My best friend H. knows about my lapsed fondness of calligraphy not-so-lapsed passion for history and books. I think some of it might've rubbed off on her, so up we went at her invitation to see the MN Science Museum's Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, followed closely by the 1602 map of the world created as conceived by a Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci.
The scrolls exhibit dumped out into one for which I wasn't forewarned, the St. John's Bible, which is a fully hand-written, hand-illustrated and hand-gilded copy of the Bible. It, like its prececessors, is constructed for the ages, using the same materials as those behind glass and is every whit as painstaking in craftsmanship. Seriously, I'm embarassed to own nibs and ink after that.
Fast-forward about a half-hour on Saturday to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the examples of Western printing's first century on display beside Ricci's formidible (if sometimes incredibly fanciful) work. Clearly, the cost of producing the written word--religious and secular--had plummeted. Yet I had to smile at the insistence on color. Perhaps the scholar or the marginally prosperous could be content with black and white line illustrations, but anyone who could afford it would not part with the pigments that brought the illuminated manuscripts to life.
But the quality wasn't exactly even. Most examples were easily the equal of their ancestry. The paintwork on the geographical (I think) treatise was downright shoddy--not even staying close to inside the lines in some cases. Brushes are contrary and intractable things in my hand, but even I could have done a better job. I imagine that the book was mass-printed and mass-colored for a mass-market, with no thought for anything but supplying the demand of the moment. That it was preserved for four centuries and change was merely accident.
The realities of our digital age are a mixed bag by comparison. Servers and gadgets are comparatively inexpensive, which effectively whittles down the chances of preservation. Yet the cost of replication and transmission are dropping every day, which ups the liklihood that a copy of something will exist. I can't guess as to whether these two factors is stronger. But the idea that my work--code and/or writing--could someday be passed around in archaelogical or other scholarly circles is sobering. When it doesn't make my toes curl. Granted, it probably wouldn't be the worst thing to work as if future centuries were looking over your shoulders. But I certainly can't call it a comfortable thought.
