#First examples of printed books and movable type
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gremlinsinthegarden · 2 years ago
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Aziraphale has an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible and the Diamond Sutra.
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omgpurplefattie · 5 months ago
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Time frame for SHL / TYK?
Has anybody spotted a specific invention, artefact, or literary reference in Word of Honor or the book Faraway Wanderers (or indeed Qi Ye) that would date it more precisely than "fantasy ancient China"?
As I need to throw around a few IRL references in the fic I am working on (again! yay!), "The World of the Morning After", I am going by vibes for some sort of post-Tang, pre-Ming era of increased political confusion, which would mean that Tang poetry exists, as do the Daoist and Confucian classics and the Book of Monsters that Fangs of Fortune is based on, but the Ming novels like "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin" or "Journey to the West" do not. Woodblock printing definitely exists, but does movable type (first mentioned around 1100 AD)?
For example, reams of tumblr-wide peer reviewed meta has placed The Untamed in the fifth to seventh century; definitely after the actual Three Kindoms (because the Burial Grounds near Yiling are the site of one of Cao Cao's lesser battles along the river of which Red Cliff is the most famous) and pre-Tang, as the war the cultivators fight very strongly points to the absence of any central power or Mandate of Heaven.
Is there any argument of this kind for Word of Honour?
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sindri42 · 1 year ago
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So, I know that this is a joke, but given the current prevailing culture of 'everything ever done by europe is wrong and stupid and everything done by china is perfect and wonderful' I do feel the need to clarify.
There are early examples of typography dating back to the 2nd millennium BC on the island of Crete. However, Gutenberg's was the first to actually be practical and efficient enough to lead to widespread literacy in the middle and lower classes, and the subsequent cultural and political revolutions.
The chinese did develop rudimentary forms of movable-type printing, first with clay tiles before 1040 AD (very similar to the methods used in europe around 1119) and then advancing to bronze somewhere in the 1100s, and these were widely used to distribute formal Imperial decrees, as well as for the production of some of the world's first paper money. But there's no evidence of actually distributing books which were printed en masse before 1490, fifty years after Gutenberg's printing press was in widespread operation. Likewise, Arab Muslims began using printing (based on the chinese process) on the small scale to reproduce brief passages from the Qur'an and short scientific treatises as early as the 10th century according to some accounts, but did not expand this to reproducing entire books until the 18th.
Part of this is because the chinese (and most of the rest of the world) at the time were still using hand-crafted paper, while europeans developed water-powered industrial paper mills in 1282; even a perfect printing process would be impossible to use on a large scale without cheap, plentiful material to print on. Another factor is that Gutenberg put a lot of work into developing new varieties of ink specifically for use with a metal press into plant fiber, as opposed to earlier varieties of ink which were generally developed for hand-writing on parchment and thus had problems with soaking and bleeding.
But the biggest factor is that the emergence of Capitalism led to a sharp rise in the education of the middle classes, producing a demand for books on a scale never seen before, and a general cultural drive toward efficiency which gradually saw most hand-crafts replaced with mechanical mass production methods.
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travelvlognn · 4 months ago
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Johannes Gutenberg's printing press stands as one of the most important inventions of the 15th century, often recognized for its role in igniting the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Exploration. Gutenberg, an inventor from Germany, pioneered movable type printing approximately in 1440 in Mainz, Germany. This breakthrough transformed how information was shared and significantly influenced culture, religion, and society. Gutenberg’s key innovation was the creation of movable type, a method in which separate letters or characters (types) were made from metal and could be organized to create words and sentences. Before Gutenberg, books were copied by hand, making theprocess extremely labor-intensive and costly. The printing press enabled the large-scale production of texts, significantly cutting down the time and expense associated with book creation. In order to develop a device that could apply pressure to paper and transfer ink from the movable type to the paper, Gutenberg modified pre-existing technology, such as the wine press. The movable type was set up on a press bed, ink was applied, paper was placed over the type, and pressure was applied to transfer the ink. Compared to hand copying, this method allowed for faster and more efficient printing. The Gutenberg Bible, sometimes referred to as the 42-line Bible, was finished around 1455 and is the most well-known example of an early printed work. It is regarded as one of the greatest printing accomplishments in history and was the first significant book to be printed using movable type. The Gutenberg Bible was renowned for its exquisite craftsmanship, exquisite typefaces, and ornamental. The printing press made it possible to produce books in large quantities, which increased the accessibility and affordability of written content. Books were rare and costly prior to the development of the press, and they were primarily written by scribes in monasteries. Literacy rates began to rise as a result of people from all walks of life having access to books and written materials. This helped spread knowledge and encouraged a better informed society. The printing press was crucial to the Scientific Revolution because it facilitated the dissemination of ideas and discoveries by scientists and thinkers. The press also helped national languages develop as books began to be written in vernacular languages rather than Latin by generating concepts and literature more widely available.
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pmfmp2 · 1 year ago
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The meaning to life
People searching for the meaning of life relates to my game as the character can be taken as it is trying to find its meaning to be alive by finding this messiah and who is behind the creation of the paper world.
an example of people finding the meaning to life is someone saying that the number 42 is important to the meaning to life so people went out searching for different reasons why examples of these are:
The world's first book printed with movable type is the Gutenberg Bible which has 42 lines per page.
On page 42 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry discovers he's a wizard.
The Doctor Who episode entitled "42" lasts for 42 minutes.
Titanic was travelling at a speed equivalent to 42km/hour when it collided with an iceberg.
The youngest president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, was 42 when he was elected.
In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence gives Juliet a potion that allows for her to be in a death-like coma for "two and forty hours".
Searching for more signs of life:
Nasa is trying to find more life in the universe using science over belief and by using what they know about life know and what they don't know about it they are discovering using atmospheres whether life exists in other places in the universe.
Higgs Boson:
The Higgs Boson is a particle that proves the big bang saying that the Higgs field always existed and when it became slightly stable after the big bang it created Higgs Boson particles that had masses.
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blue-opossum · 2 years ago
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The Usual Height Navigation (Danielle Brisebois), Sudoku
        The Usual Height Navigation (Danielle Brisebois), Sudoku
        Monday night, 25 September 2023
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        Height Navigation:
        In this vivid dream, the usual leg and arm mobility themes (secondary staging, moving from residual to a more stable REM atonia status) mix with height navigation (in this case, usage of both feet and hands to visualize climbing a ladder) because of my natural but ambiguous vestibular response to REM atonia dynamics, as I have previously revealed and explained in several thousand online dream journal entries. It is a predominant type of dream narrative, occurring a few times every sleep cycle because of my physiological responses to sleep (and wholly irrelevant to real life).
        The usual Naiad Factor (female protoconsciousness and water as the primary induction factor of sleeping and dreaming since childhood) is partly engaged here because it first suggests a girl climbing a ladder to reach a diving board (though she is in informal clothes, including blue jeans, not a swimsuit). However, the literal reference here is to the dream state itself in the outcome.
        I watch Danielle Brisebois climbing a ladder suspended in the air at night in an unknown outdoor location. The view is from behind, and even though she is already high in the sky, I am at the same slowly ascending level regarding my viewpoint (the usual in this mode), following her progress. I float (as usual) with no anticipation of falling (because REM atonia is complete).
        I enter the setting after she reaches a wooden platform (no walls), about half the area of our kitchen, suspended in the air. An unfamiliar Caucasian woman in formal clothes is sitting near a low-set table on the other side of the platform. She is not attentive to me but informs Danielle that she is here because she is "selling subscriptions to dreams."
        Sudoku:
        I am experiencing proto-cognizant staging, and this mode results in an undefined setting, though my vivid but illusory somatosensory response to REM atonia engages after a short time.
        I am involved in solving a Sudoku puzzle, but instead of writing numbers, I am "sliding" numbers (from the bottom of the page) over the paper into the Sudoku puzzle with my right index finger. My dreaming mind is confusing moving my finger on paper as having the same effect as on a touchscreen, so this could fit into the usual "paper technology fallacy" as a regular attribute of my dreams.
        Each time I “slide” a printed (but somehow movable) number into its correct location, the number briefly has animated concentric lines around it as its square briefly flashes.
        My sense of touch increases as I slide the number 5 into its correct position (in the middle, near the top) to finish solving the puzzle. However, instead of the number becoming more "present," I lose some of my somatosensory focus, and the number randomly moves down and "under" the implied puzzle layer. At this point, I am too aware of the essence of the dream state to have control (the opposite of what lucid dreaming propaganda pretends).
        Dreams in this mode are as unlike reality as possible (and as wrong as possible) to prevent real-life associations. For example, in real life, I use a pen to solve Sudoku puzzles in a puzzle book and only a computer keyboard to solve them on the Sudoku website. This wonderful illusory experience has me confusing paper with a touchscreen, so mindlessly absurd that it is a reason I appreciate dreams so much. (By the way, the number 5 is a reference to how many fingers I have on one hand, kind of a no-brainer, hey.)
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plethoraworldatlas · 1 year ago
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Awesome, interaction! I literally never turned on asks but guess I should!
To answer your question, I've always envisioned the printing press alluded to already exist to be akin to the Screw type press, using movable type; Certainly with the pre-Acedemy technology being already remarkably advanced I imagined them as a bit of an in-between, just on the verge of someone coming up with a way to get all the benefits and then some from the few diffrent ways it was being done, which Rand's funding provided. The Printing Press in the Cairhien was basically the Gutenberg moment for Mardhol; That thing, though outdated by the time this project is set, could print almost 3,600 pages a workday, while the version it replaced was probably printing about 300 pages (which is still way more than most pre-Renaissance methods of handprinting or handcopying, which I always took as why literacy is more prominent in WoT).
