/lit/ - Literature

>>14857815
>brothers 'ironically' watching dumb videos manage to justify their wasteful pastime by a veneer of moral superiority
Like clockwork. Such religious hubris is unbecoming.

If you'd like to understand the West, https://youtu.be/hqtPeMUMX4g is a good explanation of the religious schism underpinning Western thought. I'd also recommend Oswald Spengler.

https://aboutislam.net/family-life/culture/voltaire-rousseau-napoleon-prophet-muhammad/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rousseau-islam-james-campbell

Islam and the West is entirely compatible, as Islam is a clear guide for all peoples from all cultures so long as Islam takes precedence over ethnic traditions. I hear many brothers criticize the west based on things like pornography and drug use, which is fair criticism, however there is also a beauty in the faustian mindset which should be obvious to anyone who's ever traveled around Europe or the Americas.

Books before offset printing were a completely different medium to the trash we have today. They would have used a letterpress, which involved painstakingly arranging the type of each page. The books would be printed in folios, which where then hand stitched together. Given the labor intensive nature of this, throwing in a couple lithographic illustrations or a wood-cut was relatively cost efficient. A book was already labor intensive, so it was not seen as such a pig deal to commission an elaborate set of artwork. What's more, printed books were following the tradition of illustrated manuscripts, which were an even higher standard of quality and craftsmanship. Since the invention of the printing press, literature has clearly trended in the direction of quantity over quality, without aberrations.

The switch to digital has made images in books low quality and pixelated. As well, books are made much more as disposable objects now, using cheap glue in place of folios and printing in runs of tens of thousands at a time. Sure you can run an image through the same printer you're using for text, but it's going to look grainy and low quality. If you commission a wood-cut or lithograph then you've also got to pay the guy running pages through it for days on end, as well as the guy taking those pages and inserting them at the right point in the manuscript. All of this adds expenses for a product that's made to fall apart after five years anyways.

Not that it matters anyways because the frame of reference for what constitutes a book has moved away from elaborately hand-illustrated manuscripts painstakingly written on vellum and hand bound with the intention of resting in an aristocratic household for generation, and now people judge books as a kind of inferior physical placeholder for wikipedia articles, or a catalog of products to be handed out in the thousands. It's a completely different medium from what it was even a hundred years ago.

t. work in a print shop and trained in traditional bookbinding.

>>13641076
Roberto Calasso argued (Art of the Publisher) that the greatest disaster of Anglo-American publishing was placing cover design in the hands of 'Graphic Designers and similar 'Experts'. Mendelsund is great because, although he's clearly within the anglo-american tradition (at the center of it, from the looks of his Instagram) he's also clearly person who reads and thinks deeply, with a good aesthetic sensibility.

It's an interesting, and oft ignored, subject-- book design. Not many people even think about it, despite being an art almost entirely directed towards thoughtful people. Recently I've been looking at folios from the Blue Qur'an, I think that no book before or after has ever come close to the aesthetic perfection accomplished in that edition.