After Professor Phillips mentioned the 20 minute documentary during our printing demonstration on friday I decided to take a look. Assuming you can look past the sometimes maddening soundtrack, I found it very interesting that only half of the 20 minutes were on what we did in class thursday. The first half of the documentary was about the craftsmen who physically make the letters that are assembled by the printer. A process that is seemingly more meticulous and time consuming than the demonstration we had (if you can believe it). Its hard to even imagine the amount of work and time that goes into printing just one letter, let alone an entire book. Before the advent of modern technology, printing must have been an incredibly long and time consuming process, more so than I could have imagined even after the printing demonstration. This documentary really makes you appreciate the rare books we have seen, the effort it must have taken to make just one of those books is astounding.
For those of you interested in viewing the documentary it can be found on our moodle page under Authorship and Book History.
It’s so interesting to think about how technology has made certain acts simpler and certain jobs obsolete, such as printing. But, we need to start from some point in order to progress. Nowadays, more time can be given to other parts of book publishing, such as editing and writing. One could argue that because there is so much more time for these, there is so much more literature now than there was when the printing press was created. Whether this is a good thing or not can be debated.