Power of Print

This placard greeted me as I stepped into the campus copy center yesterday afternoon:

THIS IS
A PRINTING OFFICE 

CROSSROADS OF CIVILISATION 

 
REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS
AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME

ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH
AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR

INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE 

FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD

NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND
NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER'S HAND

BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF

FRIEND YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND

THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE 

Long live the printing office! And long live the internet. After I read the placard I ran home, fed Google a few key words, and discovered that this passionate tribute to typeset was created by Beatrice Warde in 1932 as an advertisement for Monotype. She was a typographer who was an expert on the history of the Garamond style of type, which Harry Potter fans will recognize as the charming, old-fashioned font that transported them to Hogwarts.

Warde's words have been immortalized in bronze and stand not only in the BYU-Hawaii Campus Copy Center, but at the entrance to the United States Government Printing Office in Washington D.C.

It got me thinking. A hundred years from now, this blog may be about as easy to read as the journal entries my friend used to keep on his Commodore 64. Possible, maybe, but worth the effort? Electronic words... how long will they last? Only until the formats change, the data corrupts, the CD's get scratched. 


I've got a cookbook that was printed in 1855. It's fragile--I keep it in a ziplock bag. But I can still read every page, plus all the recipes its first owner cut from the newspaper and glued onto the end paper. A hundred and fifty years from now, no matter where civilization goes from here, I bet my great-great-grandchildren will be able to read the hardback, library bound copy of Gail Carson Levine's "Dave at Night" that I bought last week from my local library's discontinued book sale for fifty cents.


Electronic books are nifty. But I somehow doubt I'll be able to pass a Kindle on to my great-grandchildren when I die. First of all, unless I die in a car accident soon, I'm going to seriously outlive any piece of electronics I own. Second, even if the Kindle somehow does survive me, whatever they're putting out then will be impossible for it to read, poor primitive thing.


Books, on the other hand, from my hand-penned journals to my children's fiction collection, will still be there for my posterity.


Long live the printed word.