Film and television, computer graphics, and virtual reality have, as we know, caused images to run in ever faster sequences. Subsequently, a perhaps unwarranted jubilation has governed the past century's media theories: Writing in general and the book in particular are said to have been played out, while the image, more powerful and more able to unite humanity than ever, is reclaiming its ancient birthright. It is this jubilation, or at least the diagnosis upon which it is based, that I would like to contest. My counterargument, in brief, is that the printed book has not simply been played out, but rather that this unique medium was what made its own high-technological outdoing possible in the first place. This power, which in turn is probably the basis of all Europe's power, accrued to the book not because of its printed words alone, but rather because of a union of media that, with technical precision, joined these words with printed images. Media theorists, specifically Marshall McLuhan and, succeeding him, Vilem Flusser, draw an absolute distinction between writing and the image that ultimately rests on concepts of geometry. They contrast the linearity or one-dimensionality of printed books with the irreducible two-dimensionality of images. Simplified in this manner, it is a distinction that may hold true even when computer technology can model texts as strings, as it does today. But it suppresses the simple facts emphasized long ago and, not coincidentally, by a nouveau romancier, Michel Butor: the books used most often-the Bible, once upon a time, and today more likely the telephone book-are certainly not read in a linear manner. There is a perfectly good reason for this situation. Though the lines of a book have looked linear since Gutenberg, the page of a book has been two-dimensional since the Scholasticism of the twelfth century at the latest.' Each paragraph and section, footnote and title plays across a surface whose two-dimensionality is no different from that of an image. The fact alone that Gutenberg, before using his technology of movable type in Mainz on Bibles and calendars, had practiced the same technology in Strasbourg for reproducible pictures of the saints indicates that this pictoriality is at the origin of the printing press, which itself is not much more than a sobered-up Rhine wine press. The other issue, continually underscored by Michael Giesecke, that Gutenberg's movable type was never intended for mass production