Originally published in two volumes in 1980, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.

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The impact of printing, experienced first by literate groups in early modern Europe, changed the character of the Italian Renaissance and ought to be considered among the causes of both the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern science. The advent of printing in the fifteenth century was a complicated innovation which involved a cluster of different changes. The consequences of this innovation appear to be even more variegated and remarkably elusive. Attempts to encapsulate the effects of printing in a single formula or thesis statement are almost always misleading. Take, for example, the observation by one authority that the advent of printing moved Western Europe "from image culture to word culture." Now this formula "image to word' is plausible in some ways. As Frances Yates points out in her study, The Art of Memory, the more information storage and retrieval was handled by printed reference works, the less need there was for vivid images to serve as memory aids. An increased output of encyclopedias in book form diminished the need for cathedrals to serve as encyclopedias in stone. But the formula image-to-word holds only for a limited set of phenomena, for printing also endowed graven images with a new lease on life. Protestant iconoclasts made use of picture books and exploited caricatures and cartoons. As the work of Diirer, Cranach, and Holbein suggests, image making was stimulated by printing among Protestants as well as Catholics.

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