Today, I watched The Making of the Renaissance Book. I was extremely surprised to see the amount of detail necessary to go into making a book. It was interesting to go through each step of the process because I never really realized how difficult and time consuming it was back then. The process of setting the letters seem the most time consuming to me because he had to go through each size and shape of each individual letter for each sentence. This movie really made me appreciate the technology we have today. I am so lucky to have word to write my papers on because all I have to do is simply choose the size and style I want and it appears on my computer.

This video really helped me understand the process we learned at EPI.

Walking through the library and browsing through the books I stumbled upon one that was  entitled “Printing in Plastic” by Patrick Daniel. The book was basically about how to build your own printer. One thing I noticed just seconds after looking through the book was that it was clearly written very recently. I do not think that it would have been possible hundreds of years ago for someone to build their own printer at home. Not only would it be way too costly, but a printer in every home was not the norm centuries ago. This got me thinking about how lucky society is today. After all, I think it is safe to say that the norm today is for each family to own at least one printer, if not more.

I discovered an article in the National Geographic that discusses how just recently, a clay tablet was found in Greece that is said to be “the oldest known decipherable text in Europe”. The clay tablet was found in an olive grove, which was surprising to those who found it because it is not quite clear how it got there. I think it is pretty amazing how such old texts are still being found today, and I am sure that in the future even older texts than this will be discovered. It is cool to think that maybe at one time or another, someone we know may have stumbled across something ancient like this without realizing it. In fact, I wonder how many people had come across this clay tablet in the past and disregarded it as being nothing more than an old rock.

While watching The Story of Writing Part 1, I got to see what it was like for the Egyptians to carve their writing into stone. I never imagined their stone carvings to be quite as intricate and detailed as they were in the video, and was shocked to learn how long it took for these carvings to be completed. I had always thought that ancient stone carvings were very plain and lacked the detail that drawings done on other surfaces had. However, watching this video showed me that this was not the case.

In addition, the music that was played during this segment of the film clip definitely played a role in my response to the film’s content. It was very eerie sounding music, and it made it seem all the more unbelievable and almost magic-like how the Egyptians were able to create such amazing means of communication with the few resources they had.

On Tuesday, when we looked at the art books, I started with the impression that “an artbook” was “a book which contained art.” For the most part, that idea wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t correct. I was actually someone surprised that they were instead “books which were art” alongside “books which contained art.”

Before, pop up books, shaped books, and illustrated books only seemed to me as things that could only be children’s books, as a method to keep attention. But as I remembered, art could be appreciated by anyone, and all the books we saw proved that.

I watched The Story of Writing 3: Print and Metal Pens, and the first thing that struck me was the library of chained books. Now a days, we have many security measures, most of which we take for granted, so the idea of chaining down books to shelves may seem somewhat barbaric. But considering the time period, that was the simplest method to deter theft, which never occured to me until I saw it.

I was also surprised to see, that in a time where ink was how things were written, text could be erased. With our pencils and erasers, we tend to take that for granted, until we use pens of course. I always wondered how, if corrections needed to be made, it would be done. It seems it was as simple as scraping off the mistake and writing over it. While I say simple, the process was definitely more than that, but the idea just seems too easy, when in fact it was how things were done. When it came to printing, the engraving process was just as difficult as I imagined, if not more so.

In regards to the music, it was an old timey style that made me felt like “I am watching something old.” What stood out for me in terms of the production however, was the credits. While most people would skip credits (which I am also guilty of), I watched through and noticed: all the names were written in Italic font, which was described in the video itself. I felt that it was a clever use of content.

I’ll be the first to admit that this article isn’t the easiest or the best thing you will ever read but it does raise an interesting question. The study focuses on how the brain processes words when varied which brings up a point that I hadn’t thought about. When there are pictures in books it allows us to understand what is happening or have a basis for the setting and events occurring, but are more areas of your brain activated when pictures are present along with words or when it is strictly one or the other. I am one of those people who loves creating the characters in my mind and that’s why I don’t always see movie adaptations when they come out because I don’t want it to ruin my view of the character. It would just be interesting to study how many and which areas of the brain would be used under the three varying circumstances.

A while back I remembered reading this post about what children should be reading in school. Now I don’t necessarily agree with the Common Core State Standards I do agree that kids should be reading more. I have personally found that with reading more I have had better ideas for papers in class or just having more creative ideas in general. I also feel like that kids need to be reading more at a younger age because when things pick up in high school and then again in college they need the necessary skills to help them successfully get through books at an appropriate pace.