For the electronic age, as de Chardin insisted, is not mechanical 
but organic, and has little sympathy with the values achieved 
through typography, “this mechanical way of writing” (ars  
artificialiter scribendi ), as it was called at first.

Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered 
how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose 
composition.

*     Once ensconced in the unified pictorial space of 
Gutenberg culture, many things which were in fact utter 
novelties began to be generalized as holding also for the pre-
print author and reader. “Scholarship” consists very much in 
getting rid of such irrelevant assumptions. Thus the 
nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare have become a sort 
of monument to irrelevant assumptions. Their editors had little