“Most people who are involved in making books, or writing them, are acutely aware that there’s a very big shift happening.”

“…The thing that I hadn’t appreciated was that so much of the history of the book came from elsewhere, from China mostly. Just the invention of paper, which is absolutely vital, and then printing. I visited the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, which is a printing history museum. They have a type case full of Chinese movable type, and it’s gigantic. Western ones are about the same size as a writing desk. This Chinese type case, it wraps around you, like standing in a circular telephone booth entirely filled with type. To learn that that had come out of China was quite surprising, and it was quite nice to be able to take an excursion from the Gutenberg story, which is quite widely written about…”