Things in the margins of old books
Day 269 / 365
If you have been following this blog, you would know that I am a huge history buff. I love finding out about how life was centuries back. This is why I think I have found my new favorite website today. It’s a blog called “books tell you why” and it talks about old rare books. I read something there that I found really amusing, how scribes in the old days used to write complaints into the margins of the books.
So this is before the invention of the printing press. Back then, the only way to produce books was to write them by hand. There were scribes, whose job was to sit for long hours and manually make multiple copies of a book. It was a really boring yet tough job. A spelling mistake would mean you would have to rewrite the page. Sitting for long hours was bad for the body as well, and of course, it would strain the eyes. This is why it is not a surprise that many of them were sick of it. And to take their frustration out, they used to write small complaints in the margins of the manuscripts.
Here are a few things we have found written in the margins of these old books
“Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.”
“The work is written master, give me a drink. Let the right hand of the scribe be free from the oppressiveness of pain.”
And my favorite
“As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.”
This amuses me because this is the same thing you will find in large codebases today! Many programmers will leave comments like this in the code, usually to warn anyone of the horrors that might occur if you tried to change their code. Here’s one of them
//
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 42
//
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — The Tarzan method