On Tuesday, we examined a great deal of material which almost caught us up to the modern age of printing. It was interesting to see books printed for a much larger audience; for example, we saw the first bits of magazine-style advertising in Dickens monthly installations, and it can be predicted that after that it can certainly be proposed that advertising became much more widespread, not just in newspapers, but in books, magazines and journals. The new, mechanized way of printing books allowed books to be printed more quickly and distributed to an even larger audience. As Howard points out, Stanhope’s iron press allowed for much more efficient printing; the London Times invested in a “battalion” of them, greatly increasing their production. It’s interesting to see that books in that era were printed so efficiently, yet the labor required was still vastly more extensive than the labor required for books printed today. It really takes away the value of the book nowadays to think that some books aren’t even printed, and are simply available through e-book format, when our predecessors worked so hard to ensure that a printed book could be available to anyone who wanted to learn how to read.
I think going to the archives makes me appreciate fine books more now. As you mentioned, today’s book making process–if even published on paper–is much faster and easier. I remember when I traveled to Jaipur, India, we visited a shop that specialized in binding books. I was mesmerized as I ran my fingers over the leather binding. While mass printing is important, one can still find places to buy carefully crafted books.
Today I feel like we lose an element with the mass production of books. The old books with the formal title pages and the binding looks so much nicer than books today. It will make those books even more valuable in the future.
Seeing the ads was interesting for me as well. If anything it showed me how even though those books were printed a couple hundred years ago the people are still relatively the same. We have the same thing today in magazines and other publications that is very similar to what we saw in those books.