"The Monk Spent 15 Years Copying A Book. He Made One Mistake."

There is a book in a monastery in France. It took one man fourteen years to write. Tonight, he makes one mistake. One vowel. E instead of A. In a Bible that will be copied by other monks, whose copies will be copied by other monks, whose copies will eventually reach printing presses, whose copies will spread across Europe in the thousands. The mistake will survive for three hundred years before anyone notices it. It will never be traced back to this candle, this hand, this one moment of exhaustion. Tonight we're in 1180. Four people, one evening, one book connecting all of them. A monk who just made a mistake he'll never know about. A nobleman who owns three books and thinks that makes him extraordinarily educated. A merchant who can't read a single word and is more successful than the nobleman. And a seven-year-old girl standing in a doorway watching marks on a slate mean something she doesn't understand — and who will never learn to read, and will pass something on anyway. This is what information looked like before it was cheap.