During the last two decades or so, we have become accustomed to speaking or writing of ‘printers’ not as people, but as machines made of plastic, metal and other substances that sit on our desks: machines driven at least one remove from ourselves via the computer, keyboard and screen that now form parts of our daily lives.

—David Mckitterick, writing in Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830, 2003