The book by Andrew Pettigrey, a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews and a recognized writer specializing in the Renaissance, was first published in 2015 and was enthusiastically received by critics and the American media. The New Yorker magazine called it a "revealing history," and literary critic Adam Kirsch noted that the book is "an extraordinary introduction to the past that helps us understand our future." The author covers a period of nearly four centuries, from the pre-printing era to 1800, from the end of The Middle Ages to the French Revolution, exploring in detail the human instinct to seek news and to be informed. The reader is presented with a fascinating panorama of centuries with a truly multimedia exchange, incorporating all available means of disseminating news - conversations and rumors, civil ceremonies and celebrations, church sermons and proclamations in the squares, and with the advent of the printed era - pamphlets, ballads, newspapers and leaflets. This is a fundamental history of the evolution of news, from the exchange of manuscripts in the late Middle Ages to the era of the triumph of print media.

The publisher's layout is preserved in PDF A4 format.