Adrian Johns. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 754 pp.; $40 US (hardcover). ISBN 0-226-40121-9.
This is a big, ambitious book in which Johns looks back to the time before print culture was taken for granted. He shows that the reliability on which the cultural and commercial success of print depends was slowly and painstakingly established over generations, and by people and processes now obscure. Obscurity was ...