thanks for not being a zombie

We know more about the history of orality and literacy than what we read in manuscript or print sources.

This chair is an interesting artifact of both oral and literate traditions. Sit forward, and you can talk with your guests. Sit backward, and you can read and/or write.

In 2004, I took this picture in the house John Wesley built on City Road in London in the 1760s. I should have asked more questions, but I'm assuming this is a chair one could use in the usual way, facing forward, or one could turn around to read or write using that angled board along with the padded arm rests.

Here's something I'm unsure of: did one sit backwards with legs spread around the backrest? If so, then the armrests seems too high to be comfortable. Did one instead kneel on the seat? If so, then why make the backrest so narrow?

(View the annotated photo on Flickr, or view the really big version, if you like.)

Posted by at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

The following entry is a continuation of this earlier entry.

In framing my project, I'm working to break down the boundaries between the study of speech, of writing, and of print. I don’t want to create a frame in which these forms exist in a hierarchy (e.g. print on one side, speech on the other, and manuscript in between), but rather one that recognizes they exist in the same plane of human experience. I’m looking for the overlooked shared characteristics as well as the already explored differences. Francois Lachance makes a very good point about the risk of technological determinism in the way I've explained my project, but I do not yet have a fully formed response to what he’s said. Basically, I think he's right, and I need to change how I describe what I do.

For now, here's what I do have...¹

Objection: “All oral evidence from before the invention of recording devices comes to us via ms. or print.”

Answer: This statement is wrong in two different ways:

1. A theoretical disagreement: “Recording devices” are presented in this objection as categorically different than manuscript or print, but these latter two are themselves recording devices. The evidence available to us in technologies that capture and store audio deserves to be treated with the same caution as evidence available to us via manuscript and print. In both cases, the living, breathing word is stripped of much of its meaning-constitutive context. We should not mistake the record for the original expression. Yes, a change did take place with the invention of sound recording devices in the late nineteenth century, but I would argue that this is a change in degree, not a change in kind.

2a. A methodological blindspot (This is a more significant mistake): We have plenty of non-manuscript and non-print evidence concerning orality. Such evidence exists in the form of material objects related to oral traditions. For example, we know a great deal about religious oral traditions (sermons, hymns, liturgies) from the design and placement of pulpits, of pews, of chapels.

2b. Furthermore, there are a great many traditions that we will never be able to observe first-hand, having to rely upon evidence that includes written and printed documents as well as material objects. Why single out orality for special skepticism? And, it is important to point out, the study of literate traditions is subject to the exact same constraints. We will never be able to observe an eighteenth-century reader with her book, for one thing, and even if we could, how would we know what was happening?² We will never be able to observe an eighteenth-century print shop, but we assume rather confidently that we know what went on there. If there are problems concerning the study of orality, then those problems also apply to the study of literacy. If we can make confident assumptions about literacy based on the evidence available to us, then that confidence also applies to orality.

1. See also my previous entries here, here, and here.
2. Actually, the history of reading is a lively area of research among scholars who study literate practices. Reading is no less ephemeral a practice than speaking or listening.

Gentle reader, I welcome your responses if, in fact, you actually exist.

Posted by at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Two of the dominant research interests guiding me right now are book history and the history of sound. What a coincidence, then, that the Macarthur Foundation has just awarded grants to

• Terry Belanger and
• Emily Thompson.

I'll get mine, yet!

Posted by at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In order not to hijack the comments thread at The Valve, I'm writing a longish post below in response to CR's comments. (See also this post chez Acephalous.)

Continue reading "what if there is no crisis?" »

Posted by at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Roger Chartier, from "Representations of the Written Word" (in 1995's Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer):

The revolution of the electronic text will also be a revolution in reading. To read on a screen is not to read in a codex. The electronic representation of texts completely changes the text's status; for the materiality of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location; against the relations of contiguity established in the print objects, it opposes the free composition of infinitely manipulable fragments; in place of the immediate apprehension of the whole work, made visible by the object that embodies it, it introduces a lengthy navigation in textual archipelagos that have neither shores nor borders. Such changes inevitably, imperatively require new ways of reading, new relationships to the written word, new intellectual techniques. While earlier revolutions in reading took place without changing the fundamental structure of the book, such will not be the case in our own world. The revolution that has begun is, above all, a revolution in the media and forms that transmit the written word. In this sense, the present revolution has only one precedent in the West: the substitution of the codex for the volumen--of the book composed of quires for the book in the form of a roll--during the first centuries of the Christian era. (18).

Posted by at 9:52 AM | Permalink

I attended a lecture by William St. Clair back in June. That lecture is now available for download as a PDF, with a Creative Commons license:

"The Political Economy of Reading," by William St. Clair
The John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, 2005

Posted by at 8:33 PM | Permalink

New this fall from the University of Georgia Press is Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, a biography of eighteenth-century Afro-Briton Olaudah Equiano by my dissertation director, Vincent Carretta. Equiano is the author of the autobiographical work The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, first published in 1789, and lately the subject of sometimes heated academic debate over whether he was truly born in Africa, as he claims in his Narrative. One of the issues at stake in this debate is whether or not we have a first-person account of the middle passage, the brutal trans-Atlantic nautical route by which millions of Africans were taken to and enslaved in the Americas.

Continue reading "new biography of olaudah equiano" »

Posted by at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm looking at two manuscript books today, both said to have been used by the same person. They began their bookish lives as bound blank pages, but over the years they were filled with handwritten information. I was suspicious of one of them, however: for a variety of reasons, I was not entirely convinced it is actually what it claims to be.

Could it be that this little notebook did not, in fact, belong to the person in question? That perhaps someone created a copy of an earlier book, or that someone tried to pass off a counterfeit notebook as the real thing? Could the little notebook be...an impostor lurking among the authentic documents? It has the name of the person in question written in the front, but the handwriting seems a bit too neat, and the pages are too clean to have been used very frequently. As for the other book, I harbor no doubts about it: the handwriting looks right, and the infomation it contains corresponds to external information the way it should.

