Condensing history

Abstract

Those young enough to have been brought up in the internet age may have forgotten that, once upon a time, knowledge was restricted, expensive and inaccessible. Books were valued, privileged possessions; guilds existed to control aspects of training and knowledge. The printing press and the Enlightenment changed all that, and affordable publication and public-lending libraries did much to accelerate the spread of knowledge thereafter, but it is really in our own time that free electronic distribution—most recently through online projects like Wikipedia (whose article on ‘The democratization of knowledge’ appropriately trumpets its own role), Project Gutenberg and Google Books—has made vast quantities of the best that has been thought or said available almost everywhere. It would be easy to believe that the need for actual dictionaries and reference works is now past, but in fact the sheer quantity of information available quickly leads to such an overload that there will always be a need for an expert guide. While the ‘for Dummies’ and ‘Complete Idiot’s Guides’ series are sometimes derided, we should not forget that a title that promises an ‘easy’ way in has always been a selling point—see Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) as one example where the name is indeed false advertising!