"In this marvelous, learned, and friendly volume, Helen Barolini traces the contours of his career and reveals Aldus and the Aldine press in historical and cultural context; she admirably conveys the magic of an age in which the book as we know it was invented.

The Naturalis historia by Pliny the Elder provided Renaissance scholars, artists and architects with details of ancient architectural practice and long-lost architectural wonders - material that was often unavailable elsewhere in classical literature. Pliny's descriptions frequently included the dimensions of these buildings, as well as details of their unusual construction materials and ornament. This book describes, for the first time, how the passages were interpreted from around 1430 to 1580, that is, from Alberti to Palladio. Chapters are arranged chronologically within three interrelated sections - antiquarianism; architectural writings; drawings and built monuments - thereby making it possible for the reader to follow the changing attitudes to Pliny over the period. The resulting study establishes the Naturalis historia as the single most important literary source after Vitruvius's De architectura.

Francesco Colonna's weird, erotic, allegorical antiquarian tale, "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili", together with all of its 174 original woodcut illustrations, has been called the first "stream of consciousness" novel and was one of the most important documents of Renaissance imagination and fantasy. The author -- presumed to be a friar of dubious reputation -- was obsessed by architecture, landscape and costume (it is not going too far to say sexually obsessed) and its woodcuts are a primary source for Renaissance ideas.

This early history of printed literature “delves into the delectable intrigues of Renaissance Venice with a degree of detail that will mesmerize readers” (La Repubblica). This accessible yet erudite history traces the incredible rise of publishing in the Republic of Venice, the Renaissance’s era of global capital of culture and trade. While a number of Venetian innovators drove this new enterprise, one in particular, Aldus Manutius, stands head and shoulders above the rest. Manutius tirelessly promoted the concept of reading for pleasure, and his Aldine Press commissioned the first modern typeface. Beginning in Venice and subsequently across much of the civilized world, bound printed editions of the Talmud, the Koran, the works of Erasmus of Rotterdam, and classics of Greek and Latin poetry and theater began to circulate for the first time, leading to an unprecedented diffusion of human knowledge, and bringing about the birth of the modern world.

The age of print was begun by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 in Mainz, Germany. His invention of the mechanized and mass production of print replaced the previous handwriting of the scribes and was a transformative achievement. It was both the product of and a catalyst for far-reaching intellectual, social, and political changes that began during the Renaissance and continued for centuries right up to the present. The age of electronic media was begun by Steve Jobs in 1985 in Cupertino, California. His integration of the elements of desktop publishing--personal computer, page-layout software, page-description language, and laser printer--replaced the previous photomechanical processes of printing and was a transformative achievement. It was both the product of and a catalyst for the intellectual, social, and political changes during the digital revolution that will extend for generations into the future. This book discusses these two bookends in the age of print. It follows the transitions and stages of innovation in printing between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries and shows how the inventors responsible for this progress are bound together in a chain of revolutionary technical change called disruptive continuity. While the works of Gutenberg and Jobs are separated by more than five centuries, there are striking parallels and differences between these two innovations. They both sparked the quantitative expansion of literacy and the spread of knowledge around the world. However, the emergence of electronic publishing--especially in its present-day social media forms--has brought a vast increase in the consumption of information while also heralding a qualitative transformation that places the tools of wireless and mobile multimedia publishing into the hands of billions of people on earth. Much in the same way that there was a historical lag between Gutenberg's invention and the full impact of printing on the world, so too in our own time, the long-term societal consequences of electronic publishing have yet to be realized.