disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium withoutpassing through the Trivium. But the scholastic tradition, though broken andmaimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities:

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press embodied this combinatorial creativity

Johannes Gutenberg

Gutenberg used his second edition of the Catholicon to experiment with casting type not letter by letter but in two- line slugs that could be reused in later printings, saving the labor of distributing then resetting the type letter by letter.

Among reference works the Catho-licon, the carefully alphabetized large Latin dictionary composed in 1286, was the first to be printed, by Gutenberg in 1460 and again in 1469.

Behind this order of paper slips that guarantees mobility and rearrange-ment, one can recognize the same economy of signs that a century earlier contributes to a major paradigmatic shift. Johannes Gutenberg ’ s invention of the printing press not only forges most obviously associations of typeset-ting, steel models, pouring mechanisms for individual letter types, special alloys, and composing sticks for setting lines of type. 28

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery.