ABSTRACT
An engraving by Johannes Stradanus (1523-1605) depicts the bustling interior of a sixteenth-century print shop. His caption reads, “Just as one voice can be heard by a multitude of ears, so single writings cover a thousand sheets” (reprinted in Agassi, 1968, p. 26; and on the front cover of Eisenstein, 1979). The analogy is a bit off-“can be seen by a thousand eyes” would be the more appropriate apposition to “can be heard by a multitude of ears”—but it conveys the power of print anyway, by likening it to the inherent one-to-many capacity of speech and hearing. Indeed, long before print and the alphabet, hearing was the archetypal mode for perception by the multitudes. It is also the ideal medium for perception of multiples-more than one message at the same time by one party-or multitasking.
