DOCUMENTARY VIDEOS
| Stephen Fry & the Gutenberg Press from Wavelength Films on Vimeo. |
| Stephen Fry – The Machine that Made Us (BBC) — ( embedded alongside this text) – |
| Other sources – Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V |
Harvest of Wisdom a 1994 film about the history of graphic arts and printing by the Nolan Moore Memorial Education Foundation. The style is slightly dated but the film has good social and political context, which is useful for high school and college students being introduced to the history of communication. Printing starts at 20:15. “They didn’t want the average Joe to start reading the scriptures. What if Joe began to interpret them? What if he found something there that contradicted the official teachings — one of which said it was God’s will that the poor remain poor and the rich get richer. Why, this might lead to revolution…”
- Paper and printing in China, It’s History, 2015. (funny)
- The print workshop of the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge University Library. Short, no-nonsense explanation of the process.
- Tour the US Government Printing Office with CSPAN’s American Artifacts program.
- Colonial Williamsburg printing shop, video from July 7, 2020. Can you suggest ways to make this more interesting? Fixing the sound would be a start…
Podcasts
- Highly recommended: Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of “The Printing Press as an agent of change,” three lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, 2010.
- How Luther went viral: Social media helped bring about the Protestant Reformation (Economist, Dec. 17, 2011).
- Ben Franklin and the World of the Enlightenment, Stanford Continuing Studies Program. Esp. Podcast 2: Printer, Journalist, Citizen
- The story of books, by G. B. Rawlings, Librivox audio podcast. For young adults.