ABSTRACT
The invention of printing from movable typesis second only to the clock in its critical effect upon our civilization; and in its own right exemplifies the much broader passage, constantly going on in our own day, from the tool to the handworked machine, and from the machine to the completely automatic self-regulating device from which, at the end, almost every intervention of the human person is eliminated, except at the very beginning, in the arrangement of the works, and at the very end, in the consumption of the product. Finally, and not least, I have chosen printing because it shows, in the course of its own development, how art and technics may be brought together, and how necessary it is, even for technical development, to have the person that presides over the process refresh himself constantly at those sources in life from which the symbol, in its purest forms, comes forth.
