About
Humanism For Sale was an experiment in online publishing that launched in 2008. We used the Word Press blog platform and a then-new Comment Press theme to begin a dialog based on a new scholarly monograph about the creation and sale of school books in Europe between 1450 and 1650. In that version, which remained live for over a decade, it was possible for readers to comment on any portion of Humanism For Sale in comment fields that ran parallel to the text. Over the years, some two hundred readers made over a thousand comments in this way. The result was a dialogue between author and readers that proved particularly useful for students in college and graduate level courses in history, literature, and media studies.
Software security concerns meant that it was necessary to disable the comment function in 2019. What you see now is essentially an artifact of the original site. The entire monograph is here with the illustrations, and almost all of the comments are accessible by clicking on the comment icon (
) for each numbered section. Footnotes appear at the bottom of each section, with short citations of books, articles, and online sources for which full citations appear in the Bibliography.
Humanism For Sale is a project of the Newberry Library Center For Renaissance Studies. Although the site is no longer interactive, its author welcomes inquiries. He is Paul F. Gehl, an historian of printing now Curator Emeritus at the Newberry Library, Chicago: gehlp@newberry.org. A personal statement that Gehl wrote at the time the site launched in 2008 may be found here. His CV is available here.