It might be argued that the bulk of printing has not now, and never has had, much relation to ideas, that in the early days its chief business was dubious theological disputes and that its chief business now is advertising soap flakes and the like. But printing, in its entirety, is a description of the world, and if a great deal of print is devoted to murder cases, toothpaste ads and income tax blanks--well, that must be the kind of world we have. However, when new ideas have been advanced, they have been advanced in print, so that the printer has never been safe from them. Even now, in the event that they be promulgated by radio, they must be fixed in print in order to stick and sink in. Let us only say then that with regard to gaining knowledge of the world in which we live, the printer is in an exposed position--nothing more.
Although we do not know much about Gutenberg,[22] the first printer, we doubt that he was a man of the world in our sense. How could he have been? For the preceding four or five hundred years to be a man of the world was to be unworldly; people had been concerned with building cathedrals, making religious paintings, going on crusades. Printing was the chief factor in making the man of the world in our modern sense. Printing enabled him to know what was going on so that he might take part in it, although printers did not realize this during the cradle days of printing. Great events were occurring then; the Turks captured Constantinople; the Hundred Years' War came to an end with the English driven off the continent of Europe; the Portuguese sailed to the Canaries and the Azores; but these events found little mention in early printing. _The Nuremberg Chronicle_, as Helen Gentry and David Greenhood point out in their _Chronology_, made no mention of Columbus' discovery of America in the previous year. First came religious books, then school books, law books and classics. It is true that Fust and Schöffer printed proclamations and information for the archbishop, but it was not until Von Olpe at Basle printed _The Ship of Fools_ in 1494 that we have "a book dealing with contemporary people and their exploits instead of with historical accounts of the past."