But with the Last Battle done and a world rebuilding for a new Age, and the leaders of the Rebuilding wanting better educated populations (both to improve living conditions and by some Clause in the Dragon's Peace Rand snuck in because he knew everyone would be so astonished by the whole "no more infighting and pointless feudal wars" thing that he could also get in some requirements to improve the lives of commonfolk), and more than a few nobles getting pushed into making generous donations to the Academies to honor the Dragon Reborn, there was more than enough incentive to Innovate further. The original innovators brought on more Academy members in their attempts to increase productivity; Changes to design kept producing more and more efficient Presses, which were sent out to Academy members who set up shop in places to operate them, as well as contracted existing printers, printing millions of school books, an eventually The Dragon Reborn by Loial, son of Arent son of Halan (the entire affair of the press revolution fascinated and frightened Loial and other Ogier for many reasons, but most important for this conversation, it motivated Loial to finish his book faster instead of taking the near century he planned for editing) codifying the main story of Rand and his Companions in the minds of the people.
At the time of the story, people are still working on even better presses, but the most recent invention came when a Asha'man with a fascination for the rise of steam power and a Talent related to forging with the power (This power being similar to Aviendha being able to "Read" Ter'angreal and what they do, basically being able to feel inside mundane mechanisms and using the power to connect with it like how Neald poured the power into Perrin's hammer, but instead of directly putting the power into them, you either use the power to move things around or to understand it better than before) joined. This early Steam Powered press is only a few years old, and there are only a handful in existence (mostly in either the Academies or owned by major Crowns, or the biggest Newspaper in Mardhol "The Lion and Sun") but it is a BEAST; The 3.6k pages a day of old being far surpassed by roughly a thousand an HOUR.
But, that's just part of the question. With all these advances in technology happening right alongside each other in a way that didn't happen irl (as in, not just happening in the same few years but also literally in the same buildings sometimes) things have moved fast. The creation of the first newspapers to keep both the already literate and newly educated and knowledge hungry informed basically took the place of irl's Protestant Reformation in terms of the ramifications of sudden mass availability of books and skyrocketing literacy.
The Academies have started selling Presses to start up independent businesses, but many are owned by the Crown's of major nations; Already, quiet lines are being drawn on National Presses vs "Free" Presses. Andor, for example, might use smaller National newspapers to spread the message of the Empire, but circumstances means they have to contract a independent press to print new school books, and with the prestige of being the biggest "The Lion and Sun" not only is granted but in fact needs more independence from the whims of the Crown. Combined with Traveling by Gateways and all around safer roads, news of tensions and strife from across the Continent can be front page by morning print. This effectively introduces a lighter form of the modern issues of news-induced Hyper-awareness to the early Fourth Age.
The biggest stories everyone knows about are the White Tower's Scandal (a different post) and the story of the River Republic's Declaration of Succession and Republicship (also different post). Speaking of, from (some of) the Academies, and from the small towns and villages the lived without noble rule for generations that now have both the words to put to things and increased criticism of nobility from their sudden increased presence, the ideas behind small village councils are being grown, and the (re)birth of Republicanism is occurring, alongside small ideas of democracy growing as well.
Early Imperialism, early Republicanism and democracy, rising global tensions, and the birth of entirely new ideologies and philosophies are clashing, and the first place they are butting heads are the headlines.
Wow, I didn't mean the write so much (and I still didn't get into how the printing press has effected both the Seanchan and the growing resistance to their rule). I wanted to expand on this for a while I guess. Thanks!
Also, I never thought of it, but it totally makes sense for the Old Tongue and thus the New Tongue to be character based/ use logograms (which I think is what you meant more than ideogram; Sorry if wrong, also not a linguist)! The OT already has the varied meanings and translation difficulties because of how it is. It also kinda fits into my ideas of the OT and how it came to be (Again another post, but definitely related to Zen Rand talking about how the Age of Legends wasn't all that cracked up to be, and how he admits that even without the Shadow it would've been at most a century before the flaws in their society brought about its own end with New wars)
@plethoraworldatlas You don’t appear to have asks turned on (unless I missed it, in which case, whoops) but you invited questions about your 4th age setup, so here I go!
Can you say more about the new printing press & how journalism gets started in Mardhol?
It always sounded to me like they have some kind of printing presses (otherwise how would even Rand have books, it’s not like he could afford hand-copied material & I don’t know who would be doing the copying either) and I do vaguely recall there was an inventor at Rand’s school who was working on a better printing press. Do you have thoughts on how it would work and why it would be so much better than the ones they already have? Like, is it just moveable type vs plates?
Something I thought would be cool, especially if they already had movable type, is if it was actually an alphabet/character innovation, like Hangul (the Korean alphabet). Based on the spoken version, I’d say Old Tongue appears to be more like ideograms (symbols representing concepts) than letters (symbols representing specific sounds), and modern WoT language is apparently just simplified OT.*
Some clever person creating a sound-based symbol set for the modern language, rather than an ideogram-based one, would massively reduce the number of individual characters needed to write. This would in turn massively reduce the number and kind of metal type that would need to be physically produced, bought & stored, thus reducing costs & expertise & therefore revolutionizing printing without changing the basic underlying printer technology that much.
*I think there is actually a letter-based alphabet for the OT that we get in the Companion, but I can pretend that’s a later innovation for the sake of this neat idea.
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script-a-world · 4 years ago
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hi, any advice on timeline and era etc stuff? I have dyscalculia so numbers and measurements are meaningless to me and it’s really difficult to figure out how much time should lapse (on a large scale; time periods, millennia, eras, etc, not stuff like in one persons lifespan) between eras and events, especially in regards to political n social n technological etc changes
Feral: That depends. There isn’t one answer. You’re asking for longer time periods than a generation or a lifetime, but for scale, take what’s happening now. How many calamities, major political events, social trends, and changes in technology (and how we interact with it) have happened in the year 2020? Since the year 2016? Since 2008? Since 2001? How are they grouped together or spaced apart? And these are all working on each other. In the USA where I live, the 9/11 attacks absolutely have a direct causal effect with the politics that led to the 2016 election (actually before that a Supreme Court decision in the 2000 election also had an impact on that result), and the results of the 2016 election impacted how COVID has been handled this year. That’s 20 years, so when we’re looking at longer timeframes, we scale up. We see gaps and groupings and there just isn’t a specific “oh every decade/score/century, these types of events happen.”
To quote a particularly relevant introduction on Wikipedia:
This results in descriptive abstractions that provide convenient terms for periods of time with relatively stable characteristics. However, determining the precise beginning and ending to any ‘period’ is often arbitrary, since it has changed over time over the course of history.
To the extent that history is continuous and not generalized, all systems of periodization are more or less arbitrary. Yet without named periods, however clumsy or imprecise, past time would be nothing more than scattered events without a framework to help us understand them.
Eras, of the non-geological or -cosmological sort, or time periods are culturally determined, completely variable in length, and often overlap. For example, the beginning of the Victorian Era, 64 years, (defined by Victoria’s rule of England) of the Anglo-influenced world overlapped with the Antebellum Era, 78 years, (defined by political and social tensions in the lead up to the American Civil War) of the United States, which is also part of the Anglo-influenced world, and then following the end of the Antebellum Era, was the American Civil War, 4 years, and then the Reconstruction Era, 14 years (the first 2 of which are within the Civil War), which are both fully contained within the Victorian Era. Typically, when you are trying to think about eras, think about political rulership, wars, and large scale trends like artistic styles. It may also be helpful to familiarize yourself with the Three-Age System, which can be applied individually on cultures, rather describing trends for the whole world.
What it really comes down to when we think of eras and time periods is almost like a type of pareidolia. People see groupings of like things happening and put this grouping into a bubble of time, which kinda doesn’t actually exist in objective reality and is more or less a group hallucination on a massive scale. It calls to mind what Zeno’s arrow might have actually been trying to describe - not to say that this paradox is infallible, but it’s an interesting thought exercise, especially once you get into the quantum Zeno effect.
Now that I have fully diverged from the question at hand, we’ll get back to it. Let’s look at one technology type and how much time elapses between developments as well as some tie-in technological, social, and political forces that may be acting on the developments or that the developments might be acting on. I’ll also note how this technology traverses the eras of history as I find that looking at one discrete set over time is easier than just trying to look at the big picture. Let’s look at the history of printing.
(With hopes that it will be easier for you to conceptualize, I will use simplified (aka rounded up/down) timeframes written numerically rather than spelled out or via terms like decade or century so at the very least you can compare length of numbers. I’m also going to link as many Wikipedia articles as I can - I like Wikipedia for this because of its incredible cross-indexing and how it strings relevant articles together into a series, often chronologically. If the numbers are still challenging for you, I will summarize without at the end.)
5,520 years ago, the very first form of printing we know about is done with cylinders rolled over wet clay in Sumer in 3500 BCE, the beginning of the Early Bronze Age.
3,700 years later, woodblock printing is developed in China somewhere around 200 CE/AD, just after the end of the Pax Romana in Europe.
700 years later, the next development of printing is movable type, which is developed in China in 1040. 26 years later, on the other side of the world, in 1066 is the Battle of Hastings and the establishment of the Norman Era of rulership in England, in another 20 years, in 1086, the Domesday Book is hand written in 2 volumes: 1 is 764 8”x15” pages, the other 900 8”x11” pages.
400 years later gives us the Gutenburg printing press that is developed in Germany (at the time in the Holy Roman Empire) in 1440. This is during the Renaissance Era; it’s also the Era of Humanism, and often called the Early Modern Period. Martin Luther will write the 95 Theses less than 80 years later and start the Protestant Reformation, largely thanks to the ability for the theses to be easily copied by the printing press and spread quickly.
