It's hard imagine that books that can be as big as a computer can come from such small beginnings. So many pages and so much writing comes from tiny little pieces of lead. Something as complex as, say, the bible was made up of tiny little letters individually placed. The amount of work required to make a book in the past is incredible.
One also has to consider the frustration that would come from messing up a sentence, or even just one word. It might mean you would have to redo the entire thing, and that would take forever. And if the entire phrase falls apart, that's even worse. It makes you appreciate how much work was put into books by the printers.
Also, I wonder if they ordered different style of letters for different books. If all of the books from a publisher were in the same style, I would wonder if people who wanted a specific style of text would go to a different printer. An interesting way to cause rivalry.
I really understand now how the process of printing books would be a slow one! Even with practice it would be a difficult task to file all those little letters and spaces into the places they need to be without messing up! It makes everything look very easy now; all we have to do nowadays is type the letters we want and then a machine prints them for us. We even have a system that will look for errors! It makes me side with the old-fashioned printers when they made typos; not everyone is perfect! But we have machines to fix our errors, so why are there still typos? Imagining what the future holds for book printing is really an amazing thing!
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to wonder what those old printers would think of us today right Maddie? They would probably say what right do you have to misspell ANYTHING haha.
DeleteJust think about it: they had to know how EVERYTHING was spelled too. They didn't have something like a computer to help them figure out how something was spelled. Gosh, just imagine the frustration of the people who type-set the dictionary!
Delete