Copying from the Scriptorium to the Cell Phone

The Science Fiction Writers of America publishes a news blog, “Writer Beware.” The July 31, 2026, entry is about changes to the Canon of Ethics of the American Association of Literary Agents. In their summary, the SFWA cites a comment from Publisher’s Weekly: 

“A surprising omission from the revisions is any language addressing AI. According to PW’s article on the revisions, though, this is something the AALA is looking at. Guidelines around AI usage are notably absent from this round of revisions, though AI use ranked as one of the top concerns among agents in a recent AALA survey. [AALA president Regina] Brooks said the AALA has begun circulating information internally and among members, but is “waiting for things to settle out” before formalizing anything.” 

Common chatter about AI is ubiquitous. I am complacent and ambivalent. I do recognize that soon (if not yesterday), an AI is going to sue in court for its rights as an artificial individual under the law, the same any other corporation. Whatever that may bring, for the immediate present, AI is just another computer program, a platform, an environment, no different than Cobol, Python, DuckDuckGo, or Amazon Web Services. Collectively, they are only wider abstractions to encompass concepts. 

It remains that the grammar checker and spellchecker are annoying but convenient. Typeahead is a klaxon for cliches. When you are in a Zoom call (or similar) turn on CC:Closed Captions and see whether and to what extent that program learns the nuances of your specialized vocabulary. 

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, (Book I, X “Wages and Profit,” Part I)

Writers and artists worry about losing income to new tools and it is an old problem. When movable type printing was invented copyists were disadvantaged; they rebelled and lost. When all copies were made by hand, it was a nice gift to copy a book and give it to your friend. The ability to produce hundreds or thousands of copies led to copyright laws. 

Until the invention of computers, copying and reading were distinct acts. In his 1985 book, Electronic Life, Michael Crichton asserted that reading with a computer is now identical with copying to a computer. My Apple iPhone connects automatically to my Apple iMac and copies content from one to the other.

During one of several continuing and ironic discussions with friends in the Fandom Association of Central Texas (FACT) about why we ban AI, the comment was made, “All they do is scrape the internet.” 

And what do you do? Does your story have a faster-than-light spaceship with colonists, or does it have dragons, vampires, witches, sorcerers, or does have robots or aliens? 

FACT sponsors the annual ArmadilloCon science fiction convention in Austin. During a Board meeting, discussing upcoming plans, it was said that an invitation to speak and present had been intended for a new popular writer but that as it happens, the writer-artist encourages “fanfic” written by their readers. Moreover, they actively promote and reward the use of AI tools to write and illustrate these offshoot narrations. So, the convention withdrew the invitation. To me, that was wrong of FACT.

On YouTube is a video about a monk learning to use a book. Danish is not required to understand the humor and it is interesting to read the cognates.

It is a cartoon that a proofreader found when my wife was an employee of a large commercial printer and also freelanced, reading over 100 books for Bantam Doubleday. The monk is running into the scriptorium with sweat and exclamation points over his head. He is barely carrying a double armload of scrolls. He says, "It should be celebrate!!"  

Science Fiction Writers of America https://sfwa.org/

SFWA “Writer Beware” blog by Victoria Strauss here: https://writerbeware.blog/2026/07/31/the-aala-makes-significant-updates-to-its-canon-of-ethics/

Publisher’s Weekly comment article here 

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/people/article/100919-major-aala-ethics-update-allows-agents-to-offer-paid-editorial-publicity-services.html

A Brief History of Printing.
Part II: The Economic History of Printing
by Frederick W. Hamilton,
Committee on Eduction, 1918.
From Gutenberg here.

"A Brief History of Printing. Part II: The Economic History of Printing" by Frederick W. Hamilton is a historical account likely written in the early 20th century. The work focuses on the economic dimensions surrounding the printing industry from the advent of printing in the mid-15th century through to the French Revolution in 1789. It delves into government regulations, labor conditions, and the evolving dynamics of the trade guilds impacted by the rise of printing. The opening of this volume introduces a thorough analysis of the printing industry’s economic landscape during a transformative period. It highlights how printers operated largely outside established guild systems, contending with governmental oversight and fluctuating market demands. Hamilton outlines how apprenticeships were structured, exploring the socioeconomic conditions faced by various classes of workers within the industry. He also contextualizes the historical significance of printing as not merely an industrial endeavor but as a pivotal influence on societal thought and subsequent revolutions, setting the stage for a detailed exploration of regulations, labor relations, and the inevitable shifts leading to modernization. (This is an automatically generated summary.)  A Brief History of Printing. Part II: The Economic History of Printing by Frederick W. Hamilton, Committee on Eduction, 1918.  