How to resolve this question?

Remembering my very basic bibliographic training, I compared the watermarks to be found in the paper. Manufacturers leave distinctive markings in the paper they create in much the same way the printers use ornaments to give their books an easily recognizable visual appearance. You have to hold the paper up to the light to see these marks. (I love it when archival research requires you to do little tricks of historical detective work. It's like having secret knowledge of invisible ink, hidden doorways, secret passageways. It feeds my romantic notion that everything you seek is right there if only you knew where and how to look! Yes, I know this is a fantasy.)

It turns out that the watermarks are identical, so the books are likely to have been purchased from the same vendor. If the second were somehow not what it appears to be, the chances of the watermarks being identical would be very slim.

I'm satisfied that the little notebook is what it claims to be.

O little book, I am sorry to ever have doubted you!

Posted by at 6:57 AM | Permalink

Yesterday afternoon I met Cath Feely for a few hours worth of conversation about various topics including interdisciplinarity, theory, and the field of book history. Cath, a history PhD student here at the University of Manchester, has an online essay--"'Interdisciplinarity run riot': the pleasures and pitfalls of research design in book history"--touching on some of these issues at the Book History Research Network.(1)

One comment she made in our conversation struck me as particularly well expressed, and so I wrote it down:

People are realizing that they can engage with theory without being beholden to it. You can take something away from Foucault without becoming a Foucauldian.

This is certainly my sense of where things currently stand in the humanities, where it seems that scholars are willing and able to embrace a kind of self-conscious eclecticism without abandoning a sense of intellectual consistency.(2)

We talked awhile about studying the history of reading, and she encouraged me to get my hands on Robert Darnton's "Readers Respond to Rousseau" in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. And so I shall.

Of course, we talked about blogging, too. Cath doesn't have a blog, but she's a good candidate to contribute to a group project that's just a spark in my imagination at the moment.(3)

Oh, and Cath's mother is a school teacher who, back in the day, had as students the Gallagher brothers from Oasis. Apparently, somewhere there's a video of a school production of Jesus Christ, Superstar featuring a young Gallagher lad in one of the roles.

1. Cath notes that this is not a fully polished essay, and that she is not sure she still maintains all of the opinions expressed in the essay.

2. On a related note, this week sees the launch of a discussion of Theory's Empire over at The Valve. I think the discussion is a worthy project, but I'm just not that interested. The topic does not speak to my current scholarly interests or needs...I think. That statement may come back to haunt me.

3. Speaking of such group-authored endeavors: it will take me just an hour or two of work to get the teaching-oriented Palimpsest back online, which I promise to do before the next school term starts. Hosting complications appear to have been resolved.

Posted by at 3:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Dane, Joseph A. The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Thanks to Ian for the recommendation. A lengthy blockquote is below the fold.

Continue reading "the myth of print culture" »

Posted by at 3:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In the foyer of the British Library, they have this very large electronic kiosk for you to flip through some of their collection. I'd estimate that the screen is about 30 inches across and 18 inches high. Displayed on the screen in this photo is "Baybars' Magnificent Qur'an," which you can also view online.

Continue reading "technologies old and new" »

Posted by at 5:32 PM | Permalink

"Book Production and Distribution, 1625-1800," by H. G. Aldis, M.A., Peterhouse, Secretary of the University Library (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in 18 Volumes).

Posted by at 9:52 AM | Permalink

D. F. McKenzie. "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices." Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969).

...if I were to give this paper an epigraph, it might well be that quoted by Sir Karl Popper from Black's Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry published in 1803: 'A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination, but does not advance our knowledge.' Our ignorance about printing-house conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries has left us disastrously free to devise them according to need; and we have at times compounded our errors by giving a spurious air of 'scientific' definitiveness to our conclusions.

Posted by at 4:42 AM | Permalink

Just a quick note here, dear reader, as I'm grabbing some free WiFi in a dining hall with an etiquette notice forbidding the use of laptops. My flight over was fine, and I managed to put in a brief appearance yesterday at the British Library, even though my lack of sleep made me feel like a real zombie, not just the Internet kind. As fate would have it, I encountered a former student who is now finishing up his PhD in English. I last saw him when he was a freshman in one of my sections of intro to British literature at the University of Maryland. Time flies!

I'm looking at British evangelical periodicals at the BL, and I may have more to say about the fruits of my research in the coming days. Or I may keep it to myself until print publication. What's interesting is that I'm seeing the same names involved in these publishing ventures crop up again and again.

There's also a thread I want to follow involving the controversy surrounding the claim of a publisher that a certain set of printed sermons represent the authentic words of a particular preacher who, conveniently enough for the publisher, happened to be dead at the time of publication. The sermons were purportedly taken down in shorthand by an audience member, then transcribed, then printed. This is one of those threads you don't expect to find, but that you are obliged to follow once you do. You know me: I'm a sucker for the whole "speech-script-print" thing

Oh, and I bought a surprisingly affordable CD-ROM of "the world’s earliest complete survival of a dated printed book."

Posted by at 2:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Three emails caught my eye on SHARP-L this morning. I'm not awake enough yet to say anything clever about them.

1. A conference entitled Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade, will be held in late November at the Society of Antiquaries in London:

   Leading book historians will discuss the presence of the book trade in the streets and public spaces of Britain and continental Europe. From the Frankfurt book fair in the 16th century to the Farringdon Road barrows in the 20th, speakers will range across geographical as well as chronological frontiers to follow the movement of books and people.

2. This year's Print Networks conference on the History of the British Book Trade will take place at the University of Birmingham in late July (after I'm back in the U.S., unfortunately). The keynote speaker is John Feather.
   
