'Prints and Visual' Communication Revisited: Ivins' Lessons for the information age

Abstract

Scholarly work in the humanities is rarely urgent: if the academic community has waited twenty-five centuries to learn some odd details of Aristotle's private life, for example, a few more years could hardly matter to anyone. Nonetheless, it is far from ordinary to review a book first published forty-five years ago -which is precisely what I intend to do in this article. My defense is that this particular book, William Ivins' Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953), with its retrospective view of the social history of the print, may provide useful insights for those confronting the rapidly growing and radically changing panorama of communications technology.