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

For the Glory of Old Lincoln High 

All Volitional Beings Deserve Rights 

Generative AI: As Big as it is, it is only a Program 

Art & Copy 

Start the Presses 

Hermann Zapf on Alphabets 

Libraries of the Founders 

Five Books about Books 

Goudy by Bernard Lewis and Goudy in His Own Words 

Frank Romano’s History of Desktop Publishing 

Five Books about Books

In the Library of Congress catalog system, books about books are under Z: Bibliography, Library Science, and General Information Resources. That large umbrella covers the history of books and therefore typesetting and the craft of making the media of writing and reading.

Notes from a Public Typewriter edited by Michael Gustafson and Oliver Uberti. Grand Central Publishing (Hachette Book Group), 2018. (UT Library Z 49 N68 2018 MAIN)

Michael and Hilary Gustafson own the Literati bookstore in Ann Arbor. Shortly after they opened in 2013, they provided their customers with a mechanical typewriter for leaving thoughts or often only words, alone or in a string. 

Google Maps view.
124 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

At first, the machine was only a display. The impetus for active use came from the first customer who asked for paper. Makes and models changed. I found the logos for Rheinmetall, Royal, and Olympia; they probably had others. One note asked, “Where is the power button?” 

Whimsical or deep, fleeting or deserving of stone, the random writings of these literati provided Laurel and me occasional minutes away from work, sitting on the living room couch. For myself, given the social context of a typewriter in a bookstore on the main street of a university town, the marriage proposals (and rejections) gave me the most to consider.

500 Years of Printing  by Frederick G. Melcher, et al. American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1940; 31 pages (6-³/₁₆ x 9-⅛). (UT Library Z 127 C5 P9 LIB SCH)

Towns across America and around the world celebrated the 500th anniversary of Gutenberg’s press. This book acknowledged the war that America was not yet formally engaged in: 

“It will often be said, especially in this year of international turmoil, that printing, like all inventions, has great power for evil as well as for good, that false ideas can be as successfully disseminated as sound ones, that disrupting propaganda can be readily put in print as constructive programs, that oppressors can as easily use the press as liberators. This has been true in all of the five centuries since printing began, yet the gains have far outweighed the harm and will continue to do so. Literacy has been extended, libraries established for the free use of books, book ownership has been made more universal and the machinery of book distribution has been bettered.” 

The eight essays deliver richly detailed history about publishing in our America. However, the first three set a foundation with the fifteenth century and Gutenberg before revealing the surviving works of the printing press in Mexico 1539. In the British colonies of North America, newspapers were preferred. After independence many more books were produced; as a consequence of both, machines evolved rapidly.

Books & Readers in Ancient Greece & Rome by Frederick G. Kenyon. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1932. (Z 112 K38 1932 MAIN). Kenyon was the Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum. This book draws on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (from c. BCE 100 to CE 200), and other finds discovered only the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One trove came from a home in Herculaneum (79 CE). Much here is from inferences for which the earlier empirical evidence quickly becomes scanty. We know more from allusions to books in books than to actual copies. A nice touch here (and admittedly a problem) is that the quotations in Latin and Greek are not translated. 

In our common culture, proclamations on scrolls are read 

from top to bottom. In fact, a typical papyrus scroll was held 

horizontally fed from the right and unrolled to the left, two 

columns on a page (reading left to right), two pages to a sheet, 

each line about 20 characters. 

This book was intended for an American audience. All high schools taught Latin and many offered Greek. For myself, it was possible to glean a lot from cognates in Latin, though fewer popped up in Greek. I was surprised at how well I could sound out the Greek miniscules. I seem to have learned my letters over the years.

Heidi Kasa reading from
The Beginners at 
Anna's Antiques.

I had to pause at Kenyon’s prejudices. We each have our own. About the library room unearthed at a home in Herculaneum, Kenyon gives reasons for suspecting that the owner was Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher. “It is only to be regretted that the owner was not a collector of works of poetry or history, instead of a philosopher.” 

Kenyon also dislikes public performances. Authors recited in public spaces and they also rented private homes for the purpose. “It was not a healthy phase for literature, since it encouraged compositions which lent themselves to rhetorical declamation; and one may doubt whether it did any service to the circulation of books.” 

