CS100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Cultural Determinism, Scriptorium
16 Nov 2020
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Document Summary
Chinese block printing: prior to the printing press the majority of writing was done in what was called a. Involved an author, a scribe (physically copying a book by hand), and an artist. In this age, books were an internal entity, without guidance to provenance. There was no table of contents or descriptions of the book. You didn"t know what you were reading until you started reading it. You had to be well educated to have access to a book: standard inexpensive paper existed first in china, then europe. Chinese script had many more letters than our alphabet: incunabula - books printed in europe in the 1500s. Only printed between 200-1000 copies of a book: books as commodities gave rise to the reading public; politics and popular culture. Publishing industry, books as audiences, mass literacy: printing press first developed in china, across cultures, product and reformation (languages in printing)
