Gutenberg’s Dangerous Idea
Sep
5
2008

With the exception of China and a handful of Muslim countries, the Bible is a fairly easy book to acquire. The Gideons shove Bibles into the nightstands of nearly every hotel room in the United States, missionaries hand out more of the Holy Book than food, and wild-eyed street preachers thrust The Word in the faces of those damned non-believers. It’s easily the world’s most printed and best-selling book [1]. Flashback a mere 600 years of human history and you find a completely different situation. From time immemorial, the transfer of written knowledge was a laborious task. For each copy, a scribe would have to meticulously reproduce by hand the seventy-six books of the Vulgate Bible [2], a task that » read more «