Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06830_Field_TCUM T395.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     Typography was no more an addition to the scribal art
than the motorcar was an addition to the horse. Printing had
its “horseless carriage” phase of being misconceived and
misapplied during its first decades, when it was not uncommon
for the purchaser of a printed book to take it to a scribe to
have it copied and illustrated. Even in the early eighteenth
century a “textbook” was still defined as a “Classick Author
written very wide by the Students, to give room for an
Interpretation dictated by the Master, &c., to be inserted in the
Interlines” (O.E.D.). Before printing, much of the time in school
and college classrooms was spent in making such texts. The
classroom tended to be a scriptorium  with a commentary. The
student was an editor-publisher. By the same token the book
market was a secondhand market of relatively scarce items.
Printing changed learning and marketing processes alike. The
book was the first teaching machine and also the first mass-