Kennen Sie schon … The Atlas of Early Printing?

The Atlas of Ear­ly Print­ing is an inter­ac­tive site designed to be used as a tool for teach­ing the ear­ly his­to­ry of print­ing in Europe dur­ing the sec­ond half of the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry.
While print­ing in Asia pre-dates Euro­pean activ­i­ty by sev­er­al hun­dred years, the rapid expan­sion of the trade fol­low­ing the dis­cov­ery of print­ing in Mainz, Ger­many around the mid­dle of the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry is a top­ic of great impor­tance to the glob­al his­to­ry of com­mu­ni­ca­tions, tech­nol­o­gy, and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of knowl­edge.

The inspi­ra­tion for the site comes from the maps of printing’s spread found in Berry and Poole’s 1966 book The Annals of Print­ing, and the well-known maps in Feb­vre and Martin’s L’apparition du livre (The Com­ing of the Book) from 1958. These sources, and oth­ers such as Robert Teichl’s map Die Wiegen­druck in Karten­bild, depict the spread of print­ing in Europe large­ly through a decade by decade pro­gres­sion.
The aim of the Atlas of Ear­ly Print­ing is to take this type of infor­ma­tion and allow it to be manip­u­lat­ed, while also pro­vid­ing con­tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion that visu­al­ly rep­re­sents the cul­tur­al sit­u­a­tion from which print­ing emerged.
Lay­ers can be turned on and off to build a detailed atlas of the cul­ture and com­merce of Europe as mas­ters and jour­ney­men print­ers ven­tured to new towns and mar­kets seek­ing sup­port and mate­r­i­al for the new art of print­ing.