75 years later we have etching in 1515. 90 years later, the first weekly “true” newspaper, the Relation, begins printing in 1604.
130 years later we have mezzotint in 1642, which is the start of the First English Civil War, which will last for 4 years. Depending on your preference, the Age of Enlightenment either began 5 years before or 40 years later (unless you’re French).
130 years later we have aquatint in 1772. That is right at the beginning of the American Revolution: 2 years after the Boston Massacre; 1 year before the Boston Tea Party; 2 years before the Intolerable Acts and the First Continental Congress; 3 years before Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Speech (which is printed and shared across the colonies), Paul Revere’s Ride, and the Battle of Lexington & Concord; and finally 4 years before Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is published, the signing of the Declaration of Independence (which is printed and shared across the colonies), Nathan Hale’s execution for treason against the Crown, and Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware.
25 years later lithography is developed in 1796; the year prior Napoleon overthrows le Directoire.
40 years later we have chromolithography in 1837, the year Victoria ascends and the first electric/battery powered locomotive is invented.
5 years later is the rotary press in 1843. The First Industrial Revolution is over.
15 years later is the hectograph in 1860. 1 year later, the American Civil War begins.
15 years later is offset printing in 1875. 1 year before, the first commercial typewriter becomes available. 1 year later is Bell and Watson’s first phone call in 1876.
10 years later is hotmetal typing in 1884.
1 year later is the mimeograph in 1885. 2 years later is Black Monday. 5-10 years later the radio is invented.
20 years later is the photostat and rectigraph in 1907.
4 years later is screen printing in 1911. 3 years later WWI begins in 1914.
10 years later is the spirit duplicator in 1923. The Roaring Twenties.
2 years later is dot matrix printing in 1925. 4 years later is the Great Crash.
10 years later is xerography in 1938, the same year as the first digital computer. 1 year later WWII begins in 1939.
2 years later is spark printing in 1940. 1 year later is the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
9 years later is phototypesetting in 1949. The USSR detonates their first atomic bomb.
1 year later is inkjet printing in 1950. Truman orders the development of the hydrogen bomb. Apartheid becomes law in South Africa.
7 years later is dye-sublimation in 1957. 6 years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his “I Have a Dream” Speech.
12 years later is laser printing in 1969, the summer of which is known for very Very.
3 years later is thermal printing in 1972. The break-in at the Watergate Office Building is this same year and 2 years later Nixon resigns.
14 years later is 3D printing in 1986, the year Pixar Animation is founded and the year after the beginning of the Iran-Contra Affair.
1 year later is solid ink printing in 1987. 2 years later is the invention of the World Wide Web, and the internet as we know it.
4 years later is digital printing in 1991, the same year the USSR dissolved. 2 years before, the Berlin Wall fell.
There have been no significant developments in the history of printing since 1991.
So, let’s look at some averages to help us consume this data. Printing has a history of 5,520 years. It took 3,700 years for another development to occur, and then another 700 years after that - in other words, in the first 4,400 years of printing, there were 3 developments, equalling to an average of 1 every 1,470 years. In the 400 years between 1440 and 1843,  there were 7 developments (average of 1 every 57 years). In the next 100 years between 1860 and 1957, there were 14 developments (average of 1 every 7 years but with 1 year having 2 developments simultaneously). In the next 22 years between 1969 and 1991, there were 5 developments (average of 1 every 4 years).
While the general trend is that the more a technology develops, the faster it develops, a trend is not the whole picture. Consider: in the 90 years of 1796-1885, there were 6 developments, making the average 1 every 15 years. In the 85 years of 1907-1991, there were 15 developments, making the average 1 every 6 years. There has not been a development in the past 30 years! There hasn’t been this large of a gap since 1837, 180 years ago.
In general, without numbers, what I think we can see here is that sometimes a certain development, like the printing press, can usher in a new era, and sometimes reactions to what else is happening in the world can pressure someone into developing something new, but often times, most times, when you look at just one thing under microscope over time, why that thing is produced in this era but not that era has nothing to do with the eras in question. When we create time periods, we’re generally doing it after the fact. No one living under the rule of the Roman Empire in 100 CE was thinking to themselves, “ah yes, the Pax Romana, when we have peace for 200 years!”
So applying all of this to worldbuilding, I see two methods that you can use together, to create a timeline that makes sense and is useful to your storytelling.
Method the first, arbitrarily create time bubbles of various lengths - I recommend the use of index cards for this. Index card A is 7 years; card B is 150 years; card C is 47 years and so on. Then take big ideas and put those onto your cards; use inspiration from real history. “I want the War of the Roses but condensed into 7 years.” “A Mongolian Empire type expansion happens over 150 years.” “There’s a 47 year Renaissance of fascination with Ancient History.” Then take those cards, lay them out into roughly the order in which you want them to occur, maybe overlap them a little, especially if they are happening in different parts of your world. Remember that time is not actually linear and things do not happen in a linear, narrative manner in the real world, so there can be wild leaps; there can be regressions; and you don’t have to follow real world history here - though you may want to the first time as a helpful exercise. It’s also very unlikely that you will ever have to know exactly how many years are between the eras or what the interstitial eras are.
Method the second, list all the major historical events, inventions, etc that you want/need to have happened. Start with what directly impacts your main characters and plot. “MC’s great-grandfather is humiliatingly defeated in battle, casting a pall of embarrassment across the generations following and ultimately putting the MC in the position that she starts in.” “The first great wizard codifies the 10 Laws of the Important Magical Order that the MC is trying to earn her place in.” Put these in an order that makes sense to you, keeping in mind that it’s not going to be a perfect progression. Again, you don’t need to know how many years there are between each event, but if great-grandpa was the last in a very long line of family members allowed to be in the Important Magical Order, then that IMO had to be founded first, and there would probably be some events between these two.
Then, when you have your two timelines, one of era/time periods and one of events, graft them together. You may have to shift some things to make it work, but consider the “feeling” or theme of the eras and what events make sense in relation to those feelings. Additionally would this event be more suited to happening when the era is new and is finding itself or when the era is solidly on course or is it an event that would completely shatter the illusion of the era and usher in a new one? Does it make sense for your great wizard to be codifying her laws in the expansion of an empire, or during a period of relative peace and prosperity in an established empire, or before empires were a thing in this world and few traveled far from home?
Tex: I’ve found that historically important events are caused for roughly two reasons - one, an invention that others capitalize on for an exponential growth into other inventions/social uses, and two, someone got sick of someone else’s crap and did something about it. Natural disasters will happen with enough frequency to be noted (see: the Little Ice Age, the Black Death, and the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa), although there’s little prediction for them because of the lack of observable build up in activity.
To pull from Feral’s timeline of examples, writing is popularly attributed to being invented in Sumer, 5,520 years ago - it’s our oldest found example, at any rate, though I’ve learned to never say never on archaeological discoveries.
What prompted this invention? Things rarely occur out of the blue, and rarely without interaction from other domains - where could writing have come from? Maybe art? What about from the creation of a tool, a reuse of certain skill sets? Something else we haven’t thought of yet?
So that’s one half of the question. But what about the other half - what did people around the inventor (multiple inventors?) think of this new thing? Deliberately associating a particular sound with a particular object - even a 2D object like pressing shapes into a piece of clay - and then standardizing it, is no mean feat. How did this agreement even happen? Were there arguments about how to do these graphemes, how best to shape them? What about which phoneme to each?
I doubt Sumerian cuneiform was created in a day, and likewise I doubt that language popped into existence on a whim. To keep pulling from this example, language composition has a strong effect on how we interact with our environment (University of Missouri-St Louis Libraries), but it conversely is also deeply affected by the environment its users create (Nature).
Because of this, I think it’s easier to work from a different angle - figure out what your major events are, and what eras you’re covering. If these major events also define an era, that’s even better! Working out how long everything each thing takes is ultimately a bunch of minor details, so it’s up to you how much your plot actively needs them, rather than decoration to your story meant to amuse you more than your audience.
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softlyblues · 5 years ago
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Hi! i read your story if we who are left and i thought it was rly good. one thing i wondered was why Moist is always picked as patrician after Veterinari if you knew anything about that?
hi, thank you! it’s a good question, because i think most discworld people had the idea individually and then went online to find that everyone else was on the patrician moist train. i spent all day thinking about this, actually, and i have an answer that’s definitely more complicated than you were looking for. 
i think there are three and a half people that vetinari might realistically consider as his successor, because in order to succeed vetinari you need to see the man behind the myth, and very few people do. sam vimes, rufus drumknott, and moist von lipwig are the three, and william de worde is the half. (every night i cry with the lack of anymore newspaper books.) 
so lets look at those options! sam first. vimes & vetinari have perhaps the most public relationship, and vimes is definitely the person vetinari feels most comfortable showing weakness/vulnerability around. for example, in feet of clay with the Poisoning That Sparked A Thousand Fanfics, and in men at arms with the gonne shooting, vetinari is both physically and mentally vulnerable - to a really incredible extent - for vimes. in both instances, vetinari’s life is in his hands. in the fifth elephant, snuff, jingo, and thud!, although vetinari’s life is not physically in vimes’ hands, he is very explicit in trusting his reputation and the future of ankh-morpork to vimes, much to vimes’ consternation. 
however, vimes would not be an ideal successor. there’s age, of course - night watch shows us vetinari is at most five years older than vimes, as he is a senior assassin student where sam is entering his first job, and so vimes would be retiring at the same time as vetinari. but more important than that there is vimes’ attitude to leadership and power. sybil, when telling sam that he has risen to the top, gets the reply “so does the scum”, and vimes is always deeply and intensely uncomfortable with the privilege he wields over others. he delegates to carrot as often as he can, and always always takes the most dangerous position; look at thud!, or jingo, or. fuck it. look at every single book. vimes is a commander, but he really, really doesn’t want to be one, and he’s very uncomfortable with the inequality in treatment that comes with holding power. 
okay, now drumknott! imo, the title of vetinari’s terrier is wasted on sam; drumknott is the true “loyal dog” figure. in the truth, despite being the subject of the assault and witnessing it with his own eyes, he is the only character to openly deny that vetinari stole/tried to kill him. he is “very shaken” by the idea that this could happen. unseen academicals shows us vetinari is comfortable showing weakness in front of him, with his admission that he is drunk, and we know that drumknott is his sounding-board in many little scenes throughout the series. so far, so good. drumknott is probably a dark clerk, and almost definitely attended the assassins guild, so there’s no lack of intelligence or knowledge of the city. 
but drumknott lacks one thing, which is creativity. unseen academicals shows us this crack, the whole scene with vetinari asking him what he would do if presented with a ball on the street, and his single-minded interest in stationery. he also hero-worships vetinari too much; he can’t succeed as patrician because of his own perceived lack of what makes vetinari special. 
(i want to quickly look at william before i go to moist. if we had a second newspaper book i firmly believe william would be as beloved as moist is, but as it is we don’t. ;-; the key thing between william & vetinari is that william lacks a loving father figure, and in the truth vetinari shows a paternal indulgence towards the newspaper and movable type that he doesn’t show to other innovations like moving pictures/music with rocks in/previous attempts at a printing press. when william uncovers the truth, vetinari is pleased, but not surprised. william has potential, but that’s sadly all he has - vetinari is definitely a father figure for him, though.) 
so moist! moist is a criminal, a rogue, and completely untrustworthy. he is more talented at manipulation than any other character on the disc apart from vetinari and possibly granny, and he can balance plans on a knife-edge better than anyone except vetinari. if he isn’t presented with a constant life-threatening challenge, he grows so bored he starts breaking into his own house. he has contingencies upon just-in-cases upon getaways hidden all over the city, and like vetinari, is very skilled at pretending to be someone else; or at blending into the background. at the time of raising steam moist has at least three full-time jobs, and is looking for more. vetinari several times makes comments about the state of taxes in ankh-morpork and other public services that he thinks moist would manage well over. 
crucially, vetinari does show weakness in front of moist, albeit of a different kind. with vimes and drumknott its physical weakness, but with moist, it’s civic weakness; vetinari hands him the banks, the post office, the trains, the clacks, because he (vetinari) can’t handle them. so while vetinari trusts vimes and drumknott with his person, he trusts moist with something he values a lot more than his body; he trusts him with the inner workings of his city. looking at age, too, moist is described as early-middle-aged in raising steam, definitely a great deal younger than a vetinari who is entering old age. (it’s been brought up to me that he is 26 [provided he doesn’t lie] in going postal, so assuming 10-15 years have passed between postal and raising steam that puts him at a perfect age for the job) in other words, moist is a perfect age to take over as leader of a city-state. 
vetinari trusts moist with his city in a way he doesn’t trust vimes; he trusts moist explicitly, instead of the implicit trust he gives sam. he knows sam will always be there, because sam has built the system of checks and balances that makes up an almost-perfect watch; he knows moist will always be trying to improve, and that moist has that creativity and imagination that a leader needs to be successful. 
sorry this was so long lmao. but in conclusion: lord moist von lipwig for patrician, and i have a big bang fic i should be working on instead of this
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biproroy · 4 years ago
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Graphics Design
Graphic design is a profession whose business is the act of designing, programming, and create visual communications, generally produced by industrial means and intended to convey specific messages to specific social groups, with a clear purpose. This is the activity that enables graphically communicate ideas, facts and values processed and synthesized in terms of form and communication, social, cultural, economic, aesthetic and technological. Also known as visual communication design, because some associate the word figure only to the printing industry, and understand that visual messages are channeled through many media, not just print.
Given the massive and rapid growth in the exchange of information, the demand for graphic designers is greater than ever, particularly because of the development of new technologies and the need to pay attention to the human factors that are beyond the competence of engineers who develop them.
Some classifications are widely used graphic design: advertising design, editorial design, corporate identity design, web design, packaging design, typographic design, signage design, multimedia design, among others.
Graphic Design History
The definition of the graphic design profession is rather recent, in what concerns their preparation, their activities and goals. Although there is no consensus on the exact date of the birth of graphic design, some dating during the interwar period. Others understand that begins to identify as such to the late nineteenth century.
Arguably specific graphic communications purposes have their origin in Paleolithic cave paintings and the birth of written language in the third millennium BC. C. But the differences in working methods and training required auxiliary sciences are such that it is not possible to clearly identify the current graphic designer with prehistoric man, with xylograph fifteenth century or the lithographer 1890.
The diversity of opinion reflects the fact that some see as a product of graphic design and all other graphical demonstration only those that arise as a result of the application of a model of industrial production, those visual manifestations that have been "projected" contemplating needs of different types: productive symbolic ergonomic contextual etc.
Background
A page from the Book of Kells: Folio 114, with decorated text contains the Tunc dicit illis. An example of art and page layout of the Middle Ages.
The Book of Kells - A Bible handwritten richly illustrated by Irish monks in the ninth century CE-is for some a very beautiful and early example of graphic design concept. It is a graphic demonstration of great artistic value, high quality, and that even a model for learning to design-for even surpasses in quality to many of the current-editorial productions, and also from a functional point of view contemporary This graphic piece responds to all needs presented the team of people who made it, however others believe that it would be graphic design product, because they understand that their design is not adjusted to the idea of current graphic design project.
The history of typography-and by transitive, also the history of the book-is closely linked to graphic design, this may be because there are virtually no graphics designs that do not include such items graphics. Hence, when talking about the history of graphic design, typography also cited the Trajan column, medieval miniatures, Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, the evolution of the book industry, the posters Parisian Arts Movement and Crafts (Arts and Crafts), William Morris, Bauhaus, etc.. "
The introduction of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg made books cheaper to produce, and facilitate their dissemination. The first printed books (incunabula) scored the role model to the twentieth century. Graphic design of this era has become known as Old Style (especially the typefaces which these early typographers used), or Humanist, due to the predominant philosophical school of the time.
After Gutenberg, no significant changes were seen until the late nineteenth century, particularly in Britain, there was an effort to create a clear division between the fine and applied arts.
In the 19th Century
First page of the book "The Nature of Gothic" by John Ruskin, published by the Kelmscott Press. The Arts and Crafts intended to revive the medieval art, inspiration in nature and manual labor.
During the nineteenth century visual message design was entrusted alternately two professionals: the artist or the publisher. The first was formed as an artist and the second as a craftsman, often both in the same schools of arts and crafts. For the printer as art was the use of ornaments and selecting fonts printed in his compositions. The artist saw typography as a child and paying more attention to ornamental and illustrative elements.
Between 1891 and 1896, the William Morris Kelmscott Press published some of the most significant graphic products Arts and Crafts Movement (Arts and Crafts), and established a lucrative business based on the design of books of great stylistic refinement and selling them to the upper classes as luxury items. Morris proved that a market existed for works of graphic design, establishing the separation of design from production and the fine arts. The work of the Kelmscott Press is characterized by its recreation of historic styles, especially medieval.
First Vanguards
Poster for the Moulin Rouge in Paris. Made by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec with color lithography in 1891. Thanks to Art Nouveau, graphic design and visual clarity gained by the composition.
Isotype of the Bauhaus. Founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, is considered the birthplace of the graphic design profession.
Given Poster for Matinée. Made by Theo van Doesburg in January 1923. The free font organization, expresses the spirit of the Dada movement, irrationality, for freedom and oppose the status quo and visual expressions of the time.
Corporate identity design for Lufthansa, by the Development Group 5 of the HFG Ulm. Ulm School was an inflection point in the history of design, since there is outlined the design profession through scientific methodology.
Current pictograms design for the National Park Service of the United States. The idea to simplify the symbols forms developed during the 1950s.
The design of the early twentieth century, as well as the fine arts of the same period, was a reaction against the decadence of typography and design of the late nineteenth century.
The interest in ornamentation and the proliferation of measurement changes and typographical style one piece design, synonymous with good design, it was an idea that was maintained until the late nineteenth century. The Art Nouveau, with its clear desire stylistic was a movement that contributed to higher order visual composition. While maintaining a high level of formal complexity, did so within a strong visual consistency, discarding the variation of typographic styles in one graphic piece.
Art movements of the second decade of the twentieth century and the political turmoil that accompanied them, generated dramatic changes in graphic design. The Dada, De Stijl, Suprematism, Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, the Bauhaus and created a new vision that influenced all branches of the visual arts and design. All these movements opposed to the decorative arts and popular, as well as the Art Nouveau, which under the influence of the new interest in geometry evolved into the Art Deco. All these movements were a revisionist and transgressive spirit in all arts of the time. This period also publications and manifestos proliferated through which artists and educators expressed their opinions.
During the 1930s developed for the composition interesting aspects of graphic design. The graphic style change was significant because it shows a reaction against eclecticism ornamentalist organicism and the time and proposes a more stripped and geometric. This style, connected with Constructivism, Suprematism, Neoplasticism, De Stijl and Bauhaus exerted a lasting influence and inescapable in the development of twentieth century graphic design. Another important element in relation to professional practice, was the increasing use of visual form as communication element. This item appeared mostly in the designs produced by the Dada and De Stijl.
The symbol of modern typography is the sans serif font or serif, inspired by industrial types of the late nineteenth century. Highlights include Edward Johnston, author of the font for the London Underground, and Eric Gill.
Design Schools
Jan Tschichold embodied the principles of modern typography in his 1928 book, New Typography. He later repudiated the philosophy presented in this book, calling it fascist, but remained very influential. Herbert Bayer, who dirigó from 1925-1928 the typography and advertising workshop at the Bauhaus, created the conditions for a new profession: the graphic designer. He put the subject "Advertising" in the education program including, among other things, the analysis of advertising media and the psychology of advertising. Notably, the first to define the term Graphic Design was the designer and typographer William Addison Dwiggins in 1922.
Thus Tschichold, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky became parents of graphic design as we know it today. They pioneered production techniques and styles that have been using later. Today, computers have dramatically altered production systems, but the approach that contributed to experimental design is more relevant than ever dynamism, experimentation and even very specific things like choosing fonts (Helvetica is a revival, originally a Typography design based on the nineteenth-century industrial) and orthogonal compositions.
In the years following the modern style gained acceptance, while stagnated. Notable names in modern design midcentury are Adrian Frutiger, designer of the typefaces Univers and Frutiger, and Josef Müller-Brockmann, large poster of the fifties and sixties.
The Hochschule für Gestaltung (HFG) in Ulm was another key institution in the development of the graphic design profession. Since its founding, the HFG distanced himself from a possible affiliation with advertising. At the beginning, the department concerned was called Visual Design, but it quickly became clear that his current goal was to solve design problems in the area of mass communication in the academic year 1956-1957 the name was changed to Department of Visual Communication, modeled Visual Communication Department at the New Bauhaus in Chicago.2 3 In the HFG Ulm, decided to work primarily in the area of persuasive communication in the fields such as traffic sign systems, plans for technical equipment, or visual translation of scientific content. Until that time were not systematically taught these areas in any other European school. In the early '70s, members of the Bund Deutscher Grafik-Designer (Association of German graphic designers), unveiled several features of their professional identity, as in the case of Anton Stankowski among others. While in 1962 the official definition of the profession was directed almost exclusively to the advertising, now extended to include areas located under the rubric of communication visual.4 corporate images produced by the Development Group 5 of the HFG Ulm such as those created for the firm Braun or airline Lufthansa were also critical to this new professional identity.
Gui Bonsiepe and Tomas Maldonado were two of the first people who tried to apply the design ideas from semantics. In a seminar held at the HFG Ulm in 1956, Maldonado proposed modernizing rhetoric, classical art of persuasion. Maldonado Bonsiepe and then wrote several articles on semiotics and rhetoric for Uppercase English publication and Ulm magazine that would be an important resource for designers to that area. Bonsiepe suggested that it was necessary to have a modern system of rhetoric, semiotics updated as a tool to describe and analyze the phenomena of advertising. Using this terminology, could expose the "ubiquitous structure" of a message publicitario.5
The idea of simplicity and good design feature continued this for many years, not only in the design of alphabets but also in other areas. The tendency to simplify influenced all means at the forefront of design in the 1950s. At that time, developed a consensus that simple, not only was the equivalent of good, but was also more readable equivalent. One of the hardest hit areas was the design of symbols. The designers raised the question of how they could be simplified without destroying its informative function. However, recent investigations have shown that the shape simplification only one symbol does not necessarily increase readability.
Second Vanguards
Reaction to the sobriety growing graphic design was slow but inexorable. The origins of postmodern fonts back to the humanist movement of the fifties. In this group highlights Hermann Zapf, who designed two typefaces today ubiquitous Palatino (1948) and Best (1952). Blurring the line between serif fonts and sans serif and reintroducing organic lines in the lyrics, these designs served more to ratify the modern movement to rebel against him.
An important milestone was the publication of the Manifesto, first things first (1964), which was a call for a more radical form of graphic design, criticizing the idea of design in series worthless. He had a massive influence on a new generation of graphic designers, contributing to the emergence of publications such as Emigre magazine.
Another notable designer of the late twentieth century is Milton Glaser, who designed the unmistakable I Love NY campaign (1973), and a famous Bob Dylan poster (1968). Glaser took elements of the popular culture of the sixties and seventies.
The advances of the early twentieth century were strongly inspired by technological advances in photography and printing. In the last decade of the century, technology played a similar role, but this time it was computers. At first it was a step back. Zuzana Licko began using computers to compositions soon, when computer memory was measured in kilobytes and typefaces were created by dots. She and her husband, Rudy VanderLans, founded the pioneering Emigre magazine and type foundry of the same name. They played with the extraordinary limitations of computers, releasing a great creative power. Emigre magazine became the bible of digital design.
David Carson is the culmination of the movement against contrition sobriety and modern design. Some of his designs for Raygun magazine are intentionally illegible, designed to be more visual than literary experiences.
Present Times
Today, much of the work of graphic designers is assisted by digital tools. The graphic design has changed enormously because of computers. From 1984, with the appearance of the first desktop publishing systems, personal computers gradually replaced all analog in nature technical procedures for digital systems. Thus computers have become indispensable tools and, with the advent of hypertext and the web, its functions have been extended as a means of communication. In addition, the technology also has been noted with the rise of telecommuting and special crowd sourcing has begun to intervene in work arrangements. This change has increased the need to reflect on time, motion and interactivity. Even so, the professional practice of design has not been essential changes. While the forms of production have changed and communication channels have been extended, the fundamental concepts that allow us to understand human communication remain the same.
Job performance and skills
The ability to design is not innate, but acquired through practice and reflection. Still, it remains an option, one thing potentially. To exploit this power is necessary continuing education and practice, as it is very difficult to acquire by intuition. Creativity, innovation and lateral thinking are key skills for graphic designer job performance. Creativity in design exists within established frames of reference, but more than anything, is a cultivated skill to find unexpected solutions to seemingly intractable problems. This translates into design work of the highest level and quality. The creative act is the core of the design process manager but creativity itself is not an act of design. However, creativity is not exclusive graphics performance and no profession, although it is absolutely necessary for the proper performance of the design work.
The role that the graphic designer in the process of communication is the encoder or interpreter works in the interpretation, organization and presentation of visual messages. His sensitivity to the form must be parallel to its sensitivity to the content. This work deals with the planning and structuring of communications, with its production and evaluation. The design work is always based on customer demand, demand which eventually established linguistically, either orally or in writing. This means that the graphic design transforms a linguistic message in a visual demonstration.
The professional graphic design rarely works with nonverbal messages. At times the word appears briefly, and in other texts appears as complex. The editor is in many cases an essential member of the communications team.
The design activity often requires the participation of a team of professionals, such as photographers, illustrators, technical illustrators, including professionals with less related to visual message. The designer is often a coordinator of various disciplines that contribute to the production of the visual message. Thus, coordinates its research, design and production, making use of information or specialists in accordance with the requirements of different projects.
Graphic design is interdisciplinary and therefore the designer needs to have knowledge of other activities such as photography, freehand drawing, technical drawing, descriptive geometry, psychology of perception, Gestalt psychology, semiology, typography, technology and communication.
The professional graphic design is a visual communications specialist and his work is related to all steps of the communication process, in which context, the action of creating a visual object is only one aspect of that process. This process includes the following:
Defining the problem.
Targeting.
Conception of communication strategy.
Display.
Schedule Production.
Monitoring Production.
Evaluation.
This process requires the designer to possess an intimate knowledge of the areas of:
Visual communication.
Communication.
Visual Perception.
Management of financial and human resources.
Technology.
Media.
Assessment techniques.
The four guiding principles of graphic design are variables that graphic design professional should consider when facing a project, these are:
The Individual: conceived as ethical and aesthetic unit that integrates society which is part and to whom the visual space is uniform, continuous and connected.
The advantage: because it responds to a need for information and this is communication.
The atmosphere: because it requires knowledge of physical reality to contribute to the harmony of the habitat, and the reality of other contexts for understanding the structure and meaning of the human environment.
The economy: it encompasses all aspects related to the study of the cost and streamlining of processes and materials for the implementation of the elements.
For graphic design services visit here.
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alindae-anne · 4 years ago
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What Makes a Book?
I want to take a break from my novel and dive into a history lesson of books themselves. Why? Well first of all, I will be honest, this blog is for an assignment. But also because the way books have evolved over the last 5,000+ years is fascinating!
Of course no one ever really thinks about THE book, just the fact that the story within its pages--the mystery, the romance, whatever they happen to be enjoying--is a great read (or maybe not so great), but have they ever wondered what materials the book is made from? Who invented it? How the book has become one of the most common and most used items of all time?
No. Of course they didn't wonder any of those things. And if they did, they probably didn't take the time to research any of these burning questions, either.
How great, then, that I wrote this post?! Today is your lucky day! (Also, it is a good thing that Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters, decided to write a whole book about it (1).) I'm going to use the pages of a classic tale to explain some cool things you probably never noticed while reading a book before.
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Gulliver’s Travels was originally published in London in 1726 by Benjamin Motte. The author, Jonathan Swift, used it to satirize London society and culture, poking holes at the social hierarchies and systems, basically making out everyone living in the 18th century to be fools--but mostly the wealthy and those who were obsessed with scientific progression (2). If you have not read it, I highly encourage adding it to your reading list, or at the very least there is a 2010 movie, featuring Jack Black as Gulliver, that you could watch. (It’s Jack Black, okay?)
