Pressing On: She Who Gave Wings to Print!

Let us pause for a moment of silence and reflection for Elizabeth “Betty” Eisenstein, who passed on four months ago. Who was she, you ask? Not many people in the printing industry know; neither did I. So I’ve conducted a little research: Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein, PhD, lived for 92 years. She was an American historian of the French Revolution and early 19th-century France. Later in life she was a tennis star on the senior (65+) circuit. Additionally, she is perhaps best known and remembered as a printing press historian.

So, who was this “trailblazing historian of movable type,” as the New York Times called her? “In the 1960s, when she began researching printing history, Professor Eisenstein found — to her considerable surprise — that while there were many studies of scribal life in the Middle Ages before Gutenberg, and of literary life in the Renaissance after, little had been written about the watershed years in between, when the printing press first made its mark,” Margalit Fox wrote in a Feb. 24 obituary in the NYT Books section. (Read the complete tribute.)

Was Betty “The Assassin,” as she was known agilely roaming the courts with a tennis racquet, the Red Bull energy boost of the printed medium? Did she give print wings, or did she help print to fly with the wings it already had (but wasn’t using)?

Fact: Dr. Eisenstein conducted research into the cultural impact of the movable-type printing press. In 1979 she published her two-volume, interdisciplinary masterwork, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. (You can still buy the book.)

Opinion: These tomes redefined printing as a game-changer for society. Many observers credit Eisenstein with creating the concept of how we think about printing the way that we do today.

No one before Dr. Eisenstein had considered the full and specific cultural impact of the printing press, said Sabrina Alcorn Baron, a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland who co-edited a book of essays about Eisenstein’s influence. It is true that as early as the 17th century scientist/philosopher Francis Bacon considered the printing press, along with gunpowder and the compass, one of those inventions that “changed the appearance and state of the whole world.” One of Eisenstein’s contemporaries, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, famously observed that “the medium is the message:” that is, that the way a message is transmitted — through conversation or in print, on a digital tablet or in a podcast — crucially affects the way it is perceived, recalled the Washington Post. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan argued that movable type effectively rewired human cognition and paved the way for such large-scale trends as nationalism.

Eisenstein went even further. The printing press made information more attainable, accessible, and affordable. Books and pamphlets were mass produced in ever-growing numbers. The result, she observed, was a “communications revolution:” the swift spread of ideas, faster than at any previous time in history. The printing press, she argued, enabled such movements as the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, allowing scientists across Europe to share ideas with comparative ease. She wrote, “… intellectual historians may be well advised to leave many inventions, such as stirrup or grist mill, to other specialists. To treat Gutenberg’s invention this way, however, is to miss the chance of understanding the main forces that have shaped the modern mind.” As she observed in later work, the transition from scribal culture to print culture prefigured the present-day shift from print culture to digital, NYT pointed out.

Rest in peace, Dr. E., and thank you.

Video of Elizabeth Eisenstein discussing five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers, based on one of her other books, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending.