PRINT & THE

MODERN WORLD
OVERVIEW
1: The First Printed Books
2: Print Comes t o Eur ope
3: The Print Revolut ion and Its Impac t
4: The Reading Mania
5: The Nineteenth Centur y and the pr int cu ltu r e
6: India and the Wor ld of P r int
7: Religious Reform and P u blic Debates
8: New Forms of Publication
9: Print and Censor ship
INTRODUCTION
The development of print, from its
beginnings in East Asia to its
expansion in Europe and in India. We
will understand the impact of the
spread of technology and consider
how social lives and cultures
changed with the coming of print.
The First
Printed Books

The earliest kind of print tech nology wa s

developed in China, Ja pan and Kor ea .
This was a system of h and p r inting.
From AD 594 onwards, books in China were printed by
rubbing paper – also invented there – against the inked
surface of woodblocks.
As both sides of the thin, porous sheet could not be printed,
the traditional Chinese ‘accordion book’ was folded and
stitched at the side.
Superbly skilled craftsmen could duplicate, with remarkable
accuracy, the beauty of calligraphy.
The imperial state in China was, for a very long time, the
major producer of printed material due to following factors:
The imperial state in China recruited its personnel through
civil service examinations whose numbers increased that

CHINA
increased the volume of print.
Urban culture bloomed in China, Merchants used print in
their everyday life, as they collected trade information
Shanghai became the hub of the new print culture, catering
to the Western-style schools.
PRINT IN JAPAN
The oldest Japanese book, printed in AD
868, is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra
containing six sheets of text and woodcut
illustrations.
In medieval Japan, poets and prose
writers regularly published, and books
were cheap and abundant. In the late
eighteenth century, in the flourishing
urban circles at Edo (later to be known as
Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings
depicted an elegant urban culture,
involving artists, courtesans, and
teahouse gatherings.
 PRINT COMES TO EUROPE

MARCO POLO SILK ROUTE VELLUM

In 1295, Marco Polo, a great For centuries, silk and A parchment made from
explorer, returned to Italy spices from China flowed the skin of animals. Luxury
from China.. He brought into Europe through editions were still
the technology of the silk route. In the handwritten on very
woodblock printing. Soon eleventh century, Chinese expensive vellum, meant
the technology spread to paper reached Europe for aristocratic circles and
other parts of Europe via the same route. rich monastic libraries.
Great need for
quicker and cheaper
reproduction of texts
THE DEMAND FOR BOOKS INCREASED
Booksellers all over Europe began exporting
books to many different countries. Book fairs
were held at different places.
Manuscripts were fragile, awkward to handle,
and could not be carried around or read
easily.
Their circulation therefore remained limited.
woodblock printing gradually became more
and more popular.
Gutenberg and the
Printing Press
STRASBOURG,GERMANY 1430S
Gutenberg was the son of a merchant and grew up on a
large agricultural estate. From his childhood he had
seen wine and olive presses. Subsequently, he learnt the
art of polishing stones, became a master goldsmith, and
also acquired the expertise to create lead moulds used
for making trinkets.
The olive press provided the model for the printing
press, and moulds were used for casting the metal types
for the letters of the alphabet. By 1448, Gutenberg
perfected the system. The first book he printed was the
Bible. About 180 copies were printed and it took three
years to produce them. By the standards of the time this
was fast production.
PRINTED BOOKS &
MANUSCRIPTS
Printed books at first closely resembled the written
manuscripts in appearance and layout.
The metal letters imitated the ornamental handwritten
styles. Borders were illuminated by hand with foliage and
other patterns, and illustrations were painted.
In the books printed for the rich, space for decoration was
kept blank on the printed page.
Each purchaser could choose the design and decide on
the painting school that would do the illustrations.
Gutenberg's Bible
The Gutenberg Bible was printed in Mainz in
1455 by Johann Gutenberg and his associates,
Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer. Only 48
copies are known to have survived, of which
12 are printed on vellum and 36 on paper.By
the standards of the time this was fast
production.
 THE PRINT REVOLUTION
AND ITS IMPACT
The shift from hand printing to mechanical printing led to the
print revolution.