   
3. Routledge will publish An Introduction to Book History, by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, later this summer as a companion to The Book History Reader that Finkelstein and McCleery edited. The table of contents for the Intro is as follows:

   Chapter 1: Theorising the History of the Book
   Chapter 2: Orality to Literacy
   Chapter 3: The Coming of Print
   Chapter 4: Authors, Authorship and Authority
   Chapter 5: Printers, Booksellers, Publishers, Agents
   Chapter 6: Readers and Reading
   Chapter 7: The Future of the Book
   

Posted by at 6:33 AM | Permalink

A variety of things to keep you occupied this morning:

• Jesse Kriss' visualizes the history of legal music sampling (via Lawrence Lessig)
• The University of Pennsylvania offers "PennSound," sounds files of literary readings (via Bookish, via Monty Cristo)
• William St Clair, author of The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge University Press, 2004), will deliver a paper entitled "The Political Economy of Reading" at the University of London on June 22. A sample chapter of his book is downloadable. (via HoBo)
• In The Chronicle of Higher Education, five essays and a discussion forum wrestle with the "impact of the Google's plan to scan millions of books."
  1. "Marginal Utility," by Michael Gorman
  2. "End Result," by John P. Wilkin
  3. "Stressing the Positive," by Adam M. Smith
  4. "Stretching 'Fair Use,'" by Peter Givler
  5. "A Matter of Continental Heritage," by Jean-Noël Jeanneney
• Sylvester Stallone will direct a biopic of Edgar Allen Poe (via Writer's Blog)
• Stanley Fish says composition classes should spend more time on form and less on content. (via Critical Mass)

Posted by at 7:19 AM | Permalink

Loewenstein, Joseph. "The Script in the Marketplace." Representations 12 (Autumn 1985): 101-114. (Subscription required.)

The list of Ben Jonson's permanent contributions to English literary convention...has regularly included that major contribution to the development of literary marketing, the publication of the folio Workes of Benjamin Jonson. The volume appeared in 1616, well before it could be decently represented as posthumous. This publication has frequently been remarked on, but such remark has almost inevitably subsided into reflections on Jonson's vanity; in these more sympathetic times, we incline to speak of the charm of his vanity. I should like to treat the event a bit more technically and insist that critical responses to Jonson's authorial vanity are in fact quite telling; that we make such remarks is offhanded testimony to the permanent effects of this particular publication, indirect evidence that the 1616 Workes marks a major event in the history of what one might call the bibliographic ego. (101)

Thanks to Laurie for the reference.

Posted by at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just got my hot little hands on one of these. It looks very well done. More later.

Posted by at 3:12 PM | Permalink

Rooting around in my own archives, I came across these two entries:

• Print and Information Technology
• Print and Information Technology, II (Grok is Jason, and I was going by gizmo, a nickname my niece gave me.)

Man, I remember 2003 like it was yesterday. Good times, good times.

Posted by at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Each issue of the SHARP journal Book History (subscription required) includes an overview essay on the "State of the Discipline" of book history with regard to a specific topic.

• 2003 - "The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America"
• 2002 - "The Epistemology of Publishing Statistics"
• 2001 - "Sacred Texts in the United States"
• 1999 - "Terra Incognita: Toward a Historiography of Book Fastenings and Book Furniture"
• 1998 - "The Rise and Decline of Book Studies in the Soviet Union"
• 1997 - "Booksellers and Their Customers: Some Reflections on Recent Research"

The 2004 volume features "Reading," by Leah Price. The essay begins with an amusing quote from William James concerning the distance between the experience of the world from a human and a canine point of view: humans fail to see the appeal of bones and smells, while dogs are surely puzzled by the act of reading, during which a human sits frozen for hours on end, staring at a handheld object. Price writes

James's example points to one of the central difficulties of a history of reading: how to analyze an activity that's too close for critical distance, and perhaps for comfort. What's "alien" here is not simply the relation of readers to illiterates (human or canine), but also one reader's relation to another. Writers on reading have lamented its unknowability or savored its ineffability as far back as Wilkie Collins's 1858 essay "The Unknown Public." This is the assumption that book historians have come to combat, either in practice (by uncovering the physical gestures and material artifacts that can make one reader knowable to another), or in theory (by tracing the origins of a Cartesian dualism that severs reading from the hand and the voice).2 For all the polemics that have shaped the field—about extensive reading, about technological determinism, about whether to determine the texts read by a particular demographic group or to define the audience reached by an individual text—historians seem united in the urge to contest James's characterization of reading as a literally "senseless" act.

This doesn't, however, imply any agreement about what the history of reading is. As David Hall has pointed out, different scholars have understood the term to encompass enterprises as various as the social history of education, the quantitative study of the distribution of printed matter, and the reception of texts or diffusion of ideas.

Read the whole thing (as they say) for a report on, well, the state of the discipline.

I regularly teach Robert Darnton's essay on studying the history of reading in an attempt to encourage students not to project their own reading habits and tastes upon readers who lived in previous centuries. As the work of Walter Ong reminds us, writing is a technology, thus artificial. Yet we have so internalized the acts of reading and writing that they seem natural, an essential part of being human. Literacy is a recent phenomenon in human history, and in fact, wide-spread literacy has existed in the Anglophone world for only 300 or 400 years. My position is that we should take this understanding and

1. Avoid engaging in ahistorical romantic swooning over the power and beauty of literature. This is not to say that we shouldn't swoon, just that we should not project our feelings across time.
2. Lose our fear of (but retain our intense interest in) new technologies' impact upon what it means to be human. Clearly our lives are enveloped by digital media, and while some observers see this development as a recent and radical break with the past, others view it more properly as part of a long history.

Last fall, a capacity crowd attended a local panel discussion of the NEA Reading at Risk report. (You can read my notes on this discussion here.) When the report came out, Matt K produced a response , the arguments of which are spot on, for the Electronic Literature Organization. There was also a panel discussion at the University of Maryland and other locations around the country. It's heartening that so many are concerned about the fate of reading and writing. But let's not forget that reading and writing have (long) histories that are much more complex and much more surprising than most of us realize. When we detect a shift taking place among contemporary readers, our first reaction should not be one of fear (words like "crisis," "problem," "risk" crop up regularly) but curiosity. Of course reading habits will change. They always have, and we would be foolish to expect to live in an age of stasis.

