It also boggles my mind:
1. How accurate it was, in terms of map fidelity
2. The quality of the illustrations and prints, many of which are in several (what I imagine was offset?) colors!
3. How well it's held up. The cover looks essentially completely trashed, but the interior of the book's pages are almost entirely intact, and in great shape. (I'm not worried of them turning to dust in my hands, for instance.)
It's always fascinating to see just how little has changed, especially among schoolkids in nigh on 300 years!
Here's essentially the exact book I'm talking about, so it's not _that_ uncommon. Looks to be in almost identical condition, too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184283104558
New Zealand may having something to say about that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_m...
Overall, most books ever printed have been destroyed. It's just that we've printed a lot of them. It's mostly a survivorship and recency bias.
We're barely into our first century of producing digital artifacts. Some things have been lost, of course, but we do still have a lot of information about the very earliest machines. We still have some of the first programs, some of the first machines are still running today.
We might be able to preserve things in the very long term if we can convince ourselves it's worth the effort, but more than likely the far future will have lost as much from our time as we have from antiquity.
That’s a huge understatement. We have electricity, refrigeration, medicine, mass transit (including international), human rights, enormous increases in population, fast media, internet, nuclear weapons, universal literacy, factory lines, spaceships, cities of many millions of people. Anyone that’s played Civilisation knows how far the tech tree goes once you hit the Enlightenment.
And you can see how much internet and social media have changed society, so imagine the impact of all those things combined on the human brain.
Over the course of our history as a species, people have roughly always had the same drive. The same types of people have always existed and always follow the same patterns. Compare Alexander and Napoleon. Aristotle and Freud. Pliny and Darwin. Follow the lines of philosophy, science, engineering, politics, military all the way from antiquity to today. Each has a common thread woven back to the beginning of civilization.
You are not that different from someone living in ancient Rome, no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Times and culture change, but people have always been what we are now, good and bad both. We have the same drive for greed, generosity, community, solitude, family, power, glory. The wheel of Ka turns and turns.
You should study ancient history, it's pretty fascinating for exactly this reason. People are frequently quite surprised to learn just how similar ancient people were to how we see ourselves now. This is also one of the biggest mistakes people make when studying history: underestimating ancient peoples and framing them as some sort of primitive undeveloped animals. The pyramids were just as ancient and mysterious to the Romans as they are to us to this day.
What boggles my mind is how incredible all these kids' handwriting was. Precise, flowing, beautiful cursive.
It's also a quality cover and paper.
Penmanship, and even just ordinary cursive writing, is just not taught anymore. I understand that it's hardly needed in today's world, but there's something about putting thoughts to paper by hand that enforces some deliberate thinking, unlike keyboarding or speech-to-text. Some studies show that taking class notes by hand is more effective than using a keyboard or recording.
(1) "How to take Smart Notes" by Soenke Ahrens
I'm sure these finds must have dated in some way to verify the authenticity, but I always think back to seeing my uncles toys on display as if they were historical artifacts when I see stuff like this.
What happens if the uncle used very old wood or cloth to make the toys. Will the dating technique be able to find the actual age ?
B) I don't wanna assume malice where incompetence will do
I know the answer in your case, but believe me that a lot of people would.
In my country, if a business makes a factual claim about its products, it has to have already verified the correctness of it to some reasonable level and have the documentation so show that. There's no room for this "oh, I just assumed it was true because I'm incompetent" excuse.
What I can see is the case is that you're both way too confident in your inferences for a bunch of mind readers. Why not just call them up and find out? Oh right "not my job".
And btw "no X could be that Y" last time I heard that line was in a sitcom.
If it were a genuine mistake and not fraudulent, yes.
> I know the answer in your case, but believe me that a lot of people would.
Weren’t you just talking about not assuming malice?
You can't get one in today huh.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/london/sutton-house-a...
I imagine the debris also included coins and the like.
I've often wondered if people back then were more skilled at music and art overall since there were fewer mindless leisure activities.
But, at the same time, I'm sure a guitar or ink and paper were comparatively expensive, so who knows.
Plus people could drink at 10 back then, so I'm sure they found plenty of mindless distraction.
