"I've never seen so many books before in my whole life!"

November 2, 2018 3:19 AM

A thread about book production and premodern libraries in fantasy (and real world history) (SLTwitterThread)
posted by fearfulsymmetry (17 comments total)

I like that the first tweet is slight but there's a lot behind it -- making it its own inverse.
posted by hawthorne at 4:13 AM on November 2, 2018

Lots of nice bibliophilic trivia! (Here's the Threareader unroll for easier reading.)
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:55 AM on November 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

This is very relevant to something I'm writing at the moment, thanks for sharing.
posted by terretu at 5:59 AM on November 2, 2018

And so many other great threads splitting off from it!
posted by Etrigan at 6:14 AM on November 2, 2018

That heart-shaped book is great! I want one.
posted by slkinsey at 6:48 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

What I also love abt early print is how there wasn't really time to correct typos &mistakes.
You would put typeset a page & start printing.
Someone would check the text as more copies were printed.
Then printing would halt, corrections & then some corrected pages would be printed

What I hate about reading content like this in Tweets is that the author doesn't feel the need to do even a quick edit. I don't mind the breezy, factoid pace that we get out of Twitter writing, but if you can only have so many characters, fucking edit. Or, y'know, don't use Twitter for your little piece. /OLDGRUMPYDICK.

This post is delightful, by the way.
posted by es_de_bah at 6:56 AM on November 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Was that meant to be sort of parodying the typos?
posted by Celsius1414 at 7:12 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

About how there just weren't very many books. The English Short Title Catalogue lists every single book printed in English between 1473 and 1800, in the UK or its colonies, of which a copy survives. You can list them all because there just weren't very many.

Sometime after 1800, they hooked the printing presses up to steam engines, and everything spiraled right out of bibliographers' control.
posted by ckridge at 7:20 AM on November 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

Well, it depends to some degree on how you define "books." There were many many pamphlets post-Reformation. The problem is that a lot of them ended up being recycled for the paper, so no copy survives. Obviously nothing like the modern volume, but not a small number, either.
posted by praemunire at 8:27 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

In fantasy novels, the answer to "Why are there so many books in a society with no printing presses and low levels of literacy?" is magic.
posted by betweenthebars at 8:54 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Jeanette Ng, whose twitter this is, also wrote Under The Pendulum Sun, which I really like. It doesn't have the absolute strongest plot, but it's extremely atmospheric and has stayed with me.

Things it reminded me of:

1. The creepier, lonelier bits of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell
2. Certain parts of Jane Eyre
3. Hieronymus Bosch
4. Victorian fantasy like Phantastes and other low-key stories of eerie places
5. The sort of sub-genre of odd, timeless fantasy novels like Lud-In-The-Mist and Pavane and Kalpa Imperial and Stranger In Olondria, where even though you can identify contemporary/real-world/political concerns, there's such a strong mood of eeriness and such a self-contained quality to the worlds that they don't seem especially of their time. Chamber fantasy novels, sort of.

Anyway, I really liked it (and may just go ahead and re-read it this weekend.) It truly took me away from our awful times.
posted by Frowner at 8:57 AM on November 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

This is great!

I always thought -- to the extent that I did think of it -- that the Beast's library was plausible as a manifestation of inherited wealth in the late 18th century. But it seems I was wrong.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:18 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

One of the better treatments of this is in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. When Roland (who comes from a post-apocalyptic world that's very medieval in most of its aspects, aside from having modern handguns) comes to our world, he's horrified to see someone throwing away a newspaper.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:26 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Well, it depends to some degree on how you define "books." There were many many pamphlets post-Reformation.

Yeah, the amount of printed ephemera—pamphlets, chapbooks, broadsides—in circulation probably exceeded the number of books in circulation almost until the invention of the steam-powered press. (Some of that ephemera, pamphlets and chapbooks, particularly, would be bound as books by their owners.)

One of my favorite historical libraries is the late antique Vivarium, built by the Roman Senator Cassiodorus around the middle of the 6th century. Imagining this as an oasis of Romano-Christian culture at a time when plague and Justinian was ravaging Italy is grand and tragic.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:39 PM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I am so pleased that I have learned a new thing which is the steampunkiest thing I have learned all week - that printing presses got hooked up to steam engines as a first step in mass production. Obvious in retrospect, but nothing I had even imagined before today.
posted by Mogur at 1:07 PM on November 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

omg the side conversation about the lotus sutra is just splendid thank you so much for this
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 1:51 PM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is my day job, and I was very impressed with how solid her understanding of book history is. The only thing I didn’t see that was relevant to the discussion was the Frankfurt Book Fair and its role as an engine for the dissemination of books in the early modern period.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:41 PM on November 2, 2018