I think I'm losing my mind

Original Tweet:

I'll say this: no one in all of my education could actually explain why books-qua-books were important, and I'm a 43 year old man with a graduate degree. Most, in fact, did not seem to recognize it as a valid question.

Response:

one thing that we did not even know was good about books until recently: they are pleasures that are not choked to the point of unusability with ads the book is an exceptionally ingenious invention: cheap enough to be afforded by most people, warehoused easily enough to be offered free to the rest, durable (for up to centuries!) without being sustained by fossil fuel expenditure, portable i will never forget being at a conference (on digital curricula!) and listening to a librarian say that we have absolutely no idea how durable cloud storage will be but we know archival paper lasts at least three centuries and we should think long and hard about abandoning it

That's pretty cool in and of itself, but what's useful to me as a hand engraver is....

It's a book of family coat of arms and liniages. And it goes waaaaaay the fuck back.

So far back, infact, that it traces some of the liniages to the ancient High Kings of Ireland!!

But what I personally find interesting is that all the coats of arms were hand engraved into copper plates for the printing. They'd then be filled with ink and, using a printing press, be pressed onto the paper.

And because I'm a hand engraver I know a thing or two about hand engraving. It doesn't show well in the photos but the pages are embossed from the metal plates.

I can tell from this print what type of gravers were used, what types of cuts. How they went about removing the larger black portions. I can tell which bits they cut corners on cuz they knew regular people wouldn't notice. I can tell where they slipped and covered it up. Even the subtle style choices that you wouldn't even think to notice. I could break down this entire print and reverse engineer it to tell you exactly everything about it in excruciating detail. But only because it's a physical book. Even in a high rez scan much of the information I'd be looking for would be lost.

A scan of this book would be like a drawing of a fingerprint, that's how much information would be lost in the transition.

That books don't have ads is such a good point that I intrinsically felt but hadn't considered.

(I also personally get pretty bad eye strain from e-books...so there's that)

I have a small collection of antiques though! Check out this one - it's 220 years old!

Time seems such a universal concept and then I find out the different ways people perceive everything and remember “it’s all appearances to consciousness”