Print Culture and the Modern World

(i) Increase in literacy rate: Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries literacy rates went up in most parts of Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, in some parts of Europe literacy rates were as high as 60 to 80 per cent. As literacy and schools spread in European countries, there was a virtual reading mania.
(ii) Role of periodicals: The periodical press developed from the early eighteenth century, Newspapers and journals carried information about wars and trade, as well as news of developments in other places.
(iii) Ideas of scientists and philosophers: Similarly, the ideas of scientists and philosophers now became more accessible to the common people. Ancient and medieval scientific texts were compiled and published, and maps and scientific diagrams were widely printed. The writings of thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau were also widely printed and read. Thus their ideas about science, reason and rationality found their way into popular literature.
(iv) Print a powerful engine of progress:
Louise-Sebastien Mercier, a novelist in eighteenth-century France, declared: ‘The printing press is the most powerful engine of progress and public opinion is the force that will sweep despotism away.' In many of Mercier's novels, the heroes are transformed by acts of reading.