![]() “The invention of printing,” he writes, “is the greatest event in history. After Gutenberg, “human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy.” The building had given way before the power of the printed word, and other structures with it: religion, authority, hierarchy of all kinds. Before the invention of printing, he writes, architecture had been the book of its time, the supreme expression of the human mind. Hugo himself takes up the subject at some length. “This,” he says to a colleague, of the book on his desk, “will kill that,” gesturing at the cathedral outside his window. ![]() In an early scene, the villainous Archdeacon of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo, broods in his study over the coming of the printed book. One of the themes that preoccupied Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris was the enormous destructive power of the printing press. ![]()
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