
A rough guide to making a medieval manuscript - Tomte
http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2017/09/a-rough-guide-to-making-a-medieval-manuscript.html
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ziotom78
This article reminds me of a book I read many years ago, "The Mozart
forgeries", by Daniel Leeson [1]. It tells the story of two forgers which
create the autographs of two Mozart's most beloved works for clarinet, the
Clarinet Quintet K581 and the Clarinet Concerto K621 (the originals have long
been gone), planning to sell them to some museum for a huge amount of money.
In order to do this, they acquire the documentation needed to learn how music
was written in the XVIII century was written. They start from the production
of paper sheets, the engraving of a watermark, the creation of a quill from
bird feathers, the production of ink and so on. I really enjoyed the book and
suggest it to anybody which appreciated this article. (Or Mozart. Or both,
like me.)

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4368020-the-mozart-
forge...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4368020-the-mozart-forgeries)

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herodotus
So much craft is lost! In the Spielberg movie "The Post" there are some
wonderful scenes of type setting using boards and lead. I also enjoyed the
scene where the printed, folded newspapers ran on a huge conveyer belt until
they were taken and collected for delivery. When I graduated from high-school,
we got the final results from the morning newspaper. Hundreds of us and our
parents got up before dawn, drove downtown, and waited until the huge doors of
the paper delivery dock opened. Kids whose job was to sell papers on the
street ran out and made a bonanza day selling the first edition to us. What
followed were the cheers and tears you would expect. The day is etched
permanently in my memory. No comparison with an email congratulating me and
enclosing my transcript.

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watermans
Craft will always be lost.

You could argue that the art of cave painting or tablet engraving was lost to
make way for manuscripts written on papyrus and that was lost to make way for
the printing press and so on.

Losing craft for efficiency will happen as civilizations advance, but one
thing to keep in mind is the amount of craft that went into sending an email.
It can be at the level of writing an email server with a high uptime and a
client that reads them reliably. It can go down to bits and byte. And that
doesn’t account for the crafting of the hardware that those software run on or
the effort that went into the infrastructure to carry those signals.

The trend is that each individual that has an idea to share has to put less
effort into sharing their own idea, but that doesn’t mean that what we built
no longer requires craft. The tragedy is that we don’t see and appreciate the
monumental craft that went into making email __work __in the first place. I’d
argue that whole process requires more craft, but the sender and recipient of
the emails don’t have to understand it.

EDIT: grammar

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jxub
Alternative tl;dr:

Step one: Live in the middle ages.

Step two: ??

Step three: Profit.

