became privately portable and quick to read. As today, the 
insatiable needs of TV have brought down upon us the backlog 
of the old movies, so the needs of the new presses could only 
be met by the old manuscripts. Moreover, the reading public 
was attuned to this earlier culture. Not only were there no 
modern writers at first, but they had no public ready to accept 
them so Febvre and Martin say (p. 420): “Thus print facilitated 
the work of scholars in some fields, but on the whole one can 
say that it contributed nothing to hasten the adoption of 
theories or new knowledge.” (42)

     This, of course, is to consider only the “content” of new 
theories, and to ignore the role of print in providing new models 
for such theories, and in processing new publics to accept 
them. Looked at merely from the “content” point of view the 
achievement of print is modest indeed: “Already in the fifteenth