This chapter works backward from the glossary of terms in Joseph Moxon’s 1683 printer’s manual and a 1684 poem that uses those terms extensively to show how the less technical, more widespread set of terms collected in this book demonstrate considerable rhetorical and conceptual flexibility. Two key terms, “bookish” and “set forth,” begin an exploration of how the language of books gave people a way to describe their culture and situate themselves within it.

In the seventeenth century British natural philosophers explored the cognitive value of mechanical trades. From the beginning, these explorations of down-to-earth manual processes were expressed in oblique and ironic texts. In utopian fictions by Thomas More, Francis Bacon and Gabriel Plattes, mechanical trades were presented as at once near-at-hand and alien to the world of books and codified knowledge. Bacon’s mid-century followers tried to negotiate these difficulties in plans to compile a comprehensive ‘History of Trades’. In the period’s most widely circulated didactic text, Izaac Walton’s Compleat Angler, the tacit and haptic dimension of a humble pass-time was explored through genial satire and eccentric textual design. Later, one highly literate artisan, the printer and instrument maker Joseph Moxon, gave thought to the difference between the artisanal expertise he employed as a manual technician and the theoretical knowledge he dealt with as a writer and fellow of the Royal Society.

This chapter takes on the 350-year period following Gutenberg’s invention of the hand press in Mainz around 1450. It surveys the historical precedents for Gutenberg’s movable type in China and Korea; describes the development and the uneven spread of the hand press in Europe; and investigates the social and literary impacts and potentials of the technology, contending with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s claim that the printed book “brought about” historical events such as the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Questioning any neat separation of body and machine, McDowell argues for approaches that consider the human body as an essential literary technology. Hand-printed works, she contends, are the product neither of a human or a mere tool, but the two formed into a hybrid: “neither a printing press nor a hand can produce a printed text,” McDowell argues, “but together, machine and worker can and do.”