When I wrote To be a Scribe in 1492 I only thought of it as analogy, as if to say: it is highly difficult to both imagine a new future and to overcome our anxiety to be accepting of a new future.
Another interpretation of my post is that we were forced to make a tradeoff: beauty for efficiency. Printed books, while spreading knowledge far and wide, are simply not as beautiful as hand-scribed books.
Funny enough, we don’t need to make that tradeoff anymore. Here’s an AI-generated image of To be a Scribe in 1492 in Carolingian minuscule:
