Welcome to G2G. You're reading the very first post. Please send comments, questions, and suggestions directly to me at csmith@corcoran.org.
This week's seminar reading is Richard De Bury's Philobiblon, written in the 1340s and first published in moveable type over a century later. One of the classics of biblliophile literature, the Philobiblon continues to speak to our culture's mysterious and powerful interactions with scripted forms. Click on "Richard De Bury's Philobiblon" (on the link list to the right) to read an 1899 edition.
This comedic video, that I've renamed Book: A User's Manual , reminds us that the codex book itself was a technological innovation with operating protocols not immediately obvious; the sketch (from Norwegian television) recreates the scene of rupture for one monk as volumes took precedence over scrolls in scholastic learning. The video gets one thing wrong: the change took place over a span of decades, sometimes hundreds of years.
The codex book is very much like a simple machine, a lever or a pulley. It works (works) with radical simplicity and efficiency, so much so that its workings have become transparent. It is not a coincidence that the Renaissance and the spread of printing took place at the same times in the same places (cf. Eisenstein). Perhaps print culture made the Renaissance possible and not the other way around?
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