because they would have to give up the method of 
     disputation for that of book-keeping and reasoning, and 
     a stroke of the pen would have spared much clamor.  (111)

Pope’s Dunciad indicts the printed book as the agent of a 
primitivistic and Romantic revival. Sheer visual quantity evokes 
the magical resonance of the tribal horde. The box office looms 
as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation.

*     In 1683­84 there appeared in London by Joseph 
Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing . The 
editors point out (p. vii) that “it put in writing a knowledge that 
was wholly traditional”, and that Moxon’s book “was by forty 
years the earliest manual of printing in any language.” Like 
Gibbon in his retrospect of Rome, Moxon seems to have been 
animated by a sense of print as having reached a terminus. A