The Atlas of Early Printing

I am feverishly working to get my dissertation proposal finished, and while reading Hamlet on the Holodeck (a great book, by the way), I jumped online to look a couple of things up and stumbled across the Atlas of Early Printing. It’s project done by the University of Iowa’s Libraries, and offers a nice Flash-based web map application that gives a geographic perspective on the first half-century of printing in Europe (1450-1500). The map layers include the spread of printing, and the locations of universities, paper mills, and fairs. Other resources related to the atlas include an animated 3D model of an early printing press. There’s also a nice slider feature that allows you to animate the layers chronologically to get a more dynamic picture of how printing spread. I whiled away a good half hour just checking out some of the points in the atlas, and there’s lots more great information on the site.