Dear Reader,

A collection of buttons lets me conjure letters from the aether, arrange them into words. With another button, those words enter cyberspace, where people all over the world can read them. People like you.

We're living through a change in the way our world is structured, a change that people like Noah Robischon of Gawker Media are calling the biggest since the one ignited by the invention of movable type.

And by "moveable type" I don't mean the blog hosting service. I mean the technology invented in Europe around 1450 C.E. by Johannes Gutenberg (and far earlier by others in China and Korea) that cost a lot of monks their Bible-copying jobs. I mean the method of setting letters cast of lead - tiny physical backwards letters that you can rearrange and drop on the floor - into a composing stick. Letters form words, form lines, lines stack, and a page of type is locked into the plate of a printing press. Ink coats the type, then a sheet of paper is "pressed" between the type and a hard flat surface. Remove the sheet and repeat with another, another, another, and you have publication of a broadside. The process' complexity multiplies if you want a book, at which point you have to muck around with folios, binding, and even more type-setting.

This technology once shifted our world on a faster track toward modernity. It made the making of books cheaper, thus more accessible to non-monk publishers. It made books themselves cheaper, so they reached a wider audience, and helped to make that audience more literate. Books could contain more topics than religion. It did more, but for now I'll let it rest here.

This technology is represented by the printing presses, type cases, and book bindery crowded into a large, airy room of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. This is the Literary House Print Shop and I work here, as a student. My job title is "Printer's Devil" and I work under the Master Printer, doing the dirty and tedious jobs. I clean the presses, and I set and put away type for posters and poems and books.

Four times a week, I enter this room and step back into time. Let me show you this dying technology, this growing art. At the very least, you'll step away with an appreciation for your keyboard, mouse, and word processor.