Advancing Backwards

Martin Buber, I and Thou, pp. 86-87

I was reading Rabbi Kaplan the other day in his introduction to the Sefer Yetzira, and he's talking about the challenge of authenticity for handwritten manuscripts, especially when there are different versions of the same book by supposedly a single author. He records that one of the complaints they had back in the day when they only had handwritten versions of books was that an owner might make side notes in the margin, and then a copyist hired to make a duplicate might incorporate those (non-original) margin notes into his version as part of the text(!). That flawed process might be repeated several times until ultimately, it becomes impossible to tell where the real original ends and the later added-in notes begin. Even when the printing press became the standard for duplication, those non-original side notes may have actually become fused into what we call the official, first printed edition attributed to some single author. At this point, all those additions from multiple later ‘co-authors’, were treated all as one block and unit even though they were an amalgamation of several authors. This problem with the hand copyists and the margin notes stopped pretty much when the printing press took over. From then on, copies were machine printed and side notes were easily detectable. There! Technology solves one complaint about written transmission that erodes authenticity. So now we don’t have that problem to deal with - all because of technology … But these days, technology allows me to take a picture of a page where I have written my margin notes and offer it as an NFT, as a unit. So if that block of information can be sold it becomes valuable as a unit, re-incorporating the margin notes into the whole again, will we have advanced backwards?