As the curator of an endowed institution, Kenyon had no feel for the paths by which words find paper and together they find readers. 

Hungarian Pioneers of Printing Arts: Mechanization of Setting by Dr. Peter Szöke. Hungarian Central Technical Library and Documentation Center, 1972. (UT Library Z 134 H9 V351 LIB SCH). Although culturally an island, Hungary benefited from the industrial revolution and independent inventors patented their solutions to the problems of typesetting. The machines here are similar to others that are known.

Literary Machines by Theodor Holm Nelson.Project Xanadu. 1980 - 1987.  (UT Library Z 52.4 N46 1987B C.2 MAIN). Ted Nelson was an early advocate and promoter of small computers. Literary Machines continued and extended the ideas presented in his oversize coffee table essay Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) which advocated for the popularization and democratization of computers via microcomputers (and terminals to mainframes). The extensively unstructured delivery of Literary Machines focused (for lack of a better word) on hypertext. Nelson called it that back in 1965. Today, we expect to be able to link information: data and metadata; Github and Get Info. 

• Computer Lib/Dream Machine is available on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/computer-lib-dream-machines and 
• Literary Machines is readable here: https://archive.org/details/lm-81/LM81
• The full Ted Nelson Archive is also open for access https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive

Previously on Necessary Facts

Goudy by Bernard Lewis and Goudy in His Own Words. 

Frederic W. Goudy by Peter Beilenson 

Hermann Zapf on Alphabets 

Start the Presses 

For the Glory of Old Lincoln High 

Your Public Library

You can learn anything at a library. Schools only teach you what they want you to learn. We now enjoy the “Library of Things” which lends musical instruments, weaving looms, badging machines, cameras, audio recorders, 3-D printers, telescopes, microscopes, etc., etc. 

 

In some sense this has always been true. Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s and 60s, the public library catalogs included sound recordings and cinema films. The main library had a special Typewriter Room. The main library also had a large room for Patents and it was usually pretty busy. (A friend of mine from a patriotic group said that many of the guys in there were Russian spies.)

The South Branch Library 3096 Scranton Rd, Cleveland
Pretty much as I remember it. 

 

When I returned to Cleveland in 1996 to write for an information audit project, I applied for a local card. Proof of residency was a bit of a challenge but they did accept three postmarked letters sent to your home. So, I wrote to the President of the United States, the Secretary General of the United Nations, and His Holiness in Rome, and told them that they were doing a great job. (I included $5 for the Pope.) I took the replies to the library and got a card.

 

The South Branch Library today.
Clark-Fulton is one of the city’s poorer communities,
with below-average levels of educational achievement and
median household income ($22,900 compared to
about $25,300 for Cleveland as a whole).
More at https://case.edu/ech/articles/c/clark-fulton

 

Today's South Branch Library features a music studio.

I have several library cards, one for my hometown outside of Austin, another for a nearby library in the same county—turns out they are in the same consortium—the City of Austin, and the University of Texas. I got the UT card as soon as I could when I moved here in 2011. To do that, I needed a TexShare card (which I still have) honored by all public libraries in the State of Texas. That only required six months of “good patronage” (no outstanding fines or fees). Now that I work at UT, I still rely on the TexShare card, for example, as my gateway to the City of Austin card now that I live in another tax district. In 1992, I served as a delegate from the Lansing, Michigan, library community to the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services. They gave us a tour of the Library of Congress which came with a very special courtesy borrower’s card. 

 

You really need only one library card. They are all members of consortia and can let you borrow books from other libraries via Interlibrary Loan. Speaking “I-L-L” to a librarian is a magic spell. 

 

About the time that Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the Internet,  I was researching computer viruses with an online database at my community college library. A search returned Fred Cohen’s 1985 doctoral dissertation and the library arranged for me to borrow a copy of it via Interlibrary Loan. 

Formerly the Main Library in what is now the Administration Building,
the Life Sciences Library at UT-Austin does not get much use.
Whenever I ask a student for their ID, I am told that they never carry
one because they never use it. Asking them about going to the library, 
I was told, "Everything is online."
The life science stacks are actually wrapped around the staircase
of the Texas Tower, much like nucleotides.

