Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

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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The author's name is not (to pick an example from today's solstice shopping) Tarr, Judith. That's how you sort the author's name, but, you see, there actually is (honest!) a separate field for determining how you sort the author's name. No, really, it exists and everything. So there is no need to sell me a book which thinks it is by "Tarr, Judith" or "Delany, Samuel R."

Oh, and, as an extra free tip, may I remind you that typically the first letter of the author's names are capitalized, but not any other letters in their names? So it should be (again, real example from today's shopping) Gayle Rubin, not "GayLe Rubin."

Get your act together guys. This sort of BS would be unacceptable on the cover of a print book, so why do you keep doing it on the (electronic metadata) covers of your ebooks? Ebooks have been a thing for over half a decade now. It doesn't do you any favours when your merchandise has as many typos and errors in the bibliographic data as the dodgy crap available on pirate sites.