I spent most of my Sunday desperately trying to get some work done, but kept myself entertained by finding excellent podcasts and YouTube videos to stream in a little window on the corner of my monitor. The best one by far was from a BBC Series called The Machine that Made Us, hosted by British television Stephen Fry. In the show Mr. Fry sheds light on the invention of movable type by following the construction of a working replica of Gutenberg's press, as well as travelling across Europe to learn how to cast type and make paper. The series lasts about an hour, and I enjoyed seeing the process in action.

Having spent a lot of my first semester here at RISD studying Mr. Gutenberg's series of innovations (G developed not only a printing press, but a new lead alloy, a formula for ink, as well as an entirely new casting process), I particularly enjoyed watching Fry actually carve his own punch of a blackletter 'e', strike it into a copper matrix, and then cast several pieces of lead type that would eventually be used on the replica press. I spent a lot of time trying to find images of this process for a research book, so I was amazed to have such a detailed video fall in my lap!

The real shock came, however, as I started up the first video... lo and behold! Mr. Fry's is a face I knew well — for uttering the very line quoted in my last blog entry, no less! — as the endearingly clueless Mr. Mybug in BBCs miniseries of Cold Comfort Farm.

It was funny to reconcile the bumbling, hopelessly egocentric Mybug, whose life's amibition is to prove that Branwell Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights, with the charismatic TV host geeking out over movable type.