 

Five years later, we were living in a village of 3,000 in central Michigan and the library at the county seat was subscribed to the OCLC database. Researching numismatic topics, I happened upon a Science News article about a new book on ancient clay tokens and the origin of writing. I began corresponding with Denise Schmandt-Besserat. 

 

Libraries are supported by property taxes which means that you typically must live within the tax district to get a card. However, some libraries in metropolitan areas are more flexible. In Farmington Hills, Michigan, one of the suburbs along the automation on-ramps of Detroit, the library recognized that businesses pay property taxes, too. So, anyone employed in Farmington Hills could apply for a library card. Here in Austin, anyone with a child enrolled in any school (public, private, or daycare) within Travis county can apply for a City of Austin library card. 

 

In addition to honoring the TexShare card, the University of Texas extends special borrowing privileges to members of the TexasExes association of university alumni and other athletic supporters. Any self-defined sentient can join using a few mouse clicks. 

Entrance to the Scholars Lab at the UT Austin
Perry-Castañeda Library,
completed for Academic Year 2024-2025.

By comparison and contrast, when we lived in central Michigan, as a taxpayer and resident of the State of Michigan, I held a Michigan State University courtesy card for many years and it was a great help. (Among the many books I borrowed for various projects was The Man Who Found the Money: John Stewart Kennedy and the Financing of the Western Railroads by Saul Engelbourg and Leonard Bushkoff. I also taught myself to read Tibetan.)  However, when we lived in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan had no similar program. That being so, it remains that any civil, urbane, or polite person is allowed (even encouraged) to visit and read (or etc.) within any public library in the United States. 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Libraries of the Founders 

Innovation and Discovery 

Another Example of Unlimited Constitutional Government 

Library Telescope Project 

Annular Eclipse 14 October 2023 

Copy Rights and Wrongs 

Crimes of Conscience: Antigone and Stealing from the Public Library 

Hermann Zapf on Alphabets

Hermann Zapf's legacy remains today in the typefaces offered by Microsoft Word: Optima, Palatino, and Zapfino. Other platforms deliver Melior and Linotype Aldus. Searching Google for Hallmark Jeannette will not take you to the font he designed for the greeting card company. The Blogspot platform is woefully underpowered for typography. We make do with what we have.

The whole duty of Typography, as of Calligraphy, is to communicate to the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended to be communicated by the Author. – Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson. (Frontispiece.) 

[Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson (né Sanderson; 2 December 1840 – 7 September 1922) was an English artist and bookbinder associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. ... He was the godfather of Bertrand Russell. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._J._Cobden-Sanderson]

“While visiting the United States in 1954 and 1957, I often talked with friends about printing types and modern industrial design. It seemed odd to find ultra-modern folk there for whom a plane that needed nineteen hours to fly from Frankfurt to New York was already a hobbling vehicle, but who in their own printed works preferred the most old-fashioned types of the 19th century. How one wished to ask these fanatics of ‘progress’ whether they still drive cars built in 1900, or furnish home or office in turn-of-the-century style. […]

The type of today and of tomorrow will hardly be a faithful recutting of a 16th century roman of the Renaissance, nor the original cutting of a classical face of Bodoni’s time—but neither will it be a sans-serif of the 19th century. It will surely be said that most book printers and their customers demand the historical forms. But on the other hand most of the public, too, demands cheap imitations of Chippendale furniture, Renaissance writing tables and romantic reproductions. Nor is it always the little people for whom the modern forms lack appeal, since taste only too often fails to keep pace with the growth of the bank account. Progress always demands courage; and as the powers of conservatism were and are always in the majority, they will not stop the entire development, they can only retard it. But where do we stand today? There is much talk of modern design, but if we study the catalogues and promotional printing we often find late 19th century printing types used to promote these ‘modern forms’. Just to which point in the 19th century do our lives and endeavors seek to return? Can the second half of the 19th century, the time of stylistic confusion and historicism, offer any basis for a future development? One has only to think of railway stations with Doric columns of iron, and of neo-gothic churches, or simply the ample beards of our great-grandfathers.” – pg. 36-37.

And is it not an anachronism when Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, or works by Bertrand Russell, Pasternak, and other such are printed with types of historic design? Pg. 59-60

 

 

See also Hunt Roman: The Birth of a Type,
George H. M. Lawrence, ed., Pittsburgh Bibliophiles, 1965.
Zapf designed this face for the Hunt Botanical Library.
(See also https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/hunt-roman/)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Words into Type 

Start the Presses! 

