“You may perceive, Madam,” said Dr. Johnson with a 
pugilistic smile, “that I am well-bred to a degree of needless 
scrupulosity.” Whatever the degree of conformity the Doctor 
had achieved with the new stress of his time on white-shirted 
tidiness, he was quite aware of the growing social demand for 
visual presentability.

     Printing from movable types was the first mechanization 
of a complex handicraft, and became the archetype of all 
subsequent mechanization. From Rabelais and More to Mill and 
Morris, the typographic explosion extended the minds and 
voices of men to reconstitute the human dialogue on a world 
scale that has bridged the ages. For if seen merely as a store of 
information, or as a new means of speedy retrieval of 
knowledge, typography ended parochialism and tribalism, 
psychically and socially, both in space and in time. Indeed the