Two ideas for books I would read:
- A History of Printed Communications, from moveable type to MovableType (or from Gutenberg to the Internet). The obvious pseudonym is Etaion Shrdlu. I was reading over The Battle Cry of Freedom and was struck by the illustrations — pencil drawings, paintings, and photographs — and how they were commissioned and used by Harper’s Magazine, in the case of the pencil drawings. This is the artist — Alfred Waud — captured by another great of the time, Timothy O’Sullivan.
What was the process of getting those images into print? I have worked with everything from cold type to these evanescent pixels, with hot wax and tape along the way. But even that span of technological history doesn’t quite cover it. What were the lags in time? How current were they when published and delivered? - Another title would be a history of social mobility. Again inspised by that great Civil War book, but by others as well (I am currently reading Ghost Map). The end of Battle Cry mentions the tanner’s son from Ohio — Grant — dictating the terms of surrender to Lee, a descendant of the First Families of Virginia. The idea of a book on that topic was more fully-formed earlier today, with other examples, but I seem to have lost them. Something to do with the democratization or flattening of society, an end of hereditary hierarchies, it seems to me.
Of course, the thought occurs to me that maybe I should write them (ha!). The first is more interesting, from that standpoint.