Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…I could grab one if you want to see one. So if we look at some examples. I’ll show you these one by one. For example, this is a pamphlet. Naked pages, short text, hand-stitched together. It would take two or four days because you print the front side and then the back side. It’s cheap. It’s ephemeral. You print a thousand of them. You sell a bunch around the town. You sell a bunch to news writers who are going to and from other cities, who will buy them and bring them to the next town. If you’ve printed news in Milan, people who are going to Florence will want to buy your news to go there. It might be a report of a siege. It might be what people were wearing at the royal wedding. My favorite title of a pamphlet was “The Scandalous Tale of a Doctor from Padua and How He Seduced His Maid, Murdered His Wife, Murdered the Maid, Cut Out Her Heart and Ate It, and How He Was Justly Punished by God.” That was the title of the pamphlet. These things circulated around. Some of them were nonsense, some of them were real news. Most were combinations. But you can sell something like this cheaply in a couple of days. Often they would have a cheap blue cover. You have seen this color before. This is the color of laundry lint, because fundamentally laundry lint is what paper is. You take rags of old clothes, you put them in water, you beat them until they become a pulp, and you skim it out with a sieve. Laundry lint is what rag paper is. If you don’t bleach it, it’s this generic blue-gray color, which is sort of the average color of what human beings wear. That’s a copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine, another example of technology taking a leap forward in the 18th century. When they invented the newspaper, they immediately had the problem of, “Oh, no. Newspapers contradict each other. We don’t know what’s true. We have to fact-check stuff.” That one has a great fold-out. I think there’s a procession or something. That is what everybody wore at the state funeral. Instead of photographs, we have this fancy, “Here is what everyone was wearing at the state funeral.” Very exciting. Your laundry lint, if you don’t bleach it, remains the color that it on average was. In the 18th century, they have newspapers. The newspapers are reporting news, but they don’t quite say the same thing as each other. The problem becomes, how do we know who to trust? The Gentleman’s Magazine was developed, and every week they would publish a roundup of that week’s news saying what each newspaper said about it, where they contradicted each other, analyzing who’s right and wrong. It was the fact-checking. This is the first magazine. It invented the word “magazine” being used in this context. It was an intellectual response to the fake news problem of how we reconcile what happens with newspapers. You see these many iterations: they invent the printing press, then they invent the pamphlet, then they invent the newspaper, then they invent the magazine to cope with the newspaper. with newspapers. You see these many iterations: they invent the printing press, then they invent the pamphlet, then they invent the newspaper, then they invent the magazine to cope with the newspaper. The newspaper is invented to cope with the pamphlet because you don’t know whether to trust the scandalous tale of the doctor from Padua and how he murdered his wife. Is he real? We don’t know. But if somebody publishes a newspaper that serially prints news every week, they have a reputation. They have to be respectable. You’re not going to subscribe to them if you catch them printing nonsense. The serial nature of a newspaper was a form of accountability that made people willing to trust it over time. The newspaper is a way of fact-checking the pamphlet. The pamphlet is a way of making money while you’re printing your longer book. I will also let you have a look at papyrus. Thank you.…

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