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This 2 page spread of Gulliver's Travels pictured above is actually found in The Franklin Library edition from Franklin Center, Pennsylvania, published in 1979. This is the first printing of this edition, and its pages, the way it is printed, and the way it is bound and presented, are all features of the modern 20-21st century book, plus some extra bells and whistles. The most interesting qualities come from the publishers themselves who specifically design their books to be very snazzy--meant for collectors’ editions! They include different kinds of leather binding, exclusive illustrations, and may be signed or part of a particular series specific to a certain author or genre (3). This makes the books published here very valuable and sought after.
Gulliver’s Travels is hardcover. Specifically, “fine leather in boards.” This means the spine and front and back boards (or cover) of the book are bound in leather. The leather is fine and and delicate and able to be decorated and engraved upon.4 Above you can see how fancy it looks with the gilt gold engravements. Even its pages are gilt!
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This picture shows more clearly the binding, and of course the spine, which is “hubbed,” or ridged, for added texture.
At this point you may have notice that this version is much different than the original published in 1726. That is because over time, the materials involved in making books have changed slightly or the processes have become more efficient or cost worthy, etc. Either way, the anatomy of the book has not wavered. Keith Houston has dissected the book into certain components and we can see them in each book we read:
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I have attempted to label it as best as I can, so hopefully you can follow along:
Chapter Number
a) this seems to be a description, more or less of the chapter, or the Chapter Title. b) “A Voyage to Lilliput” seems much more title-like to me, although this is technically called the “Recto Running Head.” The recto running head is a condensed or abbreviated chapter title, repeating on every right-side page to the end of the chapter.
Drop Cap. This would be the first letter of the first word of a chapter, which is usually exaggerated or embellished in some way.
Opener Text
Head Margin - the space between the top of the page and text
Foot Margin - the space between the bottom of the page and text
Folio - page number
It has taken quite a while for books to become so sophisticated. Because it was published in 1726, Gulliver's Travels is technically what you could call "modern" in terms of how long ago books began their journey to what they are today, but even between 1726 and 1979 the quality has improved. This edition published by Franklin Library is a perfect model for the modern book of today.
The 2 page spread we analyzed above is made from paper. But books were not always made with paper, or even in the book form, bound with anything at all, and they were not printed either. They were written by hand on papyrus.
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Papyrus was the first material used as "paper" beginning in Egypt. The reeds were stripped, strung side by side and pressed together. Papyrus was durable and sturdy, and the water of the Nile was abundant in aluminum sulfate, which brightened it so that writing and scribbles could be seen better. There is no particular origin of when Papyrus had first been invented but it must have been around the end of the 4th millenium BCE (Houston 4).  
Parchment is made from animal skin that has been soaked, scrubbed, dried, and stretched for days and days, creating a more flexible, yet still durable, material for writing. It was also thinner and could be made "cleaner" and brighter by chemical means. Religion heavily influenced its distribution; some parchment use was literally banned because the type of animal skin used to make it wasn't considered "holy" or "good." For example, the lamb or a calf was acceptable, but how dare you use parchment made from goat skin? What is wrong with you?
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Besides the fact that parchment is kind of gross if you think about it (although to be fair, you can’t be too choosy in times right before the common era), it was also expensive to keep certain cattle only for paper making, and the reliability of having new cattle at the time you may need more paper was not very high.
Paper was first introduced in China. It is made from bits of cloth and rags soaked in water, and after breaking down into pulp, strained through a wire grate and pressed to dry. Fun fact-- the Rhar West Art Museum in Manitowoc, Wisconsin has held classes showing how to make paper using this exact process.
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There is a trend here: the materials used to make paper (and papyrus and parchment before it) become scarce or too expensive, or they are just not “good enough.” People want their paper thin and smooth, but still strong and durable; crisp and bright, but still able to last years and years without crumbling. There have been times that processes used to ensure these preferred qualities of paper included using chemicals that ended up negatively affecting some other quality. For example, the paper would be white as snow, yet the chemical that did this broke down the natural adhesives which kept the paper intact.
Have you heard that paper grows on trees? Well, that is partly true since after rags and cloths were nowhere to be found (unless people were about to start donating the shirts off their backs), wood pulp has now since been used... the higher the demand for paper, the greater demand for those materials used for its creation. 
This brings us to printing side of things. The first ways of printing weren’t of how we think of it now. Even before papyrus, people were still writing and making inscriptions on pretty much anything they could get their hands on. The earliest forms of writing were rather indentations or markings on clay tablets. Found across the Middle East, it is a cuneiform script of the Sumerian people from 3300 BCE (Houston 79).
Similarly, the Egyptians were also keen on developing their own writing system which today we recognize as hieroglyphs. A lot of these were found carved on the walls of tombs but also began to be used on papyrus in 2600 BCE (Houston 82-83).
The Egyptians celebrated their scribes and believed those who wrote with brush and ink on papyrus to be channeling power--that it was a gift from the gods--”wielded with respect and humility” (Houston 87). The hieroglyphs not only showed the intention of the writer, visually, but often the picture would be associated with or connected to certain sounds which emerged more formal use of letters as time went on.
The alphabet we use today can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet (used by the Egyptians) which had evolved into the Greek and then Roman alphabets (Houston 91-92). At this point in time, scribes were using water based ink which was fine for papyrus, but during the transition to parchment they realized that ink smudges quite a bit. This led to the creation of iron gall ink that would darken and adhere to the parchment as it dried due to its chemical makeup in contact with oxygen in the air.
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Jump ahead to 1400s and we are with Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press! One thing Keith Houston make sure to mention is that although Gutenberg invented the printing press itself, to help moveable type and mass printing, the idea of printing had not been new. Clay pieces used as stamps and similar objects had been excavated and dated back thousands of years before the clay inscribed cuneiform tablets were made. And a primitive version of a sort of printing press is mentioned being made by a man named Bi Sheng during the reign of Qingli from 1041-1048 AD (Houston 110). Obviously nothing great came from it, most likely because he was of unofficial position. Even so, movable type was still possible, although painstakingly slow with wooden blocks used as stamps. This was common for the next few hundred years in China.
Even though Gutenberg's press completely revolutionized the transmission of knowledge, it was still quite slow in comparison to the versions which came after, only being able to print 600 characters a day (Houston 118). From Gutenberg's printing press came other types of presses that improved the speed or efficiency of movable type immensely. These all came after the original publication of Guliver's Travels, starting in the early 1800s with the Columbian press, eventually the Linotype, and then lack of precision called for the Monotype, which could produce 140 wpm (Houston 149).
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The 2 page spread above then, could possibly have been printed by the Linotype, but most likely, however, the Monotype, which is the more accurate of the two. Another possibility could be "sophisticated photographic and 'lithographic' techniques" or "'phototypsetting'" (Houston 151). Houston mentions that the printing press age has died and now faces a digital future.
I'm at my 10 image limit which means I better wrap this up with some interesting facts about bookbinding. On BIBLIO.com I was trying to see exactly what "fine leather in boards" meant which is apparently how Gulliver's Travels is bound. I didn't find any phrase that matched, but from my understanding, the leather is very supple and pliable, which is why it was able to be gilt with gold, and it was able to form nicely to the hubbing on the spine.
The website also explains that the first "book binding" was technically just putting the pieces of paper or parchment together and pressing them between two boards. Literally. Like just setting them on a board and putting another board on top of that. Eventually leather was introduced, first as a cord wrapped around the book to keep the boards in place. As time progressed, the practice was improved and perfected so it was less crude. This involved the creation of the "spine" where the pages meet together and can therefore open and close in a v shape without flying away.
This website helped explain some of the other embellishments and extra flair that can be added to a book's binding. It mostly goes over leather binding which is from most animal skin but there is a unique leather bound book that can be bound with seal skin. Some of the books on the website are so expensive because of the materials they are bound with and the effects that have been created in the cover, for example, Benjamin Franklin's observations on electricity, which has had acid added to the page, discoloring it for a lightning strike effect, and includes a key to represent his famous experiment.
Gulliver's Travels, although not quite so fancy, is still a very beautifully bound book with decorated endpapers, meaning the inside cover is laden with designed paper rather than boring white or some other neutral color.
I hope you found this journey of the book as interesting and as exciting as I did while writing this post! You must really love books because even my attention span isn't this long. I will admit I took at least 3 different breaks.
I'm back to my novel for now, thanks for listening😎
Bibliography
Houston, Keith--Author of Shady Characters, which I used extensively in my TikTok “history of punctuation” project--also wrote -> The BOOK - a cover-to-cover exploration of the most powerful object of our time, 2016.
British Library Website -> works -> “Gulliver’s Travels overview”
Masters, Kristin. “Franklin Library Editions: Ideal for Book Collectors?” Books Tell You Why, 2017 (blog).
BIBLIO.com -> “Leather Binding Terminology and Techniques”
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idratherbefishingg · 4 years ago
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Relief Printing
The earliest examples of relief type print in the form of woodblocks comes from 200 AD China. Woodblock printing, named xylography today, was the very first printing method that was applied to paper (SNAP). Back in the 2nd century BCE, it was believed that the Chinese accidentally created a more primitive type of paper after leaving their clothing in water for too long. Their clothing was made from hemp meaning that when left in water for too long, a residue would be left in the water. This residue could be pressed into paper which would go on to be a very useful material. More refined paper was then created later in 105 CE, this paper was created by soaking and pressing plant fibres, which then were dried in sheets on wooden frames or screens (Ancient History Encyclopedia). Carving into wood surfaces gave Chinese scholars the means to replicate important texts such as Buddhist scriptures by printing onto paper.
