Art & Creativity Quote by Thomas Fuller

A printer’s balance sheet isn’t a reliable measure of a book’s cultural value, and Fuller knows it. In one tight, sideways line, the 17th-century clergyman turns commerce into an accidental critic: the works that most enlarge “Learning” are often the very ones that don’t move units. The sentence is built on a neat moral inversion - “gained” for the mind, “lost” for the trade - and it lands because it flatters the reader’s vanity while indicting the market’s taste.

Fuller is writing in a world where print is exploding but still precarious: books are multiplying, literacy is rising, and the printer sits at the hinge between knowledge and money. His clergy background matters here. He’s suspicious of fashion, wary of spectacle, and alert to how easily moral seriousness gets priced out by novelty. The subtext: truth and depth don’t naturally advertise themselves. A hard book, a technical book, a politically risky book, a book that refuses entertainment - these are the titles that educate and also that “lose” because they demand slow reading, patience, perhaps even dissent.

The line also contains a quiet defense of unprofitable labor: scholars, translators, and thinkers who may never be popular but are essential. Fuller isn’t romanticizing obscurity so much as warning that popularity can be an intellectual red flag. If printers are the early modern algorithm, he’s saying the feed is not your curriculum.