It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history—and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown, and no monarch was beheaded.
What happened was this: In the middle of the 18th century, huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.
For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor.
This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution.” It was an unprecedented democratization of information, the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.
In Britain, only 21,000 books were published in the first decade of the 18th century; in the last decade of the century, it was over 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama wrote that “literacy rates in 18th-century France were much higher than in the late 20th-century United States.”
Where readers had once read “intensively,” spending their lives reading and rereading two or three books, the reading revolution popularized a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on. Books, pamphlets, and periodicals poured off the presses.
It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.
Even more importantly, print changed how people thought.
In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected, and put in its place. “To engage the written word,” the media theorist Neil Postman wrote in 1985, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making, and reasoning.”
As Postman pointed out, it is no accident that the growth of print culture in the 18th century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the 18th-century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy, and even the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.
Now, we are living through the counterrevolution. Read more»
James Marriott | “The Dawn of the Postliterate Society” | October 23, 2025
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