October 18, 2026
A Propulsive and Entertaining History of the Book
Joel J. Miller’s The Idea Machine successfully makes the history of the book into a compelling story. Instead of, for example, dwelling on the statistics of book publication after Gutenberg’s invention, Miller illustrates how the world became different, especially for the elites who could afford access to books. He tells how Montaigne suddenly had thousands of books on his shelves, whereas Machiavelli had perhaps a dozen, and how this much greater availability of books began to shift human potential and consciousness. An early example of “information overload.” As someone who has been researching the early history of print, I appreciated how Miller found a way to describe the important facts in a succinct way, such as the Chinese and Korean precedents for print prior to Gutenberg (p. 158).
One of my favorite features of Miller’s book is the Marginalia sections, asides that provide other bookish anecdotes, such as Malcolm X’s book learning and “ferocious literary habits.” I appreciated how Miller’s book is neither Polyanna nor overly gloomy about the major problems for the world, which he sees as increasing social discord and the rise of large language models (LLMs). Perhaps LLMs can in fact be part of the “idea machine” represented by physical books. In the meantime, Miller has provided a very satisfying case for why the history of the book encourages optimism, not pessimism.