Posted by at 11:45 PM | Permalink

Here's a link to the archives of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing listserv. An interesting discussion is taking place regarding habits of Bible reading.

Posted by at 2:34 PM | Permalink

This just in:

The Preliminary Programme for the upcoming SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia on July 14-17, 2005 is now available for viewing at the conference website. An exciting line-up of papers, international panels, keynote speakers, receptions, and other events awaits registrants. The 2005 conference will be a memorable meeting where scholars from around the world will address and debate many aspects of "Navigating Texts and Contexts."

Four people from my institution will be there: two professors, and two current or former grad students.

Posted by at 8:13 AM | Permalink

Via SHARP-L:

The latest issue of 'Quadrat' (the bulletin of research in progress on the history of the British book trade) is now available on-line (as a PDF) on the British Book Trade Index website.

Posted by at 9:11 PM | Permalink

Increasingly, the term "History of the Book" (aka "Book History") appears inadequate to describe the varied scholarly work that is actually taking place under this rubric, and much related work is unnecessarily excluded. The title of my course last semester was "Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing," which was cribbed and altered from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (altered because not all writing could be accurately described as "authorship"). But such a phrase is unattractively long and not at all sexy.

One of the problems with the term "Book History" is that we romanticize far too much the technology of the "book" (a problematic term itself, conjuring images of the codex to the exclusion of other printed forms), and this romanticizing blinds us to its unique (even unusual or impractical) features while also causing us to ignore evidence of other forms of communication, such as the world of orality and aurality, and their influence upon literate practices.

One of my lines of argument to establish exigence in my courses goes like this:

• Humans have been around for many thousands of years.
• We date the earliest evidence of writing to approximately 6,000 years ago.
• Print was developed even more recently than that, and in the West, just a few hundred years ago.
• While scholars disagree about how best to measure the ability to read and write, there is a general consensus that widespread literacy is a very recent phenomenon.

If we take a progressive, teleological view of history, then yes, the "book" deserves to be the center of attention: what comes more recently is obviously the best of what we are yet capable of creating. But if we have a more objective view, then we note that the "book" is barely a blip on the radar screen of human history, and that it brings with it as many limitations as it does strengths. The lamentations over the competition for our attention presented by electronic media seem silly in this light. As D. F. McKenzie and Adam Fox have shown, no medium has ever existed without its uses and meaning being altered by other media. Of course, as new media have appeared, they have often produced strong cultural anxieties. We fret over the Internet and videogames: three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope worried about the widespread availability of print.

These musings were sparked by an announcement from HoBo that led me to this website:

Centre for Manuscript and Print studies at the Institute of English Studies (London)

A new research centre created from the merger of the Centre for Palaeography and the Research Centre in the History of the Book

Palaeography, Codicology, Diplomatic and Calligraphy; History of Printing; Manuscript and Print Relations; History of Publishing and the Book Trade; Ephemera Studies; History of Reading; History of Libraries, Collecting and Scholarship; Analytical, Descriptive, and Historical Bibliography; Textual Criticism and Textual Theory; The Electronic Book

The list of areas of study is appealing and could be greatly expanded. For one thing, what about speaking & listening and their relationship to the creation, distribution, and reception of written or printed material? I don't mean to suggest that the design of this center is flawed, just that the question of what constitutes "book history" is much more vexed than it appears at first.

On the other hand, any field of study has to have a center...right? What's the more expanded version of a counter-argument to what I've written above?

Posted by at 7:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Ian Gadd on SHARP-L:

As some of you will know, HoBo is a website that provides information about forthcoming history of the book conferences, seminars and lectures in the UK (and to a lesser extent abroad). As the site is updated every week, I have been thinking about ways of informing regular visitors about updates without them having to visit the site each week. As a result, I have added an 'RSS newsfeed' for HoBo; its URL is http://users.ox.ac.uk/~hobo/hobo/hobo.rss. If you 'subscribe' to this, brief details of all recent updates to HoBo will automatically be listed in your RSS 'reader'. (HoBo itself is unchanged and you can continue to consult it as normal whether or not you subscribe to the RSS feed.)

Posted by at 6:10 PM | Permalink

Rare Book School:

With one possible exception, the roster of courses offered by Rare Book School in 2005 on our Web site is now complete.

Continue reading "various book history items" »

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink

In response to an emailed question about foundational texts on the history of the book, I wrote the following response, and I would be glad to hear other suggestions readers might have:

I would recommend that you start with Robert Darnton's "What Is The History of Books?" in his collection of essays entitled The Kiss of Lamourette. (There is a reply to Darnton in the first essay of A Potencie of Life: Books in Society.) If you're the journal browsing type, take a look at Book History, an annual that has been produced by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing for the last several years.

As the starting point with foundational texts, go with Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, which is an abridgement (accessible, but with the footnotes removed!) of her much longer work, The Printing Press As An Agent of Change. If you have time and/or are a fast reader, go with the longer work.

Appearing earlier than Eisenstein's work, Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy was influential for a time, but I have found his work unsatisfying. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy is a good synthesis of the extant work on a topic tangential to book history proper; the study of orality and literacy is a different field, although there are significant intersections.

D. F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts is an important set of essays arguing for the importance of considering not only the material nature of texts themselves but also the environment in which they are produced, circulated, and received.

Most recently, Adrian Johns' The Nature of the Book is seen as, in part, a reconsideration of many of Eistenstein's assertions. Not everyone agrees, however, that he has really successfully refuted what she has to say. A relatively recent issue of American Historical Review has an interchange between the two scholars.

You might also check out The Book History Reader (ed. by Finkelstein and McCleery) and A Dictionary of Book History by John Feather.

The field has tended to take slightly different directions depending on the area of specialization, but the above are pretty important texts. If you were to tell me that 19th-century America is what you're most interested in, for example, I might make a different (or additional) set of recommendations.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink

This came over the SHARP listserv today:

Nov. 12, 2004 — Johannes Gutenberg may be wrongly credited with producing the first Western book printed in movable type, according to an Italian researcher.

