typography is primarily that of repeatability. With typography, 
the principle of movable type introduced the means of 
mechanizing any handicraft by the process of segmenting and 
fragmenting an integral action. What had begun with the 
alphabet as a separation of the multiple gestures and sights 
and sounds in the spoken word, reached a new level of 
intensity, first with the woodcut and then with typography. The 
alphabet left the visual component as supreme in the word, 
reducing all other sensuous facts of the spoken word to this 
form. This helps to explain why the woodcut, and even the 
photograph, were so eagerly welcomed in a literate world. These 
forms provide a world of inclusive gesture and dramatic posture 
that necessarily is omitted in the written word.

     The print was eagerly seized upon as a means of 
imparting information, as well as an incentive to piety and