/lit/ - Literature

>>15550732
https://archived.moe/lit/thread/14900572/
Here's the thread. It's discussing mostly fine press bindings Since you have a private library and lots of money you would probably be interested in that kind of thing. The material aesthetics of the book as an art form and so on.

I don't think it was discussed in that thread, but I could talk all day about the the role of material form for displaying text. Since the creation of the internet, printing has become somewhat superfluous as an industry, and is well in the process of shutting down entirely. Publishing in particular has never been profitable, but it has generally tried to make ends meet by sacrificing quality in order to enable mass production. This has lead to most books being done in perfect bind, which is cheap and easy to reproduce in a print shop (takes a couple of hours to spit out hundreds of copies) but is much more fragile than a book bound with folios. Of course this is just one example of a long trend starting with Gutenberg, in which the book stopped being a singular work of craftsmanship (in fact many of the fonts we use to day were developed in monasteries that developed their own calligraphic style for copying texts) and started being seen as mass produced products focused more on conveying text than the experience of the book itself. Here we see a decline in elaborate illustrations, visual puns, use of high quality material, standardized calligraphic styles in monasteries, etc. etc. alongside an overall increase in literacy. Now we're at a point where any body of text can be infinitely reproduced almost at no cost, so the ethos of mass publishing (which is to disseminate books not as physical objects but as a textual ideal bound in paper) has suddenly found itself fulfilled beyond it's wildest dreams. From here there's no further way for this tendency towards mass reproduction to express itself, so literature is now forced to grapple with new expressions of form and the impact of technology on information dissemination.

Some further reading on the subject are
The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print by Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday
The Art of the Publisher by Roberto Calasso
The Art Forger's Handbook by Eric Hebborn
A Geology of Media by Jussia Parikka