Book Nostalgia Trip: How a Book Used to Be Made

By Tom

Oh my goodness. For a word fetishist like me, this 1947 video from Encyclopedia Britannica is enough to bring tears of ... I'm not sure what: nostalgia? Not really--it was a pain in the neck to make a book this way. Maybe just wonder, at all the obsolete ingenuity of it, and at how physical the process was: lead, wax, copper, wood, and all those intricate machines and burly hands. And for some reason I find it equally affecting that all that labor and attention would go into printing ephemeral crap, just as it did for more immortal 1947 releases like Under the Volcano or The Diary of a Young Girl. (From Book Patrol, via Maud)

--Tom