Mechanized printing changed western culture in the fifteenth century as fundamentally and profoundly as the creation of the smartphone changed it at the turn of the twenty-first. It led to sweeping developments in literature and literacy, education and popular politics, cartography, history, advertising, propaganda, and bureaucracy.3 Looking back from the seventeenth century, the philosopher-politician Sir Francis Bacon ranked printing alongside gunpowder and the shipman’s compass in having changed “the appearance and state of the whole world.”
