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06822_Field_TCUM T387.txt
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1996-04-10
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“You may perceive, Madam,” said Dr. Johnson with a
pugilistic smile, “that I am well-bred to a degree of needless
scrupulosity.” Whatever the degree of conformity the Doctor
had achieved with the new stress of his time on white-shirted
tidiness, he was quite aware of the growing social demand for
visual presentability.
Printing from movable types was the first mechanization
of a complex handicraft, and became the archetype of all
subsequent mechanization. From Rabelais and More to Mill and
Morris, the typographic explosion extended the minds and
voices of men to reconstitute the human dialogue on a world
scale that has bridged the ages. For if seen merely as a store of
information, or as a new means of speedy retrieval of
knowledge, typography ended parochialism and tribalism,
psychically and socially, both in space and in time. Indeed the