the discovery of the mid-fifteenth century; such full record would manifestly be impossible within the limits of a small volume, despite the scantiness of materials about some of the more interesting periods in the growth of the Printing Press. For, although printing has not troubled properly and connectedly to record its own development, there is yet a great wealth of varied materials concerned with its triumphs. From among these I have chosen such portions as shall show the growth of the art, from the simple types and plain wooden press of the time of Gutenberg, up to the present day, when steam machinery works many thousand times as quickly as did the old hand-presses; when, indeed, the very art of printing from movable types appears likely to give way to a later development, in which the printing is almost directly done from the matrices themselves.
It will be noticed by the reader of the following. Chapters how few are the details which have come down to us of the lives of those men who are most intimately connected with the triumphs dealt with - Gutenberg, Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Aldus, Elzevir. Of these men and several others we would gladly learn much; we would like to know what manner of men they were, what lives they led, and what their contemporaries thought of them. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not, however.
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