Where Books Come From
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Here is a quite fascinating video on how modern books are printed, courtesy of C-SPAN. They have a machine for EVERYTHING. For the Luddites among you, below is a video produced by the NYPL on illuminated manuscripts (did you know Muslim scribes write with reeds and Jewish scribes use feather quills? We didn't either) as part of their current "Three Faiths Scriptorium" exhibit. You can watch their other videos on calligraphy and making parchment too. None of these videos end in tragic penguin death, we promise. COMMENCE DORKOUT.
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This is fascinating.
My daughter has a book, Marguerite Makes a Book by Bruce Robertson and Kathryn Hewitt, that explains how a 15th Century French girl helps her father create a Book of Hours. They start with the parchment, go to mixing the paints, and so on. It's one of our favorites.
And although I think the advent of photocopiers is a great and good thing, maybe we lost something somewhere when we dropped all the old ways . . .
This was wonderful to watch. Thanks so much.
I visited the Edwards Bros plant in Ann Arbor, MI, back in 2003. They were printing the new Harry Potter book and I had to sign a waiver promising I wouldn't try to look at the text or steal any of the waste. The covers were locked in a cage and they weren't allowed to show them to us. They built a disposal pipe where any scrap from the HP print run was sucked up into and ran behind the building to an incinerator. Part of their contract would have caused massive losses for the company if anything had leaked. (The UK printer leaked that version of the book. Edwards Bros. kept up their end of the deal.)
We followed the process from start to finish. Got to watch the laser create the plates, then the plates loaded to the off-set printer, then the binding and covers.
They were about to put in a new press. We got to see the foundation. They had three feet of cement for the printer to sit on to keep it from sinking into the ground.
I wonder who were the first people to see these things and be like, "dude, I could totally write with this!"
"No way!"
"Yes way!"
"Oh yeah, then show me."
"K. Just gimme a minute. There's a PROCESS."
But seriously, this is quite awesome. Love it.
Thanks for this! Unfortunately it does make me want to run away from my computer and apprentice myself to the lady doing the gold leaf.
Also, I need to find my copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz. The illuminated blueprint is one of my favorite things.
Before watching it, I had to look up what an illuminated manuscript is. I had a good idea it wasn't an iPad, but I didn't expect this.
After watching the video, my back was sore thinking of the hours put into just that one page.
With all the gloom and doom these days about the death of printed books, to see that more than half a millenium after the printing press people are still making hand-crafted manuscripts is encouraging. Five hundred years from now, people somewhere will still be printing books.
Cool! From one extreme of low tech to the other of high tech!
If you ask me, that's an awful lot of work for a creative spelling of the word "nipple." Perverted weirdos. o.O
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