Printing and bookmaking gruntle, part 3 (final)

Here at last is the third, very long, final part of my three part takedown of Incunabula's viral thread from early September.

To recap: there was a thread on Twitter by Incunabula that went viral last month. In James Burke-ian Connections style, Incunabula said that "Cheese ?? is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails, Jesus, underwear and spectacles." The history in that thread ranges from over simplified and inaccurate, through simply wrong, to a disingenuous lie. Today I'm mostly covering the part about "snails" aka Phoenicians, alphabets, and how printing would never have taken off if Gutenberg had used a syllabary or a logosyllabic script instead of an alphabet. Which is built on a lie.

Part one: cheese and Christianity/mostly over simplified and inaccurate. Part two: underwear/simply wrong. The original viral thread that I am laboriously beating to death.

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