The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”… - Marshall McLuhan

The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”

"Oddly enough, it is a consumer-oriented culture that is concerned about authors and labels of authenticity. Manuscript culture was producer-ori-ented, almost entirely a do-it-yourself culture, and naturally looked to the relevance and usability of items rather than their sources. Not only was private authorship in the later print meanings unknown, but there was no reading public in our sense, either. This is a matter that has usually been confused with ideas about "the extent of literacy." But even if literacy were universal, under manuscript conditions an author would still have no public. An advanced scientist today has no public. He has a few friends and colleagues with whom he talks about his work. What we need to have in mind is that the manuscript book was slow to read and slow to move or be circulated."

With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.

Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.