Professor Elizabeth Miller's SLOW PRINT is a brilliantly conceived book and the sort of deeply researched study in brick-and-mortar libraries that today's digitizing of documents is replacing. Up to a point, and that's the point. To her credit, Miller cites many documents that are likely candidates for not being digitized before they disintegrate, as some of that sort already have, documents that reveal a major historical reversal, the development in the nineteenth century of an at first approving, then ambivalent, and eventually hostile attitude by “literary radicals” toward the industrialization and commercializing of printing. This development accompanied a change in the meaning of the word “radical,” which early in the century referred to political thinking that was anti- or limited-government, but that later evolved to viewing capitalism rather than government as the root cause of social injustice; and so whatever commonality the often disagreeing radical groups had by the end...

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