Presenting his findings in a mock trial of Gutenberg at the recent Festival of Science in Genoa, Bruno Fabbiani, an expert in printing who teaches at Turin Polytechnic, said the 15th-century German printer used stamps rather than the movable type he is said to have invented between 1452 and 1455.

More...

Posted by at 2:59 PM | Permalink

A beautiful website has been established for the 2005 meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) in Halifax, Nova Scotia to take place July 14-17.

Papers on any aspect of book history and print culture may be proposed. The conference theme "Navigating Texts and Contexts" suggests that examination of the varieties of relationships between texts and contexts would be welcome. In addition, because Halifax is located at one point of what a Canadian historian described as "The North Atlantic Triangle" (Britain, France, and North America), papers on aspects of the book trade in that region would be appropriate.

Paper and session proposals, in either English or French, should be submitted by November 30, 2004. Proposals may be submitted online...

I wish some of you digital/textual studies folks in the blogosphere would start presenting your work at SHARP.

Posted by at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I don't think most people realize what a radical thing the First Amendment to the American Constitution was when it was first proposed:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (emphasis mine)

I tend to read eighteenth-century American history through the lens of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. This quote from Paula McDowell's "Women and the Business of Print" (Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800, ed by Viven Jones. Cambridge, 2000) might help you see why:

Over the period from 1695 o 1774, the English press underwent some of the most important changes in its history. Before 1695, the guild which oversaw the book trade, the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London, held a royal charter granting its membership sole right to print, publish, or traffic in the printed word. Printing was confined to London and the two university towns, there were strict limits on the number of printers, and texts had to be licensed before they could be printed. During the Civil War period, press controls temporarily collapsed; political upheaval and increased literacy rates had contributed to an unprecedented demand for the printed word. In 1662, the Printing or Licensing Act would revive the principles of government censorship, yet the press would never again be as effectively controlled as it had been prior to the 1640s. In 1695, the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse for good, ending pre-publication censorship and limits on the number of master printers. The situation after 1695 was not that of a 'free press'; government and trade restrictions still limited what could be printed and by whom. Nonetheless, the early eighteenth century was a period of anarchic expansion in the print trades. Whereas before 1695 there were only twenty-four legal printers in all of England, by 1795 there were between sixty-five and seventy printing-houses in London alone. (137-138))

Imagine if you had to get permission from the government before you could publish anything (e.g. on your blog). The idea seems ridiculous now, but prior to 1695, that was the norm in the most powerful nation of the English speaking world. This was a kind of dumb phrase, given that England was pretty much the only English speaking nation in the world at this time.

Posted by at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here's an update to my previous post on the two panels sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

In an essay entitled "Speech-Manuscript-Print," D. F. McKenzie writes

"...a phrase like 'the impact of print'--however carefully it is qualified--cannot help but imply a major displacement of writing as a form of record. In the same way, too great a preoccupation with writing and printing (as the technologies of literacy) may lead us to forget the superior virtues of speech. After all, we did not stop speaking when we learned to write, nor writing when we learned to print, nor reading, writing or printing when we entered 'the electronic age.' For those who market texts in those forms, some of them may seem mutually exclusive (do we read the book, hear it on tape, or see the film?), but for the speaker, auditor, reader or viewer, the texts tend to work in complementary, not competitive, ways. None surrenders its place entirely; all undergo some adjustment as new forms arrive and new complicities of interest and function emerge" (Making Meaning: 'Printers of the Mind' and Other Essays; ed by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J.; U Mass Press, 2002; 238).

Panel 1: "The Fate of Script in an Age of Print"

Chair: George H. Williams, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Panelists:

Giles Bergel (Queen Mary, University of London), "Shifting the boundaries of 'the shift from script to print': the case of engraved lettering."

Katherine Ellison (Emory University), "Tracing the Way of an Eagle in the Ayre: Script and Print in Seventeenth-Century Cryptography Manuals"

Eve Tavor Bannet (The University of Oklahoma), "Printed epistolary manuals and the rescripting of manuscript culture."

Panel 2: "The Fate of Script in an Age of Print"

Chair: Eleanor F. Shevlin, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Panelists:

Betty Schellenberg (Simon Fraser University), "Vicarious Reading, Manuscript Culture, and Johnson’s The Rambler"

Rory Wallace (Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design), "Wish You Were Here"

Cheryl Nixon (University of Massachusetts Boston), "Circulating the Law in Manuscript and Print: Chancery Court Cases and Narrative Forms"

Posted by at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The SHARP panel at ASECS 2005 (my original CFP here):

Chair: George Williams

Panelists

Giles Bergel (Queen Mary, University of London), "Shifting the boundaries of 'the shift from script to print': the case of engraved lettering."

Katherine Ellison (Emory University), "Tracing the Way of an Eagle in the Ayre: Script and Print in Seventeenth-Century Cryptography Manuals"

Betty Schellenberg (Simon Fraser University), "Vicarious Reading, Manuscript Culture, and Johnson’s The Rambler"

Rory Wallace (Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design), "Wish You Were Here"

I received enough good proposals for a second panel on the topic, and I've asked the conference organizers if they could accommodate an additional panel. I'll keep you posted...

Posted by at 7:21 PM | Permalink

Making my work public, dear reader, I provide for your reading pleasure a couple of questions I've just posted to c18-L, the email discussion group for eighteenth-century studies:

Continue reading "18th-C British Religious Periodicals" »

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink

Robert Darnton, "First Steps Toward a History of Reading"

Both familiar and strange, [reading] is an activity that we share with our ancestors yet can never be the same as what they experienced. We may enjoy the illusion of stepping outside of time in order to make contact with authors who lived centuries ago. But even if their texts have come down to us unchanged - a virtual impossibility, considering the evolution of layout and of books as physical objects - our relation to those texts cannot be the same as that of readers in the past. Reading has a history. But how can we recover it?

