Print Culture And The Modern World: 10 SST

Question: How did Gutenberg personalize the printed hooks suiting to the tastes and requirement of others?

Answer:

1. Borders were illuminated by hand with foliage and other patterns.
2. Illustrations were painted in the painting school of the buyer’s choice,
3. In the books printed for the rich blank spares were left for decoration.
4. Each buyer could choose the design, verses were highlighted by hand with colors,
5. The overall outlook of the book was properly taken care of.

Question: Explain the main features of the first printed Bible.
Or
Describe any three main features of the first printed Bible.

Answer:

1. About 180 copies were printed and it took three years to produce them.
2. The text was printed in the new Gutenberg press with metal type, but the borders were carefully designed, painted and illuminated by hand by artists.
3. Every page of each copy was different.
4. Different colors were used within the letters in various places.

Question: “The shift from hand printing to mechanical printing led to the print revolution”. Explain.

Answer:

1. In the hundred years between 1450 and 1550. the printing presses were set up in most of the countries of Europe.
2. Printers from Germany travelled to other countries, seeking work and helping to start new presses. As the number of printing presses grew, book production boomed.
3. The second half of the fifteenth century saw around 20 million copies of printed books flooding the markets in Europe. The number went up in the sixteenth century to about 200 million copies.
4. It influenced popular perceptions and opened up new ways of looking at things.

Question: How did printing press create a new-reading public? Explain.
Or
“There was a virtual reading mania in European countries in the 18th century”. Explain the factors responsible for this virtual reading mania.

Answer:

1. Low cost of production: With the printing press, a new reading public emerged. Printing reduced the cost of books. The time mid labour required to produce each book came down, and multiple copies could be produced with greater ease. Books flooded the.market, reaching out to an ever-growing readership.
2. Accessibility of books: Access to books created a new culture of reading. Earlier, reading was restricted to the elites. Common people lived in a world of oral culture They heard sacred texts read out ,ballads recited, and folk tales narrated Knowledge was transferred orally. People collectively heard a story, or saw a performance. Before the age of print, books were not only expensive but they could not be produced in sufficient numbers. Now books could reach out to wider sections of people.
3. Increase in literacy rate: Through the. seventeenth and eighteenth centuries literacy rates went up in most parts of Europe. Churches of different denominations set up schools in Villages, carrying literacy to peasants and artisans. 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.

Question: Explain the common conviction of people in the mid-18th century about the books and print culture,

Answer:

1. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a common conviction that books were a means of spreading progress and enlightenment.
2. Many believed that books could change the world, liberate society from despotism and tyranny, and herald a time when reason and intellect would rule.
3. Louise-sebastian Mercier, a novelist in Prance declared. “The printing press is most powerful engine of progress and public- opinion is the force that will sweep despotism away”.

Question: State any three points of importance of penny chapbooks.
Or
Describe some of the new printed books which were sold by the peddlers in villages in the eighteenth century Europe.

Answer:

1. Pocket sue books that were sold by travelling peddlers called chap-men.
2. These became popular from the time of the sixteenth-century print revolution.
3. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales, children’s literature and almanacs. Where there were illustrations, they would be popular prints.

Question: “Print popularized the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers”. Explain.
Or
How did ideas about science, reason and rationality find their way into popular literature in the 18th century Europe?

Answer:

1. Collectively, the writings of thinkers provided a critical commentary on tradition, superstition and despotism.
2. Scholars and thinkers argued for the rule of reason rather than custom, and demanded that everything be judged through the application of reason and rationality,
3. They attacked the sacred authority of the Church and the despotic power of the state, thus eroding the legitimacy of a social order based on tradition.
4. The Writings of Voltaire and Rousseau were read Widely: and those who read these books saw the world through new eyes, eyes that were questioning, critical and rational