Although the Chinese developed these types of prints relatively early on, woodblock printing didn’t catch on in Japan until roughly 1800 years later! Woodblock printing became popular in Japan during the Edo period, which lasted from 1603 through to 1868. Its initial use was for reproducing traditional handscrolls into book form so it could be more widely distributed (Metmuseum.org). However over time it was then used for mass producing prints for multiple purposes. Prints of the Edo period focused on depicting seductive courtesans and Kabuki actors of the urban pleasure district. Of course, in time the subject matter of prints would change, ranging from famous romantic vistas to dramatic historical events (My Modern Met). The scenes depicted in these prints were quite popular amongst the wealthier people of that period. Although the woodblock printing method goes on to be replaced by methods such as the moveable type, it remained the most popular to Japanese artists that work in the ukiyo-e genre.
By the 11th century, moveable type was invented. The moveable type meant that separate text characters could be put together across several pages instead of painstakingly creating a woodblock for each individual page. Bi Sheng was the first to develop the moveable type system, around 1040 AD, using a ceramic type material. The way he would do it was to use a relief type of cut to create the Chinese characters onto porcelain clay, then they would go into the kiln to be fired (Wikipedia). These individual characters could be mixed around to create certain messages that would then be inked up and printed onto paper/silk. Bi Sheng also went on to experiment this method by using wood instead of clay. For himself this material was not up to standard, as the grain of wood and the absorbing of the ink often led the markings to be smudged and uneven. However, this wasn’t the case for everyone as the wood version was responded to quite well by others, most likely because wood is easier to carve than baked clay. This version of printmaking became very popular once Chinese printers started using a bronze material instead, this print type was used mainly for money and official documents (Colour Print).
 Colour Print. (2018). Moveable Type: A Print Revolution. [online] Colour print. [Viewed 31 January 2021]. Available at: https://www.col-print.co.uk/blog/moveable-type-a-print-revolution
 Wikipedia Contributors (2019). Movable type. [online] Wikipedia. [Viewed 31 January 2021]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type.
Metmuseum.org. (2021). Woodblock Prints in the Ukiyo-e Style. [online] Metmuseum.org. [Viewed 31 January 2021]. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ukiy/hd_ukiy.htm?fbclid=IwAR1fGlaDFj6FihzLYJl2BJ4WQ_z70eMXmZBdh-fhgy6UsdZPhJu0Evg5QUg
 Ancient History Encyclopedia. (2017). Paper in Ancient China. [online] Ancient History Encyclopedia. [Viewed 31 January 2021]. Available at: https://www.ancient.eu/article/1120/paper-in-ancient-china/#:~:text=The%20Invention%20of%20Paper&text=The%20traditional%20date%20for%20the.
‌ My Modern Met. (2019). The Unique History and Exquisite Aesthetic of Japan’s Ethereal Woodblock Prints. [online] My Modern Met. [Viewed 31 January 2021]. Available at: https://mymodernmet.com/ukiyo-e-japanese-woodblock-prints/?fbclid=IwAR10k8OAvwI9O93pp3OQuSTnBV6Ct_2WlQWUmfzSUM0ogyQoE1L_suwhZF8 [Accessed 31 Jan. 2021].
 SNAP. (N/A). The History of Printmaking from Wood Blocks to the Digital Age. [online] SNAP. [Viewed 31 January 2021]. Available at: https://snapartists.com/snapline-article/the-history-of-printmaking-from-wood-blocks-to-the-digital-age/ [Accessed 31 Jan. 2021].
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amzadit · 5 years ago
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The best example of legend short story english - The example of legend short story english (on Wattpad) https://my.w.tt/1vIovtOPF8 Gutenberg is often called the invention of printing .What he actually did was to develop the first method of utilizing movable type and the printing press in such a way that a large variety of written material could be printed with speed and a curacy .No invention spring full blown from the mind of a single man and certainly printing did not .Seals and signet rings,which work on the same printing as block printing had been used since ancient times .Block printing had been known in China many centuries before Gutenberg,and, in fact a printed book dating from about 868 has been discovered there .The process was also known in the west before Gutenberg.Block printing makes possible the production of many copies of a given book.However the process has one major drawback :since a completely new set of woodcuts or plates must be made for producing a large verity of book it is sometimes said that Gutenbergs main contribution was the invention of movable type.However,movable type was invented in China,some time in the middle of the eleventh century,by a man named pishing.His orginal type was made of carthenward which is not very durable, however,other Chinese and Koreans made a series of improvements
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lvrdfiji · 6 years ago
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Top 10 greatest inventions That Changed the World
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Human beings are a nifty little species. Though we have been on earth for a comparatively short period of time (Earth is normally 4. five billion years old), contemporary Homo sapiens possess imagined up and created some amazing, far-out sometimes, things. From the brief moment somebody bashed a rock on the ground to make the first sharp-edged tool, to the very first of the wheel to the development of Roter planet (umgangssprachlich) rovers and the Internet, several key advancements stick out as revolutionary particularly. Here are our top picks for the most crucial inventions of all right time, along with the science at the rear of the invention and how they will come into being.
1- wheel
Prior to the invention of the wheel in 3500 M. C., humans were limited in just how much stuff we’re able to transport over land severely, and how much. Evidently, the wheel itself wasn’t the most challenging component of “inventing the steering wheel. ” In order to come period for connecting a non-moving system compared to that rolling cylinder, issues got difficult, relating to David Anthony, a teacher of anthropology at Hartwick College. “The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle idea, ” Anthony told Live Technology previously. “But then which makes it was also hard. ” For example, the holes at the guts from the tires as well as the ends of the set axle assemblies had to be almost perfectly circular and soft, he stated. How big is the axle was a crucial factor also, as was it is snugness inside the hole (of course not too small, however, not as well lose, either). The hard work paid, big time period. Wheeled carts facilitated commerce and agriculture by enabling the transportation of goods to and from marketplaces, and also easing the burdens of people touring great distances. Right now, wheels are essential to the lifestyle, present in from lighting to automobiles to generators.
2- The nail
Without nails, civilization would crumble. This important invention goes back a lot more than 2, 000 years to the Ancient Roman period, and became feasible just after human beings developed the capability to cast and form metal. Previously, hardwood structures needed to be built by interlocking adjacent boards a more arduous construction process geometrically. Before the 1790s and early 1800s, hand-wrought nails were typical, with a blacksmith heating a square iron rod and hammering it on four sides to make a point then, according to the College or the University of Vermont. Nail-making machines came between the 1790s and the early 1800s online. Technology for designing nails continued to progress; After Holly Bessemer created an activity to mass-produce metal from iron, the iron fingernails of yesteryear waned and by 1886, ten percent of U. S. fingernails were produced from soft steel wire, regarding the School of Vermont. By 1913, 90 percent of nails stated in the U. S. was a metal wire. In the meantime, the mess a more powerful but harder to- insert securer is considered to have been invented simply by the Greek college student Archimedes in the 3rd century B. C.
3- The compass
Old mariners navigated by the stars, but that technique did not work throughout the day or on cloudy evenings, therefore it had been unsafe to voyage far from land. The Chinese invented the first compass sometime between your 11th and 9th century; it was made of lodestone, a naturally-magnetized iron ore, the appealing properties which they had been learning for years and years. (Pictured is a style of a historical Chinese compass from the Ryan Dynasty; it really is a south-indicating ladle, or Sinan, manufactured from polished lodestone. ) Soon, the technology passed to Arabs and Europeans through nautical contact. The compass enabled mariners to navigate definitely not land safely, raising ocean trade and adding to age Development.
Also, learn Why Inventors Switch to Professionals Like Invent Help
4- The printing press
The German Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440. Key to its advancement was the tactile hand’s mold, a fresh molding technique that allowed the quick creation of large levels of metallic movable type. Although others before him - including inventors in Cina and Korea - acquired developed portable type made from steel, Gutenberg was the first ever to create a mechanical procedure that transferred the ink (which he created from linseed essential oil and soot) from the removable type to paper. With this movable type process, printing presses increased the acceleration with which book copies could possibly be made exponentially, and thus they led to the widespread and rapid dissemination of knowledge for the very first time in history. Twenty million volumes have been printed in Western European countries by truck. Among other activities, the printing press allowed wider usage of the Somebody, which resulted in alternative interpretations, including those of Martin Luther, whose “95 Theses” a document imprinted by the hundred-thousand sparked the Protestant Reformation
5- The inner combustion engine
In these motors, the burning of gas releases a high-temperature gas, which, since it expands, applies a potent force to a piston, moving it all. Thus, combustion engines convert chemical substance energy into mechanized work. Years of architectural by many scientists proceeded to go into designing the inner combustion engine, which required its (essentially) modern type in these half from the 19th hundred years. The engine ushered in the Commercial Age group, as well as allowing the invention of an enormous variety of machines, including modern aircraft and cars. Pictured will be the operating steps of a four-stroke inner burning engine. The strokes are the following: 1) Intake stroke - air flow and vaporized gas are used. 2) Compression stroke - energy vapor and air flow are compressed and ignited. 3) Power heart stroke - gasoline combusts and the piston is pushed down, powering the device. 4) Exhaust system stroke – exhaust is certainly driven out.
6- The phone
Though several inventors do pioneering work on the electronic tone of voice transmission ( many of who later submitted intellectual real estate lawsuits when telephone make use of exploded), Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded an obvious for the electric phone in 1876. His patent drawing above is pictured. Even though many creators did pioneering focus on digital voice transmission ( a lot of whom later on filed rational property legal cases when telephone use exploded), Alexander Graham Bell was the first ever to end up being awarded a patent pertaining to the electrical telephone in 1876. ( His patent drawing is usually above. ) He drew his motivation from teaching the deaf and appointments to his hearing-impaired mother also, according to PBS. He called the initial phone an “ electric speech machine, ” relating to PBS. The invention took off and revolutionized global communication and business. When Bell passed away upon Aug. two, 1922, regarding PBS, U. H. telephone assistance stopped for a full minute to honor him.
