The Man Who Taught the World to Read: The Story of the Great Information Revolution

We live in an age of a new information revolution, when a palm-sized gadget provides access to all human knowledge. Could anyone—except the boldest science-fiction writers—have imagined something like this half a century ago?

This fascinating book is devoted to the history of the great information revolution: the mass spread of printed text as the main carrier of information, and to one of its key figures, the creator of the first publishing empire in the world—Christoph Plantin.

The son of a servant who, by a miracle, received a good education; an unknown apprentice without money or connections who overturned the printing business monopolized by several clans; a criminal wanted by Catholic authorities and an official printer of the King of Spain; a secret religious dissenter and publisher of the most advanced and scientific works of his time. Christoph Plantin brought the printed book into every home, making it truly mass and accessible to all.

Plantin’s biography is a story of rapid rises and crushing falls: several times he lost almost everything and rebuilt his empire from scratch. How did he manage it? And what is it like to be a pioneer of new information technologies, business strategies, and marketing decisions in the high-tech world of the 16th century?

“Johann Gutenberg invented printing, but it was Christoph Plantin who created mass book publishing and ‘packaged’ large arrays of information into books. In front of you is the first biography of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the 16th century in Russian: an elegant, exciting, and inspiring story about a breakthrough into the future.”

Egor Yakovlev, director of the educational-science project “Digital History.”