Before lithography, the street was a typographer’s domain. Text-heavy broadsides announced executions, theater openings, and quack remedies in dense, undifferentiated blocks. Color was expensive, illustration was slow, and the idea of an image stopping a pedestrian in their tracks was largely theoretical. Alois Senefelder’s invention of lithography in 1796 changed the physics of what printing could do — but it took most of the nineteenth century for anyone to understand what that meant for public space.