Fabulous First Paragraph - Five Hundred Years of Printing - S. H. Steinberg

Fabulous First Paragraph - Five Hundred Years of Printing - S. H. Steinberg


Penguin Books Baltimore, Maryland 1955-1961

Foreword's First Paragraph (and more) by Beatrice Warde

These were the five hundred years of the Printer.  These were the centuries in which there was his way, but no other way, of broadcasting identical messages to a thousand or more people, a thousand or more miles apart.  This was the epoch that we have been calling 'modern times'.

We gave it that name because we have imagined ourselves as standing on this side of the deep cleft-in-history that opened up midway of the fifteenth century: the cleft into which Johann Gutenberg and his followers drove those leaden wedges that are called printing types, and split us clean away from that almost inconceivable world in which there was no such thing as printing.

But what if another cleft proves to have been opening just behind us, in this very century?  It is not easy for our children now to imagine a world in which there were no loudspeakers.  Already the demagogues have almost forgotten how handicapped they were in that day-before-yesterday when there were no softspeakers: no radio-waves to carry a stage-whisper of scorn or passion into ten million susceptible ears at the same instant.  The children, as they grow to maturity, will become increasingly familiar with such phrases as 'the year 2000', 'the Third Millennium'.  The mysterious power that is in round numbers will impel them to look with fresher, more far-sighted eyes upon those thousand years that will have passed in some night before they are sixty.  They will be as convinced as we are that something ended and something else began with Gutenberg's invention.   But I think that they will find other names for the epochs on either side of the cleft.

Whatever they call the one on the farther side, it will no longer be the middle ages.  Whether or not they name these past five centuries the Epoch of Gutenberg, they will at least come to look upon it as another 'middle' section of human history.....