During the romantic era we had the rising middle class with more freetime and money to spare and all those musicians eager to have some more income from giving lessons. The composers started writing lesson books and methods suited to the amateur and the luthiers started building instruments for them including variations like the Decacorde by Carulli and La Cote [0] which was meant to be an easy instrument for the amateur.
Should mention, with "romantic era" I am not really referring to the literal era but the school and tradition of the romantic guitar as the dominant school which goes until the Spanish guitar and Western steel string took over around the turn of the 20th give or take depending on where you are in the world and how you want to look at things. The romantic school still exists to this day, the parlor guitar is a romantic guitar in everything but name and the Viennese guitar is still going in parts of Europe.
0. https://www.carlyle-circle-30.is.ed.ac.uk/showcase/guitar-de...
When I once came across the price for paper in mid 18th century Germany (I did not keep a reference unfortunately), I compared it to the estimated average annual wage of that time and used today's average annual wage to calculate a price in Euro. The result: the price of a DIN A4 sized piece of paper (623.7 cm²) was aprox. 1 Euro. Not cheap, but in principle still affordable in low quantities for most people. And this is half of today's typical price for one such sheet of handmade paper.
Guitars as we know them are actually quite new, and going by "350 years" in the article, didn't really exist when these bits of paper were dropped through the floorboards.
Vermeer's The guitar player dates back to just over 350 years ago, shows a baroque guitar, and as far as I am aware these were complex, really expensive things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o-TOg-y_BI
I would guess there were lots of lutes and gitterns, though; they are relatively less complex. And I would absolutely think that the children who went to this school saw, owned and were expected to play musical instruments; they came from those sorts of families.
The first vending machine was actually first century and dispensed holy water. It was actually mechanized similarly to pre-electronic vending machines. https://www.logicvending.co.uk/history-vending-machines
> missspelling
Because today's school children spend a little more time studying mathematics and science. Music, arts and crafts took up a much larger part of 17th century girls education. Upper and middle class girls were being taught what they needed to be good wives.
> The school provided lessons in writing, reading, math, music and art. The girls studied paper cutting alongside other crafts, such as embroidery and needlework
OED https://www.oed.com/dictionary/hen_n1?tab=forms#1717329 says "hean" was never a standard spelling of "hen". 350 years ago would be the late 1600s when there were "hen" and "henn" and "henne". (I don't know exactly when in the 1600s the latter two stopped being used; 350 years ago might actually be too late for those.)
On the other hand, the idea that for every word there is a single Correct spelling, as opposed to "write it however you like so long as it's clear to the reader", wasn't so well established in the late 1600s. But I think most 17th-century English folks would have regarded "hean" as wrong, not merely unusual.
(The article itself calls "hean" a misspelling, though of course that doesn't prove much.)
If you want creative and skillful culture to be mass culture, just make stuff really expensive and eliminate recording and mechanical reproduction. Elevate the social and financial rewards of sub-superstar levels of craft, art, and creativity. We’re losing those things because the value of them’s been driven into the ground.
Imagine training a chihuahua to do tricks, then looking at an untrained golden retriever, not even try to teach them, and saying “why are chihuahuas so much smarter than golden retrievers?”
A perfectly legitimate answer to that question might be that we stopped teaching them.
No one said dogs, either, they said schoolchildren. It’s an analogy. Either way, it makes zero difference to the point. You could change my word to “skilled” and it would work the same. Skills are learned and thought, that’s what matters.
> A perfectly legitimate answer to that question might be that we stopped teaching them.
Which is what I wrote as the first sentence. The second is merely an analogy to exemplify that notion.
Of course modern writing/drawing utensils are on an entirely different level and paper was very expensive back then e.g. an average labourer supposedly only made enough per day to purchase less than 100 sheets, so practising was expensive.
Paper made from textile is slightly alkaline and contains very little lignin which is highly reactive and causes paper to turn yellow over time. Pulp paper is also more acidic which also makes it more susceptible to degradation.
Lost by Schoolgirls: A display of 17th century papercuts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41045233 - July 2024 (20 comments)
All my macro-expansions are done manually, it only takes a minute or less. Don't let the programmatic appearance deceive you, I'm just decently consistent. Even at my $dayjob, for PRs people have repeatedly accused me of / assumed I'm running a linter when it's just me and my brain trying to make things easier for future brains down the road.
I'll take it as a compliment. Cheers.