(In case you wonder why all the encyclopedia posts: I have an upcoming project that will involve their historical development and cultural functions. Since my blog is my commonplace book, I’m filing things here as I run across them.)

The business of books both derives from and distances the temple; it grew alongside the commercial revolution and prefigured the industrial revolution (the book was one of the first manufactured items to be made cheaper by standardization); it favors the kind of independent revelation championed by Protestantism (which abolished the selling of indulgences, but made the Bible a bestseller) and also the French Revolution, which, some might say, began with the sale of encyclopedias [Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800]

Zaid, So Many Books, 55