JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post on the History of Memory

About a hundred years after the invention of moveable type printing, there appeared–in 1562–this woodcut in Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo nel quale si ragiona del mondo di accrescere e consertvar la memoria, showing a number of different sorts of high-Renaissance businesses/shops, including one of teh earliest images of a bookstore. 

This sort of business has survived for 450-odd years, and longer, without momentous change for 95% of that time.  The store of memory is giving place to another memory machine, a digital one that exists mostly in the clouds and electrical aether, growing more accessible by leaps and bounds, become less and less bound to cumbersome end-user machines, growing into what must be a biological interface. 

It is somewhat ironic that the first-ish appearance of a bookstore takes place in a book on memory/mnemonics  written by a poet. The replacement of the bookstore and of the book itself as the principal storehouse of knowledge is hardly a poetic matter, in spite of what the poet-izers in charge of this restoration might say. 

It will be a maatter of debate regarding what the last bookstore will look like.

I suppose the larger issue is the future of the history of memory.