If you’re a book lover and a geek, spend ~10 minutes to watch this lovely video from the 1940s about how books were made.
Here I am, ~70 years later, marveling at how things have changed. So that’s where the phrase “put to bed” comes from!
Partway through the video, I wonder what book they’re printing. There’s a single clip of a person checking the page numbers are in sequence: 1… 3… 5…
I pause the video, go to books.google.com , and type in the two phrases that I can see: “of Fair Luna” “with inimitable”
One match. From 1947.
This is amazing. Isaac Asimov futuristic amazing. How would he have described what I just did? Sitting at home, pulling up a video from a digital archive, glancing at a few words and searching the vast databanks of human knowledge for an answer? I imagine Asimov would have written the scene with me making a cup of coffee while I wait for the digital systems to search for an answer. My wait? Under a second. Something to keep in mind when I swear at the computer for not being able to upload an image to Twitter…
P.S. The book that was printed in that video? On Amazon…