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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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08487_Field_TCGG T252.txt
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1996-04-10
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customary in those histories to ignore the slightly earlier
discovery of ways to print pictures and diagrams. A book,
so far as it contains a text, is a container of exactly
repeatable word symbols arranged in an exactly
repeatable order. Men have been using such containers
for at least five thousand years. Because of this it can be
argued that the printing of books was no more than a
way of making very old and familiar things more cheaply.
It may even be said that for a while type printing was little
more than a way to do with a much smaller number of
proof readings. Prior to 1501 few books were printed in
editions larger than that handwritten one of a thousand
copies to which Pliny the Younger referred in the second
century of our era. The printing of pictures, however,
unlike the printing of words from movable types, brought
a completely new thing into existence—it made possible