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08679_Field_TCGG T444.txt
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1996-04-10
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For the electronic age, as de Chardin insisted, is not mechanical
but organic, and has little sympathy with the values achieved
through typography, “this mechanical way of writing” (ars
artificialiter scribendi ), as it was called at first.
Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered
how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose
composition.
* Once ensconced in the unified pictorial space of
Gutenberg culture, many things which were in fact utter
novelties began to be generalized as holding also for the pre-
print author and reader. “Scholarship” consists very much in
getting rid of such irrelevant assumptions. Thus the
nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare have become a sort
of monument to irrelevant assumptions. Their editors had little