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By Root 1027 0

whose Gutenberg Galaxy had appeared in 1962, for forcing them to refocus their gaze. In the age of scribes, the culture had only primitive reckonings of chronology: muddled timelines counted the generations from Adam, or Noah, or Romulus and Remus. “Attitudes toward historical change,” she wrote, “will be found only occasionally in writings ostensibly devoted to ‘history’ and often have to be read into such writings. They must also be read into sagas and epics, sacred scriptures, funerary inscriptions, glyphs and ciphers, vast stone monuments, documents locked in chests in muniment rooms, and marginal notations on manuscript.”♦ The sense of when we are—the ability to see the past spread out before one; the internalization of mental time charts; the appreciation of anachronism—came with the shift to print.

As a duplicating machine, the printing press not only made texts cheaper and more accessible; its real power was to make them stable. “Scribal culture,” Eisenstein wrote, was “constantly enfeebled by erosion, corruption, and loss.”♦ Print was trustworthy, reliable, and permanent.♦ When Tycho Brahe spent his countless hours poring over planetary and star tables, he could count on others checking the same tables, now and in the future. When Kepler computed his own far more accurate catalogue, he was leveraging the tables of logarithms published by Napier. Meanwhile, print shops were not only spreading Martin Luther’s theses but, more important, the Bible itself. The revolution of Protestantism hinged more on Bible reading than on any point of doctrine—print overcoming script; the codex supplanting the scroll; and the vernacular replacing the ancient languages. Before print, scripture was not truly fixed. All forms of knowledge achieved stability and permanence, not because paper was more durable than papyrus but simply because there were many copies.

In 1963, reading the warnings of the president of the American Historical Association, Eisenstein found herself agreeing that the profession faced a crisis, of sorts. But she felt Bridenbaugh had it exactly backward. He thought the problem was forgetfulness: “As I see it,” he said dramatically, “mankind is faced with nothing short of the loss of its memory, and this memory is history.”♦ Eisenstein, looking at the same new information technologies that so troubled older historians, drew the opposite lesson. The past is not receding from view but, on the contrary, becoming more accessible and more visible. “In an age that has seen the deciphering of Linear B and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” she wrote, “there appears to be little reason to be concerned about ‘the loss of mankind’s memory.’ There are good reasons for being concerned about the overloading of its circuits.” As for the amnesia lamented by Bridenbaugh and so many of his colleagues:

This is a misreading of the predicament confronting historians today. It is not the onset of amnesia that accounts for present difficulties but a more complete recall than any prior generation has ever experienced. Steady recovery, not obliteration, accumulation, rather than loss, have led to the present impasse.♦

From her point of view, a five-centuries-old communications revolution was still gathering momentum. How could they not see this?

“Overloading of circuits” was a fairly new metaphor to express a sensation—too much information—that felt new. It had always felt new. One hungers for books; rereads a cherished few; begs or borrows more; waits at the library door, and perhaps, in the blink of an eye, finds oneself in a state of surfeit: too much to read. In 1621 the Oxford scholar Robert Burton (who amassed one of the world’s largest private libraries, 1,700 books, but never a thesaurus) gave voice to the feeling:

I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c. daily musters and preparations, and such like, which