"This book describes how eighteenth-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's perception of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically. Drawing on the scholarship of Adrian Johns and David McKitterick, the study traces the evolution and continuity of Johnson's ideas in these areas by describing the importance of print mediation for Johnson's conception of the related epistemological and ethical dilemmas facing his generation from the Restoration to the late eighteenth century"--BOOK JACKET.