I spend so much time reading people argue about blogs that it was great to come across a passionate defence of the book. Brad De Long gives me an economics fix every day, and here he quotes Machiavelli, and makes cogent arguments that bring people and ideas to life. Thanks Brad.
Remember: Machiavelli lives only two generations after Gutenberg. He is thus one of the very first people in the world to have had a personal library. Before printing, libraries were the exclusive possession of kings, sovereign princes, abbots, masters of the Roman Empire (like Caesar and Cicero). The idea that a mere mortal–a disgraced ex-Assistant for Confidential Affairs to the Republic of Florence–might have a personal library would have been absurd even half a century earlier. To him, therefore, his personal library is not something he takes for granted, but something new, something he has that his predecessors did not. And so he can see clearly–more clearly than we can–what his personal library does for him, what his books are.
No Comments