Robin Kinross

“ So reading often has a visible and apparent social dimension. But its truer and perhaps more real social dimension lies in the reading that happens when one person picks up a printed sheet and turns its marks into meaning. ”

“ Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. ”

“ The emphasis of historians of print culture, such as Eisenstein, has tended to be on books, partly perhaps for the mundane reason that these are the printed documents that survive most abundantly. It is certainly harder for a historian to investigate newspapers or street posters: harder to locate surviving copies, and to consider their effects. ”

“ They may be widely dispersed in space and time, unknown and unavailable to each other. Or they may know each other, and come together later to discuss their reading of the text. Then the social dimension of the text may become a group of people around a table, pointing to the text, quoting from it, arguing, considering. A text is produced by writers, editors and printers. With luck, if they keep their heads down, designers might find a role somewhere here too. ”

“ The text is composed, proofed, corrected, perhaps read and corrected further. Then it is multiplied and distributed. Finally it is read alone but in common, for shared meanings. [...]
The theme of language as the possession of a community was developed by Benedict Anderson in the course of his book “Imagined communities” [2] This book is one of the handful of general works on history and politics that should be dear to typographers, because it takes notice of printing; in fact printing is at the heart of Anderson’s thesis. ”