Power of the Printing Press

Abstract

There have been many opinions about the readership declarations in the forewords (including title pages, prefaces, introductions) or afterwords (often short colophons) to older Yiddish printed books. These ‘declarations’, most strikingly, would appear on the title page of books, announcing that the book is for women, and occasionally that it is for women and men who are like women in being Yiddish (rather than proper Hebrew or Aramaic) readers, a somewhat comic way of actually saying something vernacular like: ‘Buy this book, it is for regular people like you and me who like a good fun read, not for those great rabbis busy with their legal works in those inscrutable languages.’