A New Reading Oral culture  Common people & the

Public entered print printed books

Printing reduced the cost of Printed material was orally Printers began publishing
books. Books flooded the transmitted. The line that popular ballads and folk tales,
market, Reaching out to an separated the oral and and such books would be
ever-growing readership. reading cultures profusely illustrated with
became blurred. And the pictures.
hearing public and reading These were then sung and
public became recited at gatherings in villages
intermingled. and in
taverns in towns.
 Religious Debates and
the Fear of Print
Print created the possibility It was feared that if
of wide circulation of there was no control over
ideas, and introduced a new what was printed and read
world of debate and then rebellious and irreligious
discussion. Even those who thoughts might spread.
disagreed with
established authorities
could now print and
circulate
their ideas. Through the
printed message, they could
persuade people to think
differently, The macabre dance- Dance of death

Protestant
Reformation
MARTIN LUTHER & 95 THESIS

A sixteenth-century movement to
reform the Catholic Church dominated
by Rome. Martin Luther was one of the
main Protestant reformers.In 1517, the
religious reformer Martin Luther wrote
Ninety Five Theses criticising many of
the practices and rituals of the Roman
Catholic Church. A printed copy of this
was posted on a church door in
Wittenberg. It challenged the Church to
debate his ideas.
PRINT AND
DISSENT
In the sixteenth century, Manocchio, a miller in Italy,
began to read books that were available in his locality.
He reinterpreted the message of the Bible and
formulated a view of God and Creation that enraged
the Roman Catholic Church. When the Roman Church
began its inquisition to repress heretical ideas,
Manocchio was hauled up twice and ultimately
executed. The Roman Church, troubled by such
effects of popular readings and questionings of faith,
imposed severe controls over publishers and
booksellers and began to maintain an Index of
Prohibited Books from 1558.
LITERACY RATE
INCREASED UPTO 60 TO
80 PERCENT
Churches of different denominations
set up schools in villages, carrying
literacy to peasants and artisans. As
literacy and schools spread in
European countries, there was a
virtual reading mania
READING MANIA
Booksellers employed pedlars who
roamed around villages, carrying little
books for sale.
In England, penny chapbooks were
carried by petty pedlars known as
chapmen, and sold for a penny.
In France, were the ‘Biliotheque
Bleue’, which were low-priced small
books printed on poor quality paper,
and bound in cheap blue covers.
Print & Enlightenment
Books could change the world, liberate
society from despotism and tyranny.

Louise-Sebastien Mercier, a novelist in

eighteenth-century France, declared: ‘The
printing press is the most powerful engine
of progress and public opinion is the force
that will sweep despotism away.’

Convinced of the power of print in bringing

enlightenment and destroying the basis of
despotism, Mercier proclaimed: ‘Tremble,
therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble
before the virtual writer!’
Print Culture and the French
Revolution
Print culture created the conditions within which
French Revolution occurred.
First: print popularised the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers. The writings of
Voltaire and Rousseau were read widely; and those who read these books saw the
world through new eyes, eyes that were questioning, critical and rational.

Second: print created a new culture of dialogue and debate. All values, norms and
institutions were re-evaluated and discussed by a public that had become aware of
the power of reason, and recognised the need to question existing ideas and beliefs.

Third: by the 1780s there was an outpouring of literature that mocked the royalty
and criticised their morality. Cartoons and caricatures typically suggested that the
monarchy remained absorbed only in sensual pleasures while the common people
suffered immense hardships.
The Nineteenth Century &
the Print culture
PRINT & ITS IMPACT ON CHILDREN
As primary education became compulsory
from the late nineteenth century, children
became an important category of readers.
Production of school textbooks became
critical for the publishing industry.
A children’s press, devoted to literature for
children alone, was set up in France in 1857.
The Grimm Brothers in Germany spent years
compiling traditional folk tales gathered from
peasants.
Anything that was considered unsuitable for
children or would appear vulgar to the elites,
was not included in the published version.

THE GRIMM BROTHERS

Women & Print
Women became important as readers as well as
writers. Penny  magazines were especially meant
for women,
When novels began to be written in the
nineteenth century women became important
readers.
. Some of the bestknown novelists were women:
Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters,
George Eliot.
Their writings became important in defining a
new type of woman: a person with will, strength
of personality, determination and the power to
think.
Print & Workers
In the nineteenth century, lending libraries in
England became instruments for educating
white-collar workers, artisans and lower-
middle-class people.
Thomas Wood, a Yorkshire mechanic,
narrated
how he would rent old newspapers and read
them by firelight in the evenings as he could
not afford candles.
Autobiographies of poor people narrated their
struggles to read against grim obstacles:
The twentieth-century Russian revolutionary
author Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood and My
University provide glimpses of such struggles.
 Further Innovations in the
Print Technology

THE POWER-DRIVEN THE OFFSET PRESS ELECTRICALLY OPERATED

CYLINDRICAL PRESS PRESSES

By the mid-nineteenth century, The offset press was developed From the turn of the twentieth
Richard M. Hoe of New York had which could century, electrically operated presses
perfected the power-driven print up to six colours at a time. accelerated printing operations.
cylindrical press. This was capable A series of other developments
of printing 8,000 sheets per hour. followed. Methods of feeding paper
This press was particularly useful improved, the quality of plates
for printing newspapers. became better, automatic paper
reels
and photoelectric controls of the
colour register were introduced.
 New strategies to
The Shilling Series The book jacket
sell the print
products. The dust cover or the book jacket is
In the 1920s in England, popular also a twentieth-century innovation,
Nineteenth-century periodicals
works were sold in cheap series, With the onset of the Great
serialised important novels
called the Shilling Series. Depression in the 1930s, publishers
feared a decline in book purchases.
To sustain buying, they brought out
cheap paperback editions.
India and the World of Print
Manuscripts before
the age of print
India had a very rich and old tradition of
handwritten manuscripts – in Sanskrit,
Arabic, Persian, as well as in various
vernacular languages.
Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or
on handmade paper.
Pages were sometimes beautifully illustrated.
They would be either pressed between This is a palm-leaf
wooden covers or sewn together to ensure handwritten manuscript from
the Gita Govinda of Jayadeva,
preservation.dd a little bit of body text
eighteenth century.


PRINT COMES TO INDIA

The printing press first came to Goa with
Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth
century.
Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several
tracts.
By 1674, about 50 books had been printed in the
Konkani and in Kanara languages.
Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in
1579 at Cochin, and in 1713 the first Malayalam
book was printed by them.
By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed
32 Tamil texts, many of them translations of older
works.
The Very First Newspaper in The first ever printing press was established in Bombay in
1674.
India - Bengal Gazette It was followed by a second one in Madras in 1711 and the
third one in Calcutta in 1779.
In the year 1780, India had its first official newspaper
namely Bengal Gazette published by James Augustus
Hickey.
However, before that in 1766 a British editor William Bolts
established a printing press for his fellow countrymen in
Calcutta.
He published a book of 500 pages which detailed the
alleged corrupt activities of the British East India Company.
It also lamented the supposed hardships faced by Indian
people at the hands of the East India Company.
For this writing against the British Government, Bolts was
forcefully sent back to England within two years of his
establishing the press.
Augustus Hicky too took an anti-government stance. His
Bengal Gazette was much more vociferous in criticising the
Government.
For these reasons, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette survived only for
two years and Hicky was both fined and imprisoned.
 RELIGIOUS REFORM AND PUBLIC DEBATES
Another Bengal Gazette established by Gangadhar Bhattacharya in 1816 was the first
newspaper edited by an Indian.
John Adam, the successor of Lord Hastings, passed a Regulation in March, 1823 to
restrict the freedom of the press.
Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821 and the Hindu orthodoxy
commissioned the Samachar Chandrika to oppose his opinions.
From 1822, two Persian newspapers were published, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul
Akhbar.
In the same year, a Gujarati newspaper, the Bombay Samachar, made its appearance.
The Deoband Seminary, founded in 1867, published thousands upon thousands of
fatwas telling Muslim readers how to conduct themselves in their everyday lives, and
explaining the meanings of Islamic doctrines.
The first printed edition of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century text,
came out from Calcutta in 1810.
From the 1880s, the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in
Bombay published numerous religious texts in vernaculars.
 The Deoband Seminary

Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul

Akhbar

The Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas

NEW FORMS OF PUBLICATION
By the end of the nineteenth century, a new visual
culture was taking shape.
With the setting up of an increasing number of
printing presses, visual images could be easily
reproduced in multiple copies.
Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced images for
mass circulation.
Poor wood engravers who made woodblocks set up
shop near the letterpresses, and were employed by
print shops.
Cheap prints and calendars, easily available in the
bazaar, could be bought even by the poor to decorate
the walls of their homes or places of work.
These prints began shaping popular ideas about
modernity and tradition, religion and politics, and
society and culture.
 WOMEN AND PRINT
Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and
sent them to schools
Many journals began carrying writings by women, and explained why women
should be educated. They also carried a syllabus and attached suitable reading
matter which could be used for home-based schooling.
Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed and
Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu
romances.
Sometimes, rebel women defied such prohibition for eg a girl in a conservative
Muslim family of north India secretly learnt to read and write in Urdu. Her family
wanted her to read only the Arabic Quran.
Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women –
about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do
hard domestic labour and treated unjustly by the very people they served.
 In 1926, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, a
noted educationist and literary figure, strongly
condemned men for withholding education
from women in the name of religion as she
addressed the Bengal Women’s Education
Conference:

In the In East Bengal, in the early nineteen

1880s, in present-day Maharashtra, century, Rashsundari Debi, a young
Tarabai Shinde and Pandita married girl in a very orthodox
Ramabai wrote with passionate anger household, learnt to read in the sec
about the miserable lives of her kitchen. Later, she wrote her
of upper-caste Hindu women, especially autobiography Amar Jiban which w
widows. published in 1876.
 The artist’s vision--Impact of education on women

Ghor Kali (The End of the World), An Indian

The destruction of proper family relations. Here the couple, black and white woodcut. The
husband is totally dominated by his wife who is perched image shows the artist’s fear that the
on his shoulder. He is cruel towards his mother, dragging cultural impact of the
her like an animal. West has turned the family upside down
 PRINT AND THE POOR PEOPLE
Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest

movements, wrote about the

injustices of the caste system in his Gulamgiri (1871).
In the twentieth century, B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V.
Ramaswamy Naicke in Madras, better known as Periyar, wrote
powerfully on caste and their writings were read by people all
over India.
Workers in factories were too overworked and lacked the
education to write much about their experiences. But
Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote and published Chhote
Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938 to show the links between caste and
class exploitation.
The poems of another Kanpur millworker, who wrote under the
name of Sudarshan Chakr between 1935 and 1955, were brought
together and published in a collection called Sacchi Kavitayan.
By the 1930s, Bangalore cotton millworkers set up libraries to
educate themselves, following the example of Bombay workers. 
Print & Censorship
By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court passed certain
regulations to control press freedom and the Company
began encouraging publication of newspapers that would
celebrate Britsh rule.
In 1835, faced with urgent petitions by editors of English
and vernacular newspapers, Governor-General Bentinck
agreed to revise press laws.
Thomas Macaulay, a liberal colonial official, formulated new
rules
that restored the earlier freedoms.
In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled on
the Irish Press Laws.
It provided the government with extensive rights to censor
reports and editorials in the vernacular press.
When a report was judged as seditious, the newspaper was
warned, and if the warning was ignored, the press was
liable to be seized and the printing machinery confiscated.
 Print &
Nationalism
Punjab revolutionaries were
deported in 1907,
Balgangadhar Tilak wrote with
great sympathy
about them in his Kesari. This
led to his imprisonment in
1908,
provoking in turn widespread
protests all over India.
Conclusion
Print has changed the appearance
and
state of the world and an explosive
increase in the literacy rate.
After the advent of print technology
in the history of India, the
idea of nationalism was not only
carried out by print but it
created the nationalist feeling among
people and disintegrated
British rule in India and finally led our
country to gain independence from
the colonial rule.
Thank You