- “It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,”
- “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets. This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it – a world that is largely lost to us,”
This awakens the history nerd buried deep under my science-nerd preoccupations. HOW COOL would that be to get this view of quotidian print consumption hundreds of years ago!?
This makes me think of Umberto Eco's real life, and as a fiction writer. In real life he was a Professor of Semiotics, or the study of ancient writing and ciphering systems. In fiction, he often wrote of libraries - The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum are the most popular - and their mysterious and illustrious contents. Even his book Baudolino drew from this same well; the title character is an ancient Forest Gump, who happens to travel through a series of amazing parts of history. The punchline is that all the 'historical events' he witnesses are the made-up shit that wanna-be Marco Polos published... rivers of rocks... humans with their faces in their bellies, or who just had a single large foot and moved like kangaroos... So the Prof of Semiotics has access to these massive libraries of ancient books... and then writes a fiction book stitching together the most fantastical bits of the ancient stories he has read, into a modern novel. Amazing. I love him.
This is legitimately awesome. It'll be so cool to browse through when the contents get shared online.This awakens the history nerd buried deep under my science-nerd preoccupations. HOW COOL would that be to get this view of quotidian print consumption hundreds of years ago!?