Darnton suggests that scholars writing the history of reading pursue answers to these five questions: How was reading discussed or portrayed at different times and in different places? How was reading learned? What did readers write about their reading either in diaries or as marginalia? How was meaning construed by readers? How did the typographical features of print direct or at least influence the experience of reading? These are, of course, very basic questions, but they are ones we do not yet know the full answers to.

The history of reading is something I've been doing a bit of work in, myself.

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?"

One can easily lose sight of the larger dimensions of the enterprise because book historians often stray into esoteric byways and unconnected specializations. Their work can be so fragmented, even within the limits of the literature on a single country, that it may seem hopeless to conceive of book history as a single subject, to be studied from a comparative perspective across the whole range of historical disciplines. But books themselves do not respect limits either linguisteic or national. They have often been written by authors who belonged to an international republic of letters, composed by printers who did not work in their native tongue, sold by booksellers who operated across national boundaries, and read in one language by readers who spoke another. Books also refuse to be contained within the confines of a single discipline when treated as objects of study. Neither history nor literature nor economics nor sociology nor bibliography can do justice to all the aspects of the life of a book. By its very nature, therefore, the history of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method. But it need not lack conceptual coherence, because books belong to circuits of communicaiton that operate in consistent patterns, however complex they may be. By unearthing those circuits, historians can show that books do not merely recount history; they make it.

Posted by at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

John Feather, "The Book in History and the History of the Book":

The history of the book is built up, like all social history, from bricks, each complete in itself, but each fulfilling its true role only when it is linked with others. If it is indeed true that the book, and the written or printed word it contains, is central to our history, then it follows that it is also central to the study and writing of history. Our understanding of the past, which is the ultimate objective of all history, will be severely impaired if we do not recognize this crucial fact ... The perimiters of book history are defined by the perimeters of the printed word itself and if we accept, as surely we must, that we live in a culture whose development has been based on the transmission and understanding of words, then the history of the book is as fundamental to history as is the book itself to the culture whose history we seek to learn.

Posted by at 11:52 AM | Permalink

Those of you in the KC area might be interested in the following. Please forward as appropriate:

Continue reading "robert darnton to speak in kc" »

Posted by at 10:09 AM | Permalink

Continue reading "digital catalogue of illuminated mss. conference" »

Posted by at 9:18 AM | Permalink

I am about to deliver my paper at SHARP 2004, dear reader, but you are probably asleep right now so I won't ask you to send me good vibes. Lyon, France is fun, but hot. I cannot seem to stop sweating. My French has held up remarkably well, thankfully.

The keyboards are not QWERTY, so typing is a challenge. I cannot find the necessary keys to create HTML tags, for example.

More later!

Posted by at 3:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Edit: Added more info later in the day. I saw Wilco perform last night, and they were great! A small club, and I was right next to the stage. An English band called Clearlake opened, and while they were a little rough around the edges in their performance, I think I'll probably check out some of their recordings. Nels Cline, the avant garde jazz guitarist touring with Wilco, used everything from a metal spring to (I think) a film canister to get sounds out of his guitar, plus he had about 20 effects pedals around him. Great stuff.

I spent today at the oldest public library in the English speaking world: Chetham's Library. I examined about a half dozen Bibles from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They contain a variety of marginalia, but nothing that compares to what I found in Bradburn's diary. What I'm after is the ways in which people used their Bibles, and in addition to sermons and essays on how best to read the scriptures, we have marks written on pages by readers. The sample size, so far, is way too small to come to any definite conclusions, however. I'm still trying to decide how best to construct the comparisons; I'd like to determine how unusual or common Bradburn's practice was. Suggestions are welcome.

Here are some research issues I'm dealing with:

• I could be wrong, but I think libraries with special collections are not so likely to have Bibles with a great deal of marginalia. Rare books may have been purchased because they do not have all the marks of reading that scholars like me are interested in. Books with a great deal of writing in them could have been considered less valuable when the purchases were made, unless the book belonged to someone famous. Then the marginalia would make the book more valuable. I'm looking for Bibles belonging to ordinary folks, although I certainly wouldn't turn down the opportunity to examine, say, Jonathan Swift's Bible.
• Even if I do find marginalia in an eighteenth-century Bible, I can't be sure who put them there. Libraries often, but not always, know who owned a particular book before they bought it (i.e. the book's provenance), but we can't be sure if that person is the one who wrote in it.
• Even if I do find marginalia in an eighteenth-century Bible, I can't be sure that they were put there in the eighteenth century. They may have been added in the nineteenth century, which will provide information about reading practices in that century, but not in the one I'm interested in.
• I am sure that eighteenth-century marginalia is sitting on the pages of Bibles published in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but how to find those Bibles? I know of one example that I intend to examine, but library catalogues usually record the date of publication, not the dates of marginalia. I have to say, though, that Chetham's Library's online catalogue has excellent, detailed bibliographical notes on their rare books, and I was able to determine when, according to the archivists, the marginalia in particular books were created.
• Finally, marginalia require interpretation before they will yield information about reading practices. For example, what do all those crosses in Bradburn's Bible mean? Were they texts of sermons he heard? Or were they, as I am hypothesizing, texts of sermons he preached? These questions are only the tip of the iceberg.

Chetham's has on display one of only 5 seventeenth-century handpresses in England. There are only 70 in the world. I didn't realize they were so rare. Perhaps once new presses were developed, there was no reason to preserve the old ones. Of course, the fact that they were made out of wood, rather than the iron of later presses, probably didn't help their longevity, much.

In keeping with the day's early modern theme, I took a break for lunch and had oysters on the half shell at Sinclair's Oyster Bar, which dates from the 16th or 17th century (or 18th) depending on whom you ask.

Tomorrow I finish at the Methodist Archives (for this year), and then I'm off to the British Library in London. I'm meeting a colleague whose speciality is the Renaissance, and we're gonna party like it's 1688! (1688...anyone?...anyone?...Bueller?)

