2 results for (book:ur2 AND session:739 AND stemmed:sit)
Grunaargh
Gutenberg
movable
beefy
Sue
“It seems so hilariously logical that the Sumari, who are creators, would want to ‘merge’ with a family more prone to organization,4 to come up with what they would need to spread ideas: movable type. Otherwise, how would they ever get up the gumption to sit around and carve out all those damn little characters? Too exasperating!
“I see myself, then, as one of the people involved in the thinking up and making of the typefaces. I see a large, sort of beefy man with a red face, sitting at a piece of furniture like a drafting table, carefully cutting out these characters. He had fingers like sausages; people in town were always amused that he was so big and worked with such small pieces. He made them out of wood, I think, and they served as molds or models that ended up cast in metal. He rubbed a substance on the wood grain to protect it. But using these models gave the alphabets some kind of standardization.5
“My heavyset friend was filled with the thrill of knowing that now words would spread faster. This is hard to specify, but he had the same feeling I have now about newspapers — the daily spreading out of ideas, and the kind of tremendous power behind that ability … I can see that corner of his shop/work area clearly in a half-light, illuminated by a candle in an enclosed mesh lantern sitting on a tabletop. This man had several apprentices, and he was a real artisan, putting ideas across in the form of movable type. I know that Gutenberg is credited with this invention, and probably rightly so; but I also feel this as one of those discoveries that appeared in several places at once, and that my beefy fellow’s shop was in the general vicinity of Gutenberg’s — in Germany? I can’t recall. This idea was ‘shared’ in many places at once, then.6