novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- tangible document on a flickering computer screen "Littera scripta manet: let us give the adage in its entirety -- Vox audita perit, littera scripta manet, 'The spoken word passes away, the written word remains.' It is appropriate that the tag seems to have appeared first in one of the earliest printed books, Caxton's Mirrour of the World (1481). It is surely inconceivable that the impresarios of the future will succeed entirely in persuading the creators, the makers, to consign their inspiration to the ether, to be bounced about between the earth and the Heaviside Layer until the waves peter out in inaudible murmurs. Authors are not like children, content to see their beautiful pebbles flung into the pool of eternity. The student and the scholar, at any rate in many fields of human learning, will also want a measure of continuity. They will want shoulders to stand on as they peer at the past and future, and will not want to revert to the age when memory counted for everything. Equally the endless varieties of individual research and enjoyment could never be adequately reflected in the choices broadcast by Public Authority or Private Enterprise, however enlightened. Perhaps some day it may be possible to devise ways of recapturing the flying words and images of the past. Until that happens there will be no substitute for print and the book will remain the only way by which one age can speak to another. This essay is entitled 'Let there be light'. This may seem a paradoxical way of describing printer's ink and the art of putting it on paper which was discovered by Gutenberg five hundred years ago: it is the dark letters we look at, not the white paper. But it may be justified. The printed page illuminates the mind of man and defies, in so far as anything sublunary can, the corrosive hand of Time. " -from Printing and the Mind of Man edited by John Carter and Percy H. Muir 3:25 pm - 08.30.04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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