Posted by at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was lucky enough to see the legendary Patti Smith and her band perform on Friday night, and they were absolutely amazing. If that's not enough, Television was the opening act. In other news, yesterday I sustained a small wound to my forehead, and pride, when I walked smack into a pole on the sidewalk. I was walking along when I noticed a poster for an upcoming performance by a band I saw a long time ago, and as I was looking over my shoulder and thinking when that was ... WHAM! stars...pain...blood. Today I'm nursing a swollen eye, but it's not black, thankfully.

My research is going well at the Methodist Archives here in Manchester, if a bit slowly. It always takes longer than I predict it will to work through the material. I could do with a good six months here, frankly. I'd like to share with you, dear reader, some of my research and thinking process:

Last year, towards the end of my trip, I was very excited to happen upon Samuel Bradburn's Bible, a discovery that resulted from blind luck. Bradburn (1751-1816) was an itinerant lay preacher who became so well known for his pulpit performances that he was referred to as the Methodist Demosthenes. He began his itinerancy in 1774 in the Liverpool circuit, travelling and preaching incessantly for the next forty years. I found his Bible while going through a box of his papers. Expecting only handwritten material such as diaries and letters, very valuable resources themselves, I was surprised to discover a fat, leatherbound, printed book. None of the library's finding aids that I had consulted made reference to this Bible. I'm not even sure that any scholars have spent any time looking at it before me.

The first thing I noticed was the handwriting on the pages throughout the entire book. Marginalia is not uncommon, of course, but this is really something else. These marks are often very useful for reconstructing the practice of reading, a central concern of my larger research project and of many scholars in the fields of book history and critical literacy studies. Like many readers, Bradburn did write a few comments related to the content of what he was reading; for example, next to Exodus 8.14, he wrote, "The frogs were only dead, not removed! This was to convince Pharaoh of their being real ones, that he might truly repent. Such are thy dealings, Lord, in many afflictions towards thy people!" But compared to the other kinds of marginalia to be found in the book, such comments are fairly rare. More noticeably, Bradburn also drew distinctive symbols next to individual verses, more than a thousand of them, in fact. I am cautiously interpreting these symbols as markers for verses that he used for his sermons. In order to confirm this hypothesis, I need to consult his sermon memoranda. Incredibly, Bradburn recorded a few brief details about every single sermon he preached for 40 years: over 13,000 sermons. Each one lists which Bible verse he used, so if I cross reference the Bible and the memoranda, I'll have a good idea of what the iron crosses were for. This will provide us with some valuable clues about the practice of preaching and the ways in which it was interwoven with reading. This cross reference will have to wait until I return to American, however, where the memoranda are available on microfilm. I'm using my time to focus on material only available here.

Most impressively, to me, Bradburn sketched out on the endpapers what I originally took to be an elaborate reading schedule for the entire year, a schedule of study broken down day by day such that in twelve months he would have read most of the Old Testament once and five books of the New Testament three times. Until relatively recently, I thought this was an example of the Methodists' obsessive concern with regular and disciplined reading habits. John Wesley, for example, advised followers and preachers, in particular, to set aside time in the morning and evening for study. Jeff, however, suggested I consult the Church of England lectionary to see how Bradburn's study might compare. Now, I will humbly admit that I had never even heard the term "lectionary" before. In the words of the Oxford Companion to the Bible, "A lectionary is a set selection of passages from the Bible to be read aloud in public worship over a fixed period of time." The Church of England lectionary is to be found in their Book of Common Prayer, and a quick comparison of the BCP and Bradburn's Bible reveals that there is not a significant difference between the two. A more detailed examination might uncover something, but for now, I'm just recording his reading schedule. When I get back to American, I'll undertake a detailed comparison.

So what do I do with the fact that this reading schedule is not, in fact, evidence of the characteristically obsessive reading habits of Methodists? Well, for one thing, it's a bit of evidence that they were not as different from establishment churchgoers as outsiders feared they were. Although the Methodists did not split from the Church of England until 1796, they were long the target of suspicion as radical religious nuts. Bradburn's Bible, admittedly one piece of evidence among thousands, is evidence of an adherence to the state church schedule of worship.

But really, I need to gather more information in order to make any informed conclusions. I need to avoid making too many generalizations based on limited data. Here are some as yet unanswered questions:

• How does Bradburn's Bible, with its detailed marginalia, compare to other Bibles from the same period?
• Did other preachers use a similar system of marking their sermon verses?
• Did lay people make the same kinds of notes in their Bibles?
• Do Bibles owned by members of different sects have significantly different marginalia?
• Was there any taboo associated with writing on the pages of a sacred text?
• How unusual was it for someone outside of the Church of England to follow the official lectionary?

The challenge, of course, is relatively limited time. I could research until the end of time, always finding a need for new information. But the fact is that I am here in England for only so long, and I only have so many years to work before I have to have produced enough published material to make tenure.

Like many assistant professors, I need to cut out reasonably-sized slices to publish as articles while I work on the book. I try to have patience, but it's not easy.

Posted by at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

There's a moment when you're crossing all the time zones at 625 miles per hour, when the light in the sky no longer looks normal, when flight attendants have brought you a meal and you're not sure if you're supposed to be hungry or not but you eat it anyway. There's a moment when the hands just fall off the face of the clock, the gears slip loose from the spring, and you have no idea what time it is. I started thinking of this as "zero time." The passage of time eludes your senses. I kept doing the math, and it didn't seem to help. The inside of the Boeing 777 offered no usual indicators of time, and the trip here to England seemed to be over before I knew it. I managed only about 2 hours of fitful sleep.

I'm researching Methodist communications networks in eighteenth-century Britain: preaching, letter writing, diaries, publishing, reading, writing, listening, sharing. The first day in the library was pretty spacey due to lack of sleep, but I managed to get some good work done, returning to the inventory of books that was completed upon John Wesley's death in 1791. It's a very detailed snapshot of Methodist publishing activity in the late eighteenth-century.

