Printing and the Mind of Man

John Carter, Percy H. Muir

Printing and the Mind of Man 

New York City, USA: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967

280 pp., folio, hardcover

Edition size unknown

At the behest of famed typographer Stanley Morison, an exhibition celebrating the contribution that printing had made to the enlargement of human knowledge was organized by the International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition, or IPEX, in 1963. A display at Earls Court concentrated on the technical side of printing, while the British Museum examined fine printing. Both promoted the study of books for their role in advancing factual knowledge, rather than for their aesthetics.

The eventual publication, titled Printing and the Mind of Man: A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization During Five Centuries, was edited by John Carter and Percy Muir.

“The invention of printing with movable type, by Johann Gutenberg of Mainz in the fifth decade of the fifteenth century, was crucial to the whole evolution of western civilization during the ensuing five hundred years. For the printing press furnished the means of repeatable precision of text and the capacity for the mass circulation of ideas. In this volume will be found full descriptions of books etc. which, for the ideas that they brought to the world for the first time, are of prime importance to the mind of man. New concepts in philosophy, religion and politics, in economics, jurisprudence, education and sociology; new ideas in historiography and linguistics, in the arts and architecture; new discoveries in natural history, geography, the sciences, medicine and technology: here, under 424 entries (some of them multiple), is the essential documentation of their first appearance in print.”

- dust jacket blurb

"Printing and the Mind of Man was the catalog of an exhibition that was at the British Museum, in 1963. It was about the history of printing, but actually the book is about the most important books in the Western canon and the impact that they had when they were released. It starts with the Gutenberg Bible. It’s such a fascinating book because you really start to understand where the big, fundamental ideas that made Western culture came from. It doesn’t have any Arabic books or any Indian books or any Chinese books. It’s really about the last 500 years in Western culture. And it’s probably the most fascinating book about intellectual history that I’ve ever read.

And it’s a very beautiful book because it was put together by a great printer who used lots of beautiful types and so on. It’s a wonderful book.”

- Brian Eno, to Ezra Klein, September 2025