It's been over two months since my last Things Literary post, so I thought I'd throw a new one up on this windy Sunday afternoon:

BBC's Stephen Fry has a wonderful one hour documentary on the Gutenberg press. People tend to forget the press is the coming together of (at least) three or four new and critical inventions. When you really consider the ingenuity and implications of these pieces of the puzzle, the whole is really quite breathtaking. Also, watching these guys set lead type by hand made me think typesetting Art Space Tokyo maybe wasn't that hard after all.

An edgy jab at "free beer" geeks by Steven (note to self: the world doesn't need any more babies named Steve) Poole on giving away your work (in his case, his writing) for free:

If the breathless advocates of “the free distribution of ideas” are serious, they need either a) to come up with a realistic proposal as to how I am to keep feeding myself while giving the fruits of my labours away for free; or b) come out and say honestly that they don’t think any such thing as a “professional writer” ought to exist, and that I should just get a job like anyone else.3 In a way, I’d respect people who came out and said the second thing. What I don’t respect is people who can’t see that those are the choices.