The Lost Gutenberg Quotes

“Printing meant arranging the letters into words, the words into perfectly straight lines, and the lines into even blocks of text to be inked and pressed onto paper or vellum. And each small step of the process, which sounds so mundane today, required invention.”
― Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey

“To use them, and turn his press into an assembly line, his workers had to master an array of skills—reading the Latin of the source Bible; rapidly and accurately arranging the type, upside down and backward, in frames to duplicate the text for printing; spacing type line by line and employing the scribe’s art of using hyphenation and abbreviations to ensure that it lined up perfectly in two columns of equal width. Not to mention learning to ink the type, work the presses, and pull clear, unblemished pages, tens of thousands of times.”
― Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey

“Decades later, it's striking to see the archival center clearly articulating the value of collections like Estelle's, using words that no one in the archdiocese could muster at the time of the sale: "The Archival Center," its website says today, "long ago embraced the notion expressed by Lawrence Clark Powell that: 'the collecting of books is...the summum bonum {highest good} of the acquisitive desire, for the reason that books brought together by plan and purposely kept together are a social force to be reckoned with, as long as people have clear eyes and free minds.”
― Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey