as i was trying to think of themes here, i went to the wonderful elizabethizeen stein's new book, the response to print in the west from first impressions to a sense of an ending -- now out in paperback, i'm happy to say -- [laughter] and the professor suggests two answers to the question what do readers like about the book drawn, of course, from the history of the early reception of print. and one answer, i think, is that readers from the very beginning, from the 15th century forward have responded very positively to the fixity of the book, the apparent stability of printed pages bound between stiff material gives to text and their meanings. she writes: printing came to be known as the divine art partly because it was regarded as the art which preserved all other arts. but somewhat paradoxically, as pointed out, early readers -- like readers today -- also valued something different can about the book, what might be he referred to as the velocity of print, the ability to multiply copies meant that texts and their meetings could and did move with new speed from hand to hand and mind to