Best quotes of the tonight's foray into reading about printing
"Hand-sewn books are sown on either cords or tapes. Of course, you can have cords and tapes on a machine-sewn book, but they will be false ones, pasted on after the book has been stabbed to death. I do not want to give you the impression that I am some sort of John the Baptist crying in a wilderness of machines. Machines are designed for special purposes and when we try to use them for a different purpose from that for which they were intended we fail. You would think a carpenter who used a machine that was made to drive nails in an orange box unbalanced if he tried to adjust that machine to build a house." From Edwin Grabhorn's "The Fine Art of Printing"
Favorites? A unbalanced carpenter, some sort of John the Baptist, and stabbing a book to death.
And one last one, because it's just too funny:
"Within this time continuum, huge human upheavals--war, vast expansions in economic demand for some commodity--will lead to changes which leave their mark on the way people make things. These marks are not charted and will not be recognized by a potential forger, unless he is very clever indeed (I shall be coming in a moment to an example of a forger who is very clever indeed)." From Nicolas Barker's "The Forgery of Printed Documents"
So much fun.
-AAS