The first printed books were practically indistinguishable from hand copies. Printers followed the graphical tropes, in some form or another, for centuries after.
When the first printed books were made, they didn't look right without big initials, so "rubricators" inserted these by hand for the first few decades. (The book is an edition of Balbus's Catholicon printed by Adolf Rusch in about 1475.)pic.twitter.com/JQsvmxLbNs
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Similar to how the first electric cars had faux-front grill.
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Is this because starting a new rubric on a new page wasn’t a thing?
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I'm assuming large margins were to protect the contents of the page from weathering and decay?
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Was there a reason other than decoration that they were there to begin with?
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The side-effects of printing are really interesting - for example Welsh doesn't use 'k' at all, instead it has a hard 'c' because the printers of the first Welsh Language bible had more 'c' letter blocks than 'k' ones.
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I am sure you'd love the documentary 'A to Z'. It's not that printed books didn't look right without big initials. It's that printed books positioned themselves as identical to handmade books: luxury goods, sometimes costing the equivalent of several good houses (each!).
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In other cultures (e.g. Arabs), you couldn't position printed copies as equivalent to handwritten books. You couldn't print a Quran, write some big red letters and make a couple of illustrations; due to the nature of their writing, that wasn't possible. That hindered adoption.
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I'd buy a printed book of your essays, but now I'm envisioning it with rubricators since you don't tend to use figures/images in your writing. The startup tome.
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