They were beautiful, the old books. Beautiful I tell you.
You’ve no idea, you young ones with all these machines;
There’s no point in telling you; you wouldn’t understand.
You wouldn’t know what the word beautiful means.
I remember Mr Archibald – the old man, not his son –
He said to me right out: ‘You’ve got a beautiful hand
Your books are a pleasure to look at, real works of art.’
You youngsters with your ball-points wouldn’t understand.
You should have seen them, my day book, & sales ledger:
The unused lines were always cancelled in red ink.
You wouldn’t find better kept books in the City;
But it’s no good talking: I know what you all think:
‘He’s old. He’s had it. He’s living in the past,
‘The poor old sod.’ Well, I don’t want your pity.
My forty-seventh Christmas with the firm. Too much to drink.
You’re staring at me, pitying, I can tell by your looks.
You’ll never know what it was like, what you’ve missed.
You’ll never know. My God, they were beautiful, the old books
A book-keeper, book-maker, has as much right to pride in his work as any medieval monk had in his manuscripts. And we wouldn’t have had the credit crunch if it were not for those young ones with their machines, would we?
(What do you mean, remember the 1850s?)
In primary school we used old-fashioned wooden handled pens which you had to dip in the inkwell. Fountain pens were de rigueur for grammar school – these biros ruin your handwriting, you know, you cannot make your downstrokes thicker than your upstrokes with one of those
But I was astonished to see that Sir Alan Steer thinks they should still be compulsory for schoolchildren today
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