In league with the devil

I have been reading “A Place for Everything” by the imaginative Judith Flanders.  She is imaginative in the way Deirdre Mask in “The Address Book” is imaginative.  They both see value and intelligence where most people don’t. The names of streets and the numbering of buildings makes addresses.  These days, too, having an address is a valuable thing to have.  In a similar way, having a place for a book in a library, a place that is related to the identity of the book, makes it much easier to locate the actual book and even to check whether that book is available from that library.  

The subject of new kinds of library materials is important in our house.  My wife was a school librarian and a professor of school librarianship.  She wrote her dissertation about the problem of new materials and libraries, such as slide-tapes, visual slides to be shown along with a tape, discussing each slide in turn.

You probably know that the mechanical process of printing a book was not invented until the 1640’s.  When Gutenberg and his business partner took a load of Bibles to sell on a Paris street corner, each copy of that important book was sold for a much cheaper price than was typical for the previous hand-written copies.  Elizabeth Eisenstein reports that people reported the men to police for being in league with the devil since every copy showed EXACTLY the same on a given page, not possible in hand-copied books.