This will kill that, the book will kill the edifice ; the Archbishop says bluntly with a printed book . This is a scene from “Notre Dame de Paris ”, a novel written by Victor Hugo during the chaos of the July Revolution in 1830. That scene is so significant that the author makes a pause and takes up a considerable amount of time to carry on with his own argument. This argument about architecture and typography is an interesting part of the novel, along with the technical description about the gothic cathedral at the introductory chapter. It overlaps his life and times with the historical background of the characters in the novel and parallels the author in a world of an entire transformation from the political revolution and the cathedral in a vortex of a sudden innovation from the printing revolution.
Victor Hugo reportedly didn’t hide his anger toward the imprudent demolition of the old buildings and the disorderly reconstruction in a destructive manner; accordingly, his analogy in the argument to the relationship between architecture and books through language is absolutely attractive. Through a variety of metaphors somewhat poetic, he says that architecture has engraved the history of mankind within the edifice and has conveyed that edifice to the next generation; then he declares that the role of architecture will be replaced by the publication as a result of the invention of metal type casting. Notwithstanding this long story that is not really related to the main