On the other hand the travels of journeymen printers, which were so frequent in the period, must have served to transplant trade practices far from their place of origin, and this in turn must have led to a general acceptance of the practices which were felt to be best. Hence principles which seem to us to be self-evident, like the separation of upper and lower case letters, must sooner or later have been adopted. Yet no strict rules seem to have come into being for several centuries; although such rules would have served to make the compositor’s work easier and to help him acquire those automatic reflexes whose necessity we have stressed.
how technology develops. what innovation looks like. it’s a muddy business and these days we must plug in other information distribution systems than travelling journeymen. and the possibility to create “improvements” out of made up shit rather than physical effortful experience and energy expenditure (ie moving around and fitting into new environments)
it required a century, at least, to overcome the opposition of the scholars who thought it sacrilegious to use such a process for printing classical texts and who seemed to have feared that their trade as copyists would be threatened p74 - on chinese block printing
the mixture of “sacrilege” and “fear for job” with related pleas to “authenticity” and the benjamin sense of “aura” in conjunction with “might lose my job” are similar today. not to dismiss them, but it is an interesting combination. that there is something special that inheres to their form of labour.
gargantua in gothic bastarda