About The Atlas The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. While printing in Asia pre-dates European activity by several hundred years, the rapid expansion of the trade following the discovery of printing in Mainz, Germany around the middle of the fifteenth century is a topic of great importance to the history of European civilization. This website uses Flash to depict the spread of European printing in a manner that allows a user to control dates and other variables. The inspiration for the site comes from the maps of printing’s spread found in Berry and Poole’s 1966 book The Annals of Printing, and the well-known maps in Febvre and Martin’s L’apparition du livre (The Coming of the Book) from 1958. These sources, and others such as Robert Teichl’s map Die Wiegendruck in Kartenbild, depict the spread of printing in Europe largely through a decade by decade progression. The aim of the Atlas of Early Printing is to take this type of information and allow it to be manipulated, while also providing contextual information that visually represents the cultural situation from which printing emerged. Layers can be turned on and off to build a detailed atlas of the culture and commerce of Europe as masters and journeymen printers ventured to new towns and markets seeking support and material for the new art of printing. The atlas, along with accompanying material such as the animated printing press model, is designed to be used as a teaching resource. The map and the information that it depicts represents data compiled by research using common bibliographic catalogues and databases for fifteenth century printing, along with secondary sources focusing on each of the contextual layers of the map. All of the resources utilized during the creation of the atlas are available on the Sources page. The Atlas of Early Printing is the culmination of an idea that first occurred to me over ten years ago. At the time, the technology for delivering interactive content on the internet was primitive. Today, technology has advanced to a point where The Atlas of Early Printing is now a reality, but only through the efforts of many people. This site was made possible by an Innovations in Instructional Computing award from the Academic Technologies Advisory Council at the University of Iowa, and the support of the University of Iowa Libraries, Academic Technologies, and Information Technology Services at the University of Iowa. We invite your comments at lib-atlas@uiowa.edu. Greg Prickman, Project Manager
Staff: Gregory J. Prickman Linda Roth Kirk Murray Special thanks to Joel Silver and Jim Canary at the Lilly Library Indiana University, for assistance with the creation of the printing press model. |