The Importance of Printing in Modernity

The printing press was compared to the guillotine by Erasmus, Joel King de Bele and other early humanists. The comparison between or perhaps the contrast between printing on the one hand and gunpowder on the other became something of commonplace. People were worried about it at the time, weren't they? Because that meant that information could kind of get away from an elite. And then there's a worry about the quality of the different books and the way they're printed as well.