Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  As you know as I travel around by train and car I hit antiquarian bookstores, any place I can find old books and recently there are a few that I got that might be of interest.  This is one from Scholastic called The History of Making Books.  I found it in a bookstore in San Luis Obispo.  It was $7.  See, it says $7 and it’s beautifully done, printed and coated in every way.  I mean this is absolutely a gorgeous book and it wants to demonstrate certain things, so for instance, in order to demonstrate letterpress they printed it on this cardboard material and they embossed it to give you that feeling of letter press.  Where you have color they actually have overlays of various kinds.  There are stickers in the back that kids can put down in various places.

Now I said I wonder if this book is generally available, so I went to Amazon and the first thing that came up was it says there were 18 used copies and the first three were one cent, three cents and six cents.  Six cents, oh, $3.99 for shipping and handling, but then I scrolled down the list and the last one was $55.  You can get this book from one cent to $55.  I paid seven bucks, so I think I got a bargain.

I found this really interesting book on the Yiddish alphabet.  By the way, you have to open it from this side and it goes into the history and explanation of all the Yiddish characters, actually, Hebrew characters.  It was right next to the Arabic book and they seemed to be doing okay together.

The most interesting thing I found and this is something I've been looking for, for years, about 40 years after the invention of printing a scribe, part of the church wrote a book called In Praise of Scribes and in it he said that handwritten books were going to go out of existence because this new thing called printing was taking over.  This particular version of it is the English translation.  It was written in Latin and it was done in Vancouver by the Alcuin Society.  That is why I found it in a bookstore in Vancouver and it was done with letterpress, beautifully typeset and beautifully printed and it goes through the whole explanation that this scribe had for why it was so important to have handwritten books, to not lose that skill and not lose the ability to produce them, but here is the irony.  In order to get this book published and into the hands of many people he had it printed.  No, no, no, not handwritten.  He had it set in type and printed.  It was the first example of irony in the printing industry in the fact that I want to explain that should be hand done, but I'll do it in a mechanical way.  

I remember when the first offset lithography systems started to come into use and it became very popular and we switched over from hot metal to photographic typesetting and I became the first  manager at Compugraphic Corp.  Some of you will know that name.  Well what was interesting was the first thing I got there one of my tasks was to start planning for the annual report, so I go into the president and we start talking about it and I discover that all of the annual reports that Compugraphic had done were hot metal.  They were done all on linotype machine because tabular was very hard to do on their own machine and I said we can’t have this.  There is no way a company that makes photo typesetting machines should use hot metal for their annual report.  It took me the longest time to set and have pasted up the annual report that year because I said it had to be done with photographic type and at that time it was really hard to do it, so there again we were using old technology to promote new technology.  In Praise of Scribes was the first example.

And that’s all my opinion.  Thank you.

It was probably—I'm being honest about this, the worst press conference I've ever been to.