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Updated: May 12, 2025
Benjamin spent a short time in looking over Keimer's office, and found that his press was old and damaged, and his fount of English types nearly worn out. Possessing much more ingenuity than Keimer, and understanding a printing-press much better, he went to work, and in a short time put it into decent order for service.
A printing-press was introduced as early as 1530, and ever since the sixteenth century many works of merit have been produced from time to time by Icelandic genius.
I rediscovered on that trip the ancient bellwoman, sole advertising medium before the advent of the printing-press, the extinct chimney-sweep, the ornamental policeman who for professional excitement reads detective novels at home, and the sacrificial rites of of what or whom I shall leave unsaid.
Man had indeed increased his conquest over Nature in later centuries by a few mechanical inventions, such as gunpowder, telescope, magnetic needle, printing-press, spinning jenny, and hand-loom, but the characteristic of all those inventions, with the exception of gunpowder, was that they still remained a subordinate auxiliary to the physical strength and mental skill of man.
It is smaller and more gloomy, and its columns are almost black with age; it was here, in 1455, that Pannartz and Schweinheim, two of those nomadic German scholars who have not yet forgotten the road to Italy, established their printing-press in the house of Pietro de' Massimi, and here took place one of those many romantic tragedies which darkened the end of the sixteenth century.
But the sojourner for a day will probably not notice this, and, if he should, must simply make allowance, and think with Henry James of the other memories of "this land of Rabelais, Descartes, and Balzac; of good dinners, good company, and good houses." To link the city still closer with letters, the first printing-press in Touraine was set up here in 1496.
The printing-press multiplied copies of the old literature and put them in the hands of the poor. It was the precursor of a new civilization, and because it was a new birth of thought, we call it the Renaissance. The Renaissance, however, needed another factor to complement it. Not merely intellect was sleeping, but also man's moral nature. Conscience and will required new stimulus.
As a result of his efforts, the printing-press was sold to M. Laurent, and the type-foundry became the property of the De Bernys, under whom it was highly successful. At the same time, to save Honore from disgrace, Madame de Balzac lent 37,000 francs and Madame de Berny 45,000, the latter sum being paid back in full by Balzac in 1836, the year of Madame de Berny's death.
Here and there, even in our civilised societies in remote agricultural districts, the old social conditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk of our societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the wide diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap printing-press; the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into vast cities, where not merely thousands but millions of individuals are collected together under physical and mental conditions of life which invert every social condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means of locomotion; the increasing intercourse between distant races and lands, brought about by rapid means of intercommunication, widening and changing in every direction the human horizon all these produce a society, so complex and so rapidly altering, that social co-ordination between all its parts is impossible; and social unrest, and the strife of ideals of faiths, of institutions, and consequent human suffering is inevitable.
In this street, dark even when the sun shines brightest, is another reminder of William Bradford, a tablet in form, but quite as much a tombstone as the other; for its brazen letters tell in true epitaph how he lived here two hundred years gone by, and how here on this spot he set up the first printing-press in the colony, and that here he did the public printing, as well as such books and psalms, tracts and almanacs, and such like things as he had time for.
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