production ensures that the problem of “freedom” will 
henceforth be paramount in all social and political discussion. 
In Library Week, March 17, 1950, the Minneapolis Morning  
Tribune , in an editorial entitled “The Right to Read,” quoted a 
joint statement by Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman: “We 
Americans know that if freedom means anything, it means the 
right to think. And the right to think means the right to read—
anything, written anywhere, by any man, at any time.” This is 
an impressive statement of consumer doctrine based on the 
homogeneity of print. If print is uniform, it should create 
uniform rights for writer and reader, publisher and consumer. 
The American colonies were first settled by people who had long 
had experience of the exactly opposite idea of the meaning of 
print. The producer-oriented or ruler-oriented version of the 
message of Gutenberg is simply that it is the ruler’s right to 
impose uniform patterns of behavior on society. The police