Thank you Robert Darnton for this letter from the 15th. century.

Robert Choate Darnton (born May 10, 1939) is an American historian and library director (currently a Trustee of the New York Public Library) who has written expansively and lucidly on the history of books and libraries. I take the following letter from Darnton’s book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. New York: NY Public Affairs. 2009.  The letter, written in 1471, just twenty years after Gutenberg’s invention. is from Niccolò Perotti, a learned Italian classicist, to Francesco Guarnerio.

I read it and stopped in my tracks, as they say, and looked about me, why this could be today, in 2017, how many, some five and one half centuries later. How many of us have thought or said, if not written something similar, very similar, regarding the extraordinary changes in our lives brought about by the Internet. While I don’t believe this is true today (nor then), that the changes wrought by the Internet are on balance destructive or detrimental, but rather that they are a wondrous benefit to more and more if not all of us, I might still ask Niccolo’s question:  Has it, the Internet, not the printing press, corrupted us to the point where it would be much better if it did not exist rather than it spread with little or no thought or effort falsehoods (conspiracy theories, fake news, and the like) over the known world.



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