For the Glory of Old Lincoln High 

Money as Press and Speech 

Words into Type

Sir Robert worked hard and well to make himself a king and then wanted to unite his realm under a single banner. So, he called his vassals into his great hall where they stood with their shields, escutcheons, and crests. Looking out over the array, he said, “The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.” (That fable was in a computer magazine from about 1987.) 

A.T.A. Type Comparison Book by Frank Merriman.
Advertising Typographers Association of American, Inc. 1965.

I consider The Chicago Manual of Style to be the baseline. It is easy, direct, and common for American English. That volume is in my wife’s office. She edited over a hundred books for Bantam-Doubleday Dell and has several other style guides on her shelf. I have Chicago’s origin, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations by Kate L. Turabian, fifth edition revised and expanded by Bonnie Birtwistle Honigsblum, University of Chicago Press, 1987. Unless otherwise directed, I turn to that first.

 

A.T.A. Type Comparison Book by Frank Merriman.
Advertising Typographers Association of American, Inc. 1965.

When I worked at Coin World newspaper, we were given our own copies of the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual. It was a revelation to learn what a newspaper can be sued for. The truth is not always a defense in a court of law. In Michigan, it is and that was written into the state constitution.

 

Microsoft PowerPoint

For science writing, I have the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fourth edition, 1994. 

 

The book that taught me first was Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. I still open it for random reminders and I pick up used copies to give to people who tell me that they want to be writers. But OMG it is over a century old. OTOH, the best style is conservative. Of course, YMMV. 

 

A.T.A. Type Comparison Book by Frank Merriman.
Advertising Typographers Association of American, Inc. 1965.

On that basis, I was happy to find Modern English Handbook, Third Edition by Robert M. Gorrell and Charlton Laird, Prentice-Hall, 1962. I bought it for 50 cents in 2001. It was the textbook for 12^th graders at Cleveland’s Lincoln High School when I was in the ninth and tenth grades 1964-65 and also on the staff of the school newspaper. My first journalism class was an eighth grade elective, but junior high pupils were not allowed to work on the Lincoln Log. At that time, I also had printing as a shop class elective. The Lincoln Log was not a school product but was contracted to a commercial printer which produced other school and community newspapers. With large ethnic communities, Cleveland had weekly papers in German, Hungarian, and other languages.

A.T.A. Type Comparison Book by Frank Merriman.
Advertising Typographers Association of American, Inc. 1965.

 

I actually never used Words into Type. It is in Laurel’s office. I just liked the phrase as a descriptive title for this blog entry. 

 

Accepted as an assistant editor for This Month in Astronomical History, an online publication of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society, I was promoted early to editor in the wake of the Covid crisis. Considering that my degrees are in criminology and social science, and that I am an Amateur Affiliate member of the AAS, it is an honor and privilege to be responsible for fact-checking, as well as grammar, syntax, and style. I collaborate with subject matter experts, researchers, faculty, and other astronomers. I recruit writers and also write features to fulfill the editorial calendar of monthly columns. I report to a senior editorial team that is chosen biannually. Find the series here: https://had.aas.org/resources/astro-history.

A.T.A. Type Comparison Book by Frank Merriman.
Advertising Typographers Association of American, Inc. 1965.

 

I developed a style guide for HAD’s TMIAH. (Use endnotes not footnotes. The ampersand is not a word.) For AAS writing, the foundation is the style guide of the American Physical Society. However, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar amended that when he served as editor of the Astrophysical Journal (1952-1971). That perturbing force sent the AAS into a different path. Just for one example, we do not require that manuscripts be submitted in TeX/LaTeX.

 

A.T.A. Type Comparison Book by Frank Merriman.
Advertising Typographers Association of American, Inc. 1965.

I learned Donald Knuth’s programming language for typesetting mathematics publications back in 1985 when I was taking computer classes and teaching technical writing at Lansing Community College. The Arts and Sciences Division acquired a DEC VAX 11/785 and interactive terminals, overcoming the objections of the Business Division with their IBM 360 mainframe and punched cards in Cobol and RPG. I served as the editor of the newsletter of the DECUS chapter. I then worked as a technical writer for a medical information firm whose previous technical writer had the insight to acquire TeX. Consequently, I have almost 40 years of experience with HTML.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Start the Presses! 

Art & Copy 

Art as Ordered Narrative 

Innovation and Discovery 

For the Glory of Old Lincoln High