The invention of the letterpress not only allowed for mass production of existing content,
but made it so easy that there was demand for more content. And with that content was
a need for well-understood page composition principles, not just those handed down
secretly by cloistered monks transcribing old works.
So composition became a process of assembling a layout that consistently arranged components
and content on a page. These rules were repeated on all other pages, creating a
recognizable system of component relationships that were understood by social reading
norms.