and content is universal, and affects non-literary people as 
much as the scholar. Thus the Bell Telephone Laboratories 
spend millions on research but have never even noticed the 
peculiar form that is the telephone and what it does to speech 
and to personal relations. As an expert in prints Ivins became 
aware of their difference from the printed books in which they 
appeared. This in turn made him aware of the great difference 
between printed and manuscript books. At the outset (pp. 2­
3) he draws attention to the dimension of repeatability built 
into the phonetic written characters, in order to stress the 
same dimensions of repeatability as it is found in pre-
Gutenberg block printing of pictures from woodcuts:

          Although every history of European civilization 
     makes much of the invention in the mid-fifteenth century 
     of ways to print words from movable types, it is