We live in a digital, post-automated mechanical world, when once many centuries ago books were written and bound by hand.
Then with some ingenious reworking by Gutenberg and others in reimagining winepress and jewellery making techniques and technologies, metal type was created and off we went to the mass-printing races. So we thought. Because it only took a few centuries to really perfect the “mass” part of it all.
It makes me treasure the hardcover more, because it is the closest we still have to the wholly hand made book. Don’t get me wrong, I too saw a lot in the 1990s advent of the digital book, for its democratisation of information potentialities, which somehow could have brought to light many texts that publishers couldn’t be bothered thinking about re-printing. Only it didn’t happen for reasons we know. Free and fair and open competition is simply a myth, with publishers even sighing and throwing withering side glances at the “damnable” used book market.
Swimanög 