Growing up, I’ve
always liked to read and now that I’m a senior in college (which is kind of
like being an adult but not quite) not much has changed. I love to read, books
specifically. I feel as if in this day and age I have to clarify that bit. I
love to read books. Not ebooks, pdfs
on the computer, Kindle, Nook, or what have you – books with a binding, pages,
and a cover. I like to physically hold a book, dog-ear it’s pages, maybe write
a few notes in the margins here and there, and prop it on my bookshelf,
watching my collection grow before my eyes. But even given my seventeen or so
years of being a book-lover, I have never, and I mean never, given any thought
as to how a book is actually made.
I, unlike a
majority of the class it seemed, did not have the faintest idea of the origins
of printing/publishing. Gutten-who? The
name rings a bell… But now having read chapters two and three of The Book, I found it interesting his
actual involvement with the printing press and how it is often perceived. Though
it is often misconstrued that Guttenberg invented the printing press, his
biggest contribution to the printing process was not the press itself because
those had existed before his time was moveable type. But since moveable type
was such a revolutionary concept at the time because it solved the problem of
“creating moveable metal type quickly and accurately,” the Guttenberg Press
became the top dog of all printing presses essentially.
These chapters
also go into great detail about how the press actually worked, which was quite
hard to visualize and follow. So when we watched the video in class of the man
actually using the press, it definitely made things a lot clearer. Seeing this
man use the printing press also made me realize how far we’ve come in terms of printing
and publishing technologies. It may be a very generalized thing to take away
from the readings but it truly is astounding to see how much effort went into
printing one page and then comparing it to something like the espresso book
machine, which can print an entire book in minutes. I can only imagine how much
further we can innovate the printing and publishing process with the
advancement of current technologies.
Victoria,
ReplyDeleteLike you, I have been a lover of books all my life. In my younger years, I could spend hours on my couch, upside down reading anything from the BFG to The Divine Comedy to Twilight to The Scarlet Letter. If I had the time, you would still find me spending most of it in one of several different "book-reading" positions. I would fall asleep with books on my face and my room was stacked with books of all different kinds filling up the corners of my room. I'd get these books from garage sales or, when I was really lucky, the bookstore. That was my favorite place to be (besides the library and Coldstone Creamery). I'd be in sections of books that I had no idea how to even begin interpreting (Dante's Inferno has a few advanced topics that an 8-year-old might find difficult to understand), but I'd buy them nonetheless. My parents would get me gift cards to the bookstore for Christmas and my birthday. All my friends would buy me books for these major gift-giving holidays and they knew it didn't matter to me what they bought: it could be a volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry or it could be the next Harry Potter (once a friend even laughingly purchased Anna Karenina without a doubt in her mind that THIS would be the book I didn't read; to her surprise, I did). I was a very Matilda-esque child in the way that books lined my walls in my room and overflowed off and on top of my bookshelf. And I still have all those books and have collected many more over the years (although they are much more organized now on several bookshelves in my apartment). I am still a lover of books. And how funny that just this semester, as I am entering my 22nd year of life, I am learning about how they were/are made. What a concept! Also like you, I didn't know the tedious work that went into book making and printing in earlier years. I find it incredibly fascinating that books were not so readily accessible. I never thought of books as indication of status and wealth or things with which to be wholly concerned about when it came to their appearance. I also never thought of print culture as a culture. When I think of books, I think of relationships between authors and their personas/characters and readers. Never did I think about the relationship between the printer and the author, or even the printer and the reader! It has been incredibly interesting to learn all these things I didn't know about the history of print culture and I, like you, am also incredibly interested to know the future of it. And I don't think the phenomenon of print culture is dead or dying (although perhaps some forms of it are, but certainly not as whole); there are still too many of us Matildas running around, lying on couches upside down, who would rather flip a page than swipe a Kindle.