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moting the Protestant Reformation was most prominent, stimulating an enormous outpouring of publications on religion and its reform. By 1520, 32 tracts by Luther had been published in more than 500 editions, and within a few years a quarter of all German publications appeared under his name. Before Luther’s death in 1546, more than three million copies of his writings, excluding his Bible translations, had been printed. It has been estimated that 150,000 items were printed in Germany during the sixteenth century, a significant percentage of which were Reformation tracts. It has also been es- timated that after the controversies of the Reformation quieted, the number of publications in Germany actually declined in the seventeenth century, to between 85,000 and 150,000.47
Looking back at the impact of printing in the fifteenth century on the more specialized field of medieval scholars’ use of books, Richard and Mary Rouse analyzed changes in book usage as a result of printing, including the elimination of glossing as a method of studying and commenting on texts, and the reduction of the process of copying out portions of books for individual use. While numerous manuscripts had been formatted for glossing, few printed books were typographically designed for that purpose. Availability of less expensive copies of texts obviated the need for copying out lengthy portions of texts necessary for individual study, though writers continued to do so, perhaps for different purposes, in commonplace books, mostly for personal use, well into the twentieth century. The history of writ- ing commonplace books has been traced to the zibaldone, or hodgepodge book, a practice of making personal collections of useful information on a wide variety of topics, usually in the vernacular, by writing in paper codices in small or medium format, beginning in Italy in the fourteenth century. By the seventeenth century this was such a well-established practice that it was taught to college students. Though HistoryofInformation.com began strictly as a timeline online in 2005, in its present form it might be thought of as a
47 Flood, “The History of the Book in Germany,” Suarez & Woudhuysen (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Book I (2010), p. 227
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