familytreemagazine.com 9According to legend, Gutenberg’s business
partner offered 20 copies of his printed Bible
to a Paris bookseller—only to fl ee for his life
from an angry crowd. The mob believed that
the only explanation for so many identical
books was witchcraft.David A. Fryxell
is the founding editor of
Family Tree Magazine. He
now writes and researches
his family tree in Tucson.| |1799
Louis-Nicolas Robert develops the paper
machine, which cranks out up to 40 times as
much paper in a day compared to traditional
techniques. He and his colleague Saint-Léger
Didot bicker over the patent, leading Robert to
sell the patent and prototype to Didot.1817
Poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge derides
the increasing popularity of books. In his Biographia
Literaria, Coleridge says that books, once revered as
“religious oracles,” had “degraded into culprits.” Over
the next several decades,
inexpensive paper leads to
an explosion of supposedly
lowbrow fi ction: “penny
dreadfuls,” dime novels
and (later) pulp fi ction.
Parents fret that cheap
popular fi ctions will seduce
their children into lives of
crime and violence—much
as they later would over
comic books, television
and the Internet.1867
Piano-maker Theodore
Steinway popularizes
wood-pulp paper, imports
a German wood grinder
and opens the United
States’ fi rst wood-pulp
paper mill. Today, wood
pulp accounts for nearly
40 percent of the world’s
paper, with another 55 per-
cent made from recycled
wood-pulp paper.1844
Friedrich Gottlob Keller and Charles
Fenerty use wood pulp (instead of
rags) to make paper. Rags had become
a hot commodity, leading to confl icts
between governments and smugglers;
wood off ered a readily accessible alter-
native, and pulp could be bleached
to produce whiter paper. Inventors
had tinkered with other ideas as well,
including straw, grass, vegetables,
manure, ash and hornets’ nests.2007
Amazon intro-
duces the Kindle,
a paperless
“e -reader.” Other
electronic-reading
devices follow,
leading to a rise in
e-book (and audio-
book) publishing.1700 | 1800 | 1900 |