Wallpaper manufacturers have recently begun to issue wallpaper that presents the appearance of a French newspaper. The Eskimo sticks magazine pages on the ceiling of his igloo to deter drip. But even an ordinary newspaper on a kitchen floor will reveal news items that one had missed when the paper was in hand. Yet whether one uses the press for privacy in public conveyances, or for involvement in the communal while enjoying privacy, the mosaic of the press manages to effect a complex many-leveled function of group-awareness and participation such as the book has never been able to perform. The format of the press --that is, its structural characteristics --were quite naturally taken over by the poets after Baudelaire in order to evoke an inclusive awareness. Our ordinary newspaper page today is not only symbolist and surrealist in an avant-garde way, but it was the earlier inspiration of symbolism and surrealism in art and poetry, as anybody can discover by reading Flaubert or Rimbaud. Approached as newspaper form, any part of Joyce's Ulysses or any poem of T. S. Eliot's before the Quartets is more readily enjoyed. Such, however, is the austere continuity of book culture that it scorns to notice these liaisons dangereuses among the media, especially the scandalous affairs of the book-page with electronic creatures from the other side of the linotype. In view of the inveterate concern of the press with cleansing by publicity, it may be well to ask if it does not set up an inevitable clash with the medium of the book. The press as a collective and communal image assumes a natural posture of opposition to all private manipulation. Any mere individual who begins to stir about as if he were a public something-or-other is going to get into the press. Any individual who manipulates the public for his private good may also feel the cleansing power of publicity. The cloak of invisibility, therefore, would seem to fall most naturally on those who own newspapers or who use them extensively for commercial ends. May not this explain the strange obsession of