This is an awesome chapter that taught me plenty of things I’ve never known before. Of course, I don’t know everything about a book, especially the fact that upper- and lower-case letters literally meant they were stored in the upper and lower cases of shelf organization. After learning that in class, I was mind blown! It is truly such an amazing privilege to learn about the history of minute things like letters and how they originated.

I remember in class we were discussing upper and lower cases as a literal technical term for printing presses. What I find interesting is that we continue to credit Gutenberg for the “invention” of the printing press when he only created a business that spread printing throughout Europe. I’m not excusing his contributions to book history, however, I was please to learn that others came before him. According to Borsuk, a “Chinese engineer Bi Sheng […] developed a technique for printing from clay” (73), which is not as well-known. Sheng developed this in 1041, around 4 centuries before Gutenberg. This shocked me especially because of how much credit we give Gutenberg who barely even ran his own business. His financier and son-in-law took over the company when Gutenberg failed to repay investments.

But to the real point of this post, I seriously had no idea that upper- and lower-case letters are also called majuscules and minuscules. I knew miniscule was at least an adjective, but I never considered it as a noun. I distinctly remember discussing this in class because a peer asked what they were called before ever being put in cases. We didn’t know the answer, but this book revealed it. I find that aspect about reading super fun because there is always something new. That’s the reason why the definition for book gradually changed over time.

With the invention of the printing press, replications of the bible were being produced in larger quantities. Those with access to acquire a bible from a printing press had money and power, which were usually churches who read from the bible. Therefore, the definition of book shifted from more of a physicality to an ideology. That ideology was the fact that books held knowledge and, at the same time, power. It really makes me wonder if people fetishize books for their idea of “power” or if there is some other underlying reason.