TBOTNS as political document and the wait for new sun

Josh Geller · 10 Jul 2003, 16:15 · from urth-v0307.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) TBOTNS as political document and the wait for new sun
Date: 10 Jul 2003 09:15:56 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3639 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0307/3639.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 08:41, matthew.malthouse at guardian.co.uk wrote:
> On 10/07/2003 16:55:41 Josh Geller wrote:

>>In a society that does not have mechanical printing, where would be
>>the most likely place to find a scriptorium?

Actually, I misspoke slightly. I think that they do have mechanical
printing, but not much need for it because the society is mostly=20
illiterate.

> Plausible.
=20
> But no clue that the Commonwealth _is_ a society without mechanical=20
> printing.  Ultan and Cyby are Curators not Scrivenors.

Exactly. But I think what I say still applies. There don't seem to me
too many books around, and no newspapers. There is also no mention of
a Printer's Guild (btw, secular guilds in the middle ages did have
ceremonies analogous to the St. Katherine's Day feast). I think that=20
if there are any printing presses around, the librarians control all
or most of them, and in the same way that the use of the roads is=20
forbidden to the general populace, the use of printing is forbidden to
people not associated with the government, as the Library certainly is.

Perhaps upon receiving the book, Master Ultan had enough copies made to
stock the branches of the library.

=2E
=20

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net