7- The lamp
When all you need is daylight, productivity is bound to hours of sunlight. Lights changed the global world by allowing us to be active at night. According to historians, two dozen individuals were a key component in inventing incandescent lights through the entire 1800s; Thomas Edison is definitely acknowledged as the principal inventor as they produced a totally functional light system, including wiring and generator in addition to the carbon-filament bulb like the one above, in 1879. And also starting the introduction of electrical power in homes throughout the burkha, this invention also had a fairly unexpected consequence of fixing people’s rest patterns. Rather than going to sleep in nightfall (having nothing at all otherwise to accomplish ) and sleeping in sections through the entire night separated by intervals of wakefulness, we have now stay up except for the 7 to 8 hours allotted meant for sleep, and, ideally, we rest all of them at once.
Also, learn The vibrant business of invention ideas
8- Penicillin
Is actually probably the most famous discovery tales ever sold. In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming observed a bacteria- packed Petri dish in his lab with its cover accidentally ajar. The test experienced become contaminated with a mold, and the mold was almost everywhere, the bacterias were lifeless. That antiseptic mold ended up being the infection Penicillium, and over another 2 decades, chemists purified it and created the drug Penicillin, which fights a wide array of microbial attacks in humans without harming the human beings themselves. Penicillin was being produced and advertised by 1944 mass. This poster mounted on a curbside mailbox advised World Battle II servicemen to consider the medication to rid themselves of venereal disease. About 1 in 10 folks have an allergic attack towards the antibiotic, according to the study published in 2003 in the journal Clinical Critiques in Immunology and Allergy; even so, most of those social people go on to be able to tolerate the drug, experts said.
9- Contraceptives
Not really only have birth control pills, condoms and other forms of contraceptive sparked a sexual trend in the developed globe by enabling women and men to have sexual intercourse designed for leisure instead of procreation, they will also have significantly reduced the common quantity of offspring per woman in countries exactly where they are utilized. With fewer mouths to feed, modern families have achieved higher standards of living and can offer better for every young child. On the other hand, around the global level, contraceptives are helping the human population level off gradually; our amount will stabilize by the finish of the century probably. Certain preventive medicines, such as for example condoms, curb the pass on of sexually transmitted illnesses also. Herbal and organic contraception offers been used for millennia. Condoms arrived to use in the eighteenth century, as the earliest oral contraceptive “the tablet ” was developed in the past due 1930s by a chemist called Russell Marker. Researchers are ongoing to create developments in the contraceptive, with some labs even pursuing a male form of “the pill. ” A permanent birth-control implant called Essure was approved by the Drug and Food Administration in 2002, though in 2016, the implant was warned by the FDA would need more powerful warnings to tell users about serious risks of using Essure.
10- The internet
It certainly desires no introduction: The global program of connected with each other computer systems referred to as the web is used simply by billions of individuals worldwide. Countless people helped develop this, however, the person most credited using its invention is the computer scientist Lawrence Roberts often. In the 1960s, a united team of pc scientists doing work for the U. Ersus. Protection Department’s ARPA (Advanced STUDIES Agency) built a communications network to connect the computer systems in the company, called ARPANET. It used a way of data tranny known as “packet switching” which usually Roberts, a known member of the team, developed predicated on the prior function of additional computer researchers. ARPANET was your predecessor of the web.
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thewreckkelly · 5 years ago
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Requiem for the Age of Hooper - Revisiting Brideshead (30 Oct 20)
I know I hardly noticed the disappearance of the cassette tape from the shelves of record shops whose picturesque vinyl too suddenly dissolved into shiny plastic CD filled racks before such palaces of sound terminated back to being properties to let, (the eight track tape passed me by completely).
The house phone, at first seemed to have no apparent competition from the brick phone until it rapidly morphed into a ‘flip-fone’ before finally arriving in no time at all to being defined as a ‘smart phone’ designed to run all aspect of our lives which naturally resulted in resigning the afore-forgotten house phone into something best described as bulky, quaint and redundant.
Progress in such instances is something to be cherished more often than not and what was common once will most likely end up residing in memory with the exaggerated fondness of nostalgia.
For further example ……
When goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg introduced the civilized world to the benefits of mechanical movable type five hundred and fifty years or so ago, he surely would have been happy to know that the book printing process he had initiated would have a profitable run of product production for more than half a millennia.
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and all the tragic comics of the 1920’s knocking out 15 minute shorts, would have roared with laughter at being told audiences of the 2020’s would require and desire stories to be told in high definition moving pictures - playing up to thirty or forty hours - and would result in a phenomena called ‘Binge Watching’.
Even the brooding existentialist scribblers of the mid-twentieth century in all their cynicism could not possibly have foreseen that within fifty years of their ‘finality’, the grown up best seller lists would be dominated by fifty shades of female masturbation ‘literature’ and ‘magical’ children’s stories.
Two hundred and forty virtual characters of type are potentially all you now need to become world famous while courage of conviction and abuse is conveniently hidden behind an anonymous coat of virtual armour. 
Photographs of cats caught unawares are an unlikely route to riches and the ability to debate and argue is too often substantiated from a cleverly worded populist headline without the need for depth of content.
I recently binge watched the ITV series from 1981; ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and was reminded of a philosophical argument drawn from one of its characters. 
The story concerns the death of empire and substantive classical belief systems, as seen through the experiences of its narrator; Charles Ryder – an effete Oxford graduate who returns to the setting of the ‘halcyon days’ of his youth which happens to be an aristocratic rambling estate called ‘Brideshead’ - that has recently been sequestered and diminished by the military for WWII exercises.
The narrative is a savage comment on a society that was and a society Ryder predicts will replaced it. The character that reflects the new world of thought and belief is named Hooper – who is seen by elitists as everything wrong in the world through his refusal to respect and take an aesthetic and belligerent history seriously.
The Age of Hooper – as it is referred to - may prove to be as insidious as Ryder predicted yet the past was never so forgiving to so many as it is now. 
Evelyn Waugh, (the author of the book from which the TV series is adapted) is chilled by the terror of what Hooper represents and argues through the voice of Ryder that; ‘Hooper is not a romantic’ but is bound by the terrible reality that; ‘The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change’.
Yes it’s more than a touch pompous and yes it has proven over time to be way off the mark - if social progress, artistic freedom and egalitarian existence are accepted as being good things. 
However the substance of education - that a not so old English writer argues for - is somewhat valid in an era where we should be open to learning that the past is an invisible monolith which should not and, in reality cannot, be actually revisited. 
Practically, perhaps, the past should be treated as a worthy teacher to highlight how to avoid simple and great mistakes along with being a reasonable authority to promote the maintenance of proven healthy practices and an established concept of beauty. 
Maybe we should consider this new era as being ‘The Age of Thunberg’
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danfutura · 5 years ago
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A Brief History of Design
AKA: Today I Learned Episode 9
In past lectures Andy has been giving us brief history lessons on design movements and the evolution of design. I have collected notes from these lessons and feel that it is time to collate them all together in a structured list. 
Disclaimer: This list is no where near complete and just a collection of things I have personally learned from my communication design studies classes. This list may be added to in the future. 
-  Early writing forms: Cuneiform, Hieroglyphs and other early writing forms are found from all other the world. They all seem to have early or basic ideas of letters/ shape that have a meaning. They are also written in a multitude of different way from left to right, right to left or even in a circular or spiral pattern. 
- 1st Century BCE: Books had start to become luxury items, are only available to a select few (rich/educated) as they are labour intensive to make and had to be written by hand. 
- 888:  The Diamond Sutra is the first dated example of block printing, using blocks to stamp letters onto a page. 
- 1041: In China Bi Sheng invents the first movable type to customise pages, sentences, printing large bodies of text onto a page at once.
-  1440: Johannes Gutenberg completes his wooden printing press which used movable metal type. This causes black letter to become popular due to it being the standard letter form to be used in mass produced books.
- 1517 - 1692: Geometric specifications and proportions are added to Latin capital letters to create a font. Letters also start to be placed into a grid with specific coordinates. A shift is seen where printed writing starts to replace handwriting in books. San-serif fonts also start to gain prominence. 
- 1814: A steam powered printing press is used to print the Times.
- 1909: Futurism, an artistic and social movement starts to spread throughout Europe. Futurists tried to create works that emphasised newness ( speed, technology, youth, violence) and tried to abolish tradition or ‘old fashioned’ ways of life. 
- 1919: The Bauhaus, a school of design is founded in Germany by Walter Gropius. This school was very influential in its design teachings and their ideas of simplicity and practicality are still prominent today.
- 1928: Jan Tschichold writes the ‘New Typography’ a manual for graphic designers that presents modernist ideals about font (size, font, colour, use of empty space and composition).
- 1972: The end of modernism. Modernist buildings by Minoru Yamasaki at Pruitt Igoe are demolished for failing to cater to the needs of its occupants. This causes for the rise of Post-Modern movements such as the Punk movement that emphasises rebellious activity, chaos and the breakdown of structure. 
- 1980: Memphis design group is founded. Memphis is almost the opposite of the Bauhaus and parodies traditional furniture design. Described as ‘Ikea on LSD’ by Andy. 
- 1981: Joseph Muller Brockmann creates the book ‘Grid Systems’ that proposes the use of grids to aid type composition on a page. 
Now-ish: The invention of the Desktop computer allows design practice that would normally be outsourced to different professionals to be completed in a singular place by one person. Designers now could compose text and images directly on a page. 
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 
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