ess.

SECTION 5. BOOKS

[Sidenote: Numbers of books published]

The sixteenth was the first really bookish century. There were then in
Germany alone about 100,000 works printed, or reprinted. If each
edition amounted to 1000--a fair average, for if many editions were
smaller, some were much larger--that would mean that about a million
volumes were offered to the German public each year throughout the
century. There is no doubt that the religious controversy had a great
deal to do with the expansion of the reading public, for it had the
same effect on the circulation of pamphlets that a political campaign
now has on the circulation of the newspaper. The following figures
show how rapidly the number of books published in Germany increased
during the decisive years. In 1518 there were 150, in 1519 260, in
1520 570, 1521 620, in 1522 680, 1523 935, and 1524 990.

Many of these books were short, controversial tracts; some others were
intended as purveyors of news pure and simple. Some of these
broadsides were devoted to a single event, as the _Neue Zeitung: Die
Schlacht des tuerkischen Kaisers_, [Sidenote: 1526] others had several
items of interest, including letters from distant parts. Occasionally
a mere lampoon would appear under the title of _Neue Zeitung_,
corresponding to our funny papers. But these substitutes for modern
journals were both rare and irregular; the world then got along with
much {692} less information about current events than it now enjoys.
Nor was there anything like our weekly and monthly magazines.

The new age was impatient of medieval literature. The schoolmen, never
widely read, were widely mocked. The humanists, too, fell into deep
disgrace, charged with self-conceit, profligacy and irreligion. They
still wandered around, like the sophists in ancient Greece, bemoaning
their hard lot and deploring the coarseness of an unappreciative time.
Their real fault was that they were, or claimed to be, an aristocracy,
and the people, who could read for themselves, no longer were imposed
on by pretensions to esoteric learning and a Ciceronian style.

Even the medieval vernacular romances no longer suited the taste of the
new generation. A certain class continued to read _Amadis of Gaul_ or
_La Morte d'Arthur_ furtively, but the arbiters of taste declared that
they would no longer do. The Puritan found them immoral; the man of
the world thought them ridiculous. Ascham asserts that "the