Memo From the Monastery

Funny. A couple things to add about this:

- Gutenberg basically tried to mimic illuminated manuscripts with his creation, in terms of the lettering and the use of hand-painted letters at the beginnings of new sections. He did not immediately see the potential of his application for new styles of books and new uses of printing.

- Printing presses caught on very quickly in Europe. Once they did, there were very few people who believed illuminated manuscripts were better. Certainly, the Church didn't like losing control over information, but even it recognized that the technology was superior and could serve its own ends (see Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change for more about this, as well as the impact of printing on many aspects of society)

- Illuminated manuscripts held on through the early 1600s (see http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/browse....). Of course, by then their impact was negligible compared to books and other printed works.

To play joke explainer in case anyone didn't get it, Aldus is a double reference to early Venetion printer Aldus Manutius and Aldus corp, creator of pagemaker, which merged with Adobe in 1994.

In 16th century England, after a book had been printed, someone would go in and draw pencil drafting lines marking the text area and the text baseline as was done before hand-writing a manuscript.

Illuminated manuscripts are orchestral music. Printed books are rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll wins:

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/01/cory-doctorow-c...