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Data

Production of printed books per half century

About this data

Source
Buringh and Van Zanden (2009) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
January 1, 2009
Date range
1475–1775
Unit
books

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Buringh and Van Zanden – Charting the "Rise of the West": Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries

The unit of analysis for the estimates of manuscripts is the number of individual manuscripts. The unit of analysis for the estimates of printed books is (new) 'title' or 'edition'. The authors corrected the numbers to account for the underrepresentation of estimates for different geographical regions and different times. The authors consider their estimates to be conservative and note that the "figures should be interpreted as low estimates".

Titles are either books (which have by definition more than 49 pages) or pamphlets (less than 50 pages). The authors define a title as 'a printed publication which forms a separate whole, whether issued in one or several volumes. Different language versions of the same title published in a particular country should be considered as individual titles'; this includes first editions and reeditions. The authors give the following example: 'The first printing of Gutenberg's Bible is one title, and new editions of the Bible will again be counted, but a reprint of exactly the same manuscript would not be included.'

Buringh and Van Zanden note that the aggregation of the data to country levels obscures inequalities within countries – 'if we could isolate data on, for example, northern Italy or the north of France (including Paris), these regions rank much higher in output per capita'.

Retrieved on
January 1, 2009
Retrieved from
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40263962
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden (2009) – Charting the "Rise of the West": Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries. In The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Jun., 2009), pp. 409-445.

The unit of analysis for the estimates of manuscripts is the number of individual manuscripts. The unit of analysis for the estimates of printed books is (new) 'title' or 'edition'. The authors corrected the numbers to account for the underrepresentation of estimates for different geographical regions and different times. The authors consider their estimates to be conservative and note that the "figures should be interpreted as low estimates".

Titles are either books (which have by definition more than 49 pages) or pamphlets (less than 50 pages). The authors define a title as 'a printed publication which forms a separate whole, whether issued in one or several volumes. Different language versions of the same title published in a particular country should be considered as individual titles'; this includes first editions and reeditions. The authors give the following example: 'The first printing of Gutenberg's Bible is one title, and new editions of the Bible will again be counted, but a reprint of exactly the same manuscript would not be included.'

Buringh and Van Zanden note that the aggregation of the data to country levels obscures inequalities within countries – 'if we could isolate data on, for example, northern Italy or the north of France (including Paris), these regions rank much higher in output per capita'.

Retrieved on
January 1, 2009
Retrieved from
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40263962
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden (2009) – Charting the "Rise of the West": Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries. In The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Jun., 2009), pp. 409-445.

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Production of printed books per half century”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from Buringh and Van Zanden. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260511-092124/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.html [online resource] (archived on May 11, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Buringh and Van Zanden (2009) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Buringh and Van Zanden (2009) – processed by Our World in Data. “Production of printed books per half century” [dataset]. Buringh and Van Zanden, “Charting the "Rise of the West": Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries” [original data]. Retrieved May 13, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260511-092124/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.html (archived on May 11, 2026).

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Data API

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-printed-books-half-century.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear