(no subject)

[msmemory_archive]

One of my favorite thought experiments is imagining being able to bring someone forward from history, and see his reaction to modern times. Showing Ben Franklin a modern home, or showing Gutenberg a library.

Wouldn't it be lovely to see Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, and his reaction to Obama's election?

Comments

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I think he was a thoughtful man, and I like to think he would have found Obama's candidacy the superior one, but I don't think it would have mattered to his reaction. How could he not see that this man is emancipated?

(On a side note, didn't they have libraries in Gutenberg's day? Not modern lending libraries, but large collections of books that scholars might go and study, surely.)

[metageek.livejournal.com]

On a side note, didn't they have libraries in Gutenberg's day?

There were, but the scale of a modern library would have been mind-boggling. Even a small town library, with, say, 100,000 books, would rank among (above?) the largest collections of 15th-century Europe. Plus, of course, everybody is allowed to read them.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Well, Alexandria had probably 100,000s of scrolls in its day... I don't know about the state of libraries in the 15th century. Seeing the amount of traffic in a major modern library might be a wondrous sight for him, though.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Yes, supposedly, Alexandria had something like 750,000 scrolls. I would expect, though, that scrolls tended to be shorter than bound books, since they weren't random-access.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the idea is something like a 10:1 ratio of scrolls to Works, where the multi-scroll work might still be undersized by our standards.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

OK. And my local library says it has 140,000 works, so nearly twice Alexandria's collection. Of course, that count includes things like "Goodnight Moon".

At the college where my dad used to teach, they were proud that they had over a million volumes...but, to reach that million, they had to buy a lot of crap. I worked there one summer, and they actually had Cliff's Notes.