SC - OP Question re: American Civil War cooking

[Ann Sasahara]

Balthazar of Blackmoor
>In a message dated 6/10/00 12:34:56 AM Pacific Daylight Time, ddfr at best.com
>writes:
>  > > After all, folks
>  > > have been writing stuff down for a long time...
>  > 
>>   They haven't been printing in Europe for a long time, however. And
>>   printed books are a lot less likely to disappear than manuscripts,
>>   since there are generally quite a lot of copies.
>
>I see.  You are referring to commercially printed books, and not, let's say,
>The Book of Kells type manuscripts, which are pretty unique.  That makes
>sense, then.

Commercial has nothing particular to do with it. It's a question of 
technology. There's a technological difference between a printed 
book, such as Lord Cariadoc is talking about, in which the pages are 
printing using a printing press, or sometimes carved wood blocks, and 
a manuscript (hand written) book, such as the Book of Kells, in which 
everything is done "by hand", that is hand written with pen and ink, 
creating a unique (in the true, not the oft abused, sense of the 
word, that is, one of a kind) book. There's only one Book of Kells 
and there never was more than one Book of Kells. Some manuscripts are 
copied, but each book, being hand written, is slightly different from 
every other copy. Printed books in the same edition are virtually 
identical.

The issue is, that a unique book may or may not survive. A unique 
book belongs to a unique owner (i.e., one only) so only one 
person/family/household could use it at a time. If it's destroyed, 
it's gone, lost forever, never to be duplicated exactly.

A printed book is usually made in multiples. With an edition of 100, 
one hundred different families/ households/ guilds/etc. could use 
this one book. And even if 99 were lost, if one survives we know what 
was in the other 99 and can duplicate it.

Anahita al-shazhiyya bint-al-karim al-Fassi