Print Culture and the Modern World

(a) Erasmus's idea of the printed book : Erasmus, a Latin scholar and a Catholic reformer, who criticised the excesses of Catholicism, but kept his distance from, Luther, expressed a deep anxiety about printing. He wrote in Adages (1508) :
 To what corner of the world do they not fly, these swarms of new books ? It may be that one here and there contributes something worth knowing, but the very multitude of them is hurtful to scholarship, because it creates a glut and even in good things, satiety is most harmful… [printers] fill the world with books, not just trifling things (such as I write, perhaps), but stupid, ignorant, slanderous, scandalous, raving, irreligious and seditious books, and the number of them is such that even the valuable publications lose their value.'
(b) The Vernacular Press Act : The revolt of 1857 forced the government to curb the freedom of the press. After the revolt, enraged Englishmen demanded a clamp down on the ‘native’ press. As vernacular newspapers became assertively nationalist, the colonial government began debating measures of strict control.
In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, on the model of Irish Press Laws. It provided the government with extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press. The government started keeping regular track of the vernacular newspapers published in different provinces. When a report was judged as seditious, the newspapers were given a warning and if the warning was ignored, the press was liable to be seized, and the printing machinery could be confiscated.