Between 1517 and 1520, Luther’s thirty publications sold well over 300,000 copies…Altogether in relation to the spread of religious ideas it seems difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Press, without which a revolution of this magnitude could scarcely have been consummated. Unlike the Wycliffite and Waldensian heresies, Lutherism was from the first the child of the printed book, and through this vehicle Luther was able to make exact, standerdized and ineradicable impressions on the mind of Europe.
For the first time in human history a great reading public judged the validity of revolutionary ideas through a mass-medium which used the vernacular language together with the arts of the journalist and the cartoonist