The Second Printing Revolution: Invention of Mass Media
January 14 – April 11, 2026
By the beginning of the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had been underway in Britain for nearly a century, yet book production had hardly changed since Gutenberg's invention of printing by movable type in the mid-fifteenth century. This exhibition tells the story of the second printing revolution, which took place during the nineteenth century: the transition from book production as exclusively handcraft to the mechanized production of papermaking, printing, illustration, typesetting, and bookbinding.
The mechanization of book production is a multiregional, multimodal story that crosses time and place. This exhibition often takes England as a main reference point, incorporating works and inventions from French and German printers, as well as printers working in the United States as it began to industrialize in the nineteenth century. The gallery is organized in four movements: INNOVATION, detailing steam-powered presses and papermaking; DIFFUSION, exploring the spread of early magazines and typesetting; DESIGN, highlighting bookbinding and color imagery; and SCALE, focusing on mass printing in America and Europe in the late nineteenth century. Interludes between the movements situate the mechanization of print in different social and cultural contexts, including the effect of the railroad on mass market reading and the role of women in printing environments.
In each case, you will encounter key inventors, their inventions, and exemplars of those new technologies, as well as social responses to the introduction of mechanization into what were up till then primarily hand crafts. As we enter a new age of artificial intelligence, this exhibition reminds us of the tension between innovation and tradition in the relationship between humans and machines, and the consequences for labor, employment, and art when technology advances.