Intro Cond Thin Alt

Rightly, we have come to associate access to books with certain freedoms, freedoms that extend beyond the realms of intellectual independence and inquiry. The Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution were fuelled by the printed word. Thanks to the book, authors from beyond antiquity to the present day have voices loud enough to reach the entire world, now and for generations to come. Men and women have risked and given their lives for them, they have been burned at the stake alongside them, shot for owning them. But the book has survived the puritanical, the despots and the dictators. Whether printed on a hand press or mechanical press, or appearing as millions of pixels on a digital screen, the typographic book has triumphed