On Book Illustration And Hope
‘Pentiment’ and the so-called lost art of illustration
Recently I’ve been playing Pentiment. It’s a video game in which you play as artist Andreas Maler, who works as an illustrator in a monastery’s scriptorium in 1518 — a time when, almost 70 years after the invention of the printing press, his trade is dying out. The monastery is almost a living anachronism and its inhabitants know it: they are the only ones left, a community of a dozen where they had once been a hundred or more, fearful every day that they will run out of money and have to leave. By the end of the game, in the 1540s, the monastery has closed, and you play as the daughter of the town’s printing press — a neat little nod to the progression of technology. The loose medieval timekeeping — vespers, compline, matins, etc — is replaced by an accurate-to-the-hour mechanical clock. Change is coming, even to time itself.
I’ve also been reading The Bookseller of Florence, a beautifully written biography of the last great collector of illustrated (that is, hand-decorated and -written) manuscripts in Florence, a man who in his time saw the rise and rise of the printing press — and who eventually retired in despair, unable to bear what had happened to his craft.
We can imagine the existential angst of these people, with the looming black cloud of AI…
