Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

by Vaclav Smil

When Gutenberg used his invention of movable type to print the first pages of his Bible in 1454, he could not foresee that during the remaining 45 years of the 15th-century European printers would publish more than 11,000 new editions, that the number of new titles would rise by an order of magnitude during the second half of the 16th century (to about 135,000), and that they would reach nearly 650,000 during the second half of the 18th century (Buringh and van Zanden 2009). Book printing, not textiles or tools, was the first mass-scale industry of the early modern era whose impact (is the Enlightenment conceivable without it?) was not obvious at the time of its origins. Similarly,