The Age of Great Powers

You know, I can't help but get excited when I see an old book with this kind of old font. It doesn't really matter what it's about, the very feel of it adds gravitas and learning. It's a bit like old people being deserving of respect, they may have been useless nutters in their youth, so you should listen to them. I think old book are the same, the come from the age of great powers, when it was proper hard to even made a book. If it was worth the effort to make, maybe worth the effort to read.

Reminds me, somewhat incongruously, of a line from Jurassic Park...

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox

I wonder if, as a result of progress, we produce a lot more tripe as eBooks etc than in the day when the construction of the book alone was an art? Of course we do, what am I saying?

Anyway, you'll often see me trawling the second-hand bookshops hunting for the wisdom of the ancients and the smell of a thousand musty hands. In this case, "The Outline of History" by H.G. Wells from 1919 (my edition is 1930) - which was lying on my desk, so this is actually a VERY lazy blip...

But I wrote a lot about it, so it wasn't so bad after all...