Next, I returned to the Bible of Methodist lay preacher Samuel Bradburn, obsessively recording as many details from it as possible. This book is filled with marginalia, most of it in the form of fat "iron crosses" next to particular verses, which I take to be his system for reminding himself which texts to use when he preaches. Over a thousand of them are spread throughout just about every book in both the Old and New Testament. As far as I know, no one has ever written about the ways in which preachers customize their Bibles to improve their use as tools like this. I don't know how many Bibles that look like this survive from the eighteenth century, and I did not expect to find it: I just opened what I thought would be a box of Bradburn's personal papers and there it was.

I also got a tour of the boxes and boxes of manuscript material downstairs. Librarians and archivists are wonderful people, listening to what you're interested in and then pointing you towards what you need. And each box seemed to contain something unexpected. There are dozens of boxes containing thousands of pages, and as with most special collections, the level of cataloguing with most of the material is relatively general: you know the box contains the papers of so-and-so, but you don't necessarily know what those papers are. Diary? Receipt book? Letters? It's a treasure hunt. Fun and scary at the same time. What if I miss the best stuff? What if what I hope to find isn't here? What if it doesn't exist?

If you want to see something silly and fun, Manchester is currently doing the CowParade.

And just for yucks, here's a brief playlist of Manchester music in roughly chronological order:

• Buzzcocks, "Just Lust"
• Joy Division, "Digital"
• New Order, "Blue Monday"
• The Smiths, "Boy With the Thorn in His Side"
• Badly Drawn Boy, "Pissing in the Wind"

Note: last year's Manchester Adventure starts here.

Posted by at 10:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The 2005 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies will take place in Las Vegas, baby! The calls for papers are available online. I'll be chairing the SHARP panel:

“The Fate of Script in an Age of Print”

It is generally acknowledged that the technology of print facilitated many important cultural transformations during the eighteenth century. However, manuscript practices clearly did not disappear with the advent of print. This panel invites scholars from all fields to interrogate the boundary between the cultures of manuscript and print in the eighteenth century and to investigate the ways in which their histories might be said to overlap. Materials of interest might include but are not limited to commonplace books, diaries, graffiti, letters, marginalia, recipes, record keeping, and shorthand. Papers are welcome from those working in a variety of languages and in a variety of national traditions.

Proposals from non-SHARP members are welcome with the understanding that they must become members of SHARP if their paper is accepted and they agree to present. Please send one page abstracts for this panel to williamsgh@umkc.edu by September 15, 2004.

Posted by at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Jason J. provides links to some interesting readings for a summer seminar titled "The Future of the Page."

Posted by at 11:22 AM | Permalink

If you're going to be in New York in early June, this announcement, via SHARP-L, might be of interest to you:

The New York Chapter of the American Printing History Association is pleased to announce a lecture by Mark Batty, of Mark Batty Publishing, Ltd., on June 2, 2004 at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, NY at 6 p.m. Mr Batty will be speaking on the complexities, trials and tribulations of making a new edition of Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683), the first book ever written on printing and printing types. The text, edited by bibliographer John Lane, has been extensively annotated and expanded for scholars and artists in the fields of printing, typography and the graphic arts. The new edition is based on that of the Oxford Univesity Press (1962), edited by Herbert David and Harry Carter.

The event is free and open to the public. More information about the event is available on the APHA website calendar. For information about the New York Chapter, contact its president Lowell Bodger at 212 777-0841 or write to APHA-NY, PO Box 1074, New York, NY 10278.

Posted by at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A detailed program is available online.

Posted by at 9:25 AM | Permalink

Via Slashdot: Sony, Phillips, and E-Ink have teamed up to produce a reading device -- christened the Librié -- with a display that mimics the features of paper.

The hardware technology that makes such a display possible is amazing, but really, the key details as to why this device is a bad idea are to be found in this story from The Guardian:

To keep a tight rein on the flow of ebooks, 15 major publishers and newspapers, including Kodansha, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, have teamed up with Sony to form a company called Publishing Link and to provide content through a website known as Timebook Town.

[T]he sting in the tail is that each title is really only borrowed. Thanks to Open MG protection, the content is unreadable after two months, so it's best to think of the Librié experience as a library of sorts.

Okay, let's review.

There are billions of pages of information available for free on the Internet, but with this device, you get to pay for the privilege of reading material in a proprietary format that makes the content disappear after two months. More expensive then paper books and less durable? Where do I sign up!?

Oh yeah, this product is sure to be a big success!

The history of reading teaches us that readers engage in a wide array of complex and unpredicatable behaviors. Rare book rooms the world over are filled with evidence of this fact. One of the strengths of the "old-fashioned" book format is that it supports a wide array of complex and unpredicatable behaviors. Digital media present an opportunity to widen that range of possible behaviors even further: build your own concordances of your favorite works in seconds, search your personal library for other occurences of an interesting word or phrase, make your own literary "smash ups" by slicing and dicing plots, create an electronic commonplace book.

How sad that these possibilities have yet to be made available in a dedicated reading device. Any reading format that attempts to put absolute boundaries upon reading behaviors is bound to fail because attempts to make readers submit will breed resentment. Either someone will hack the Librié, or it will flop.

See also these stories on the Librié: NY Times, Forbes, C|NET.

Posted by at 11:45 PM | Permalink

This is really just a "Hey, isn't this cool?" kind of post, and I guess I've had a lot of those lately. Take a look at Joseph Viscomi's chapter on William Blake's "Illuminated Printing" techniques.

“Illuminated Printing” was first published in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, edited by Morris Eaves, 2003. It is republished here by permission of Cambridge University Press. While the text remains the same, the electronic version has 95 illustrations versus 9 in the printed version. The illustrations demonstrate in detail the stages of both Blake’s relief etching (“illuminated printing”) and conventional intaglio etching according to the six “Chambers” in the “Printing house in Hell,” from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The comparison of these two methods of etching will help reveal what was borrowed, altered, invented, and radical in Blake’s new mode of graphic production. The illustrations, which are linked to enlargements that have detailed captions, supplement the text but also function autonomously as slide shows on the technical and aesthetic contexts in which illuminated printing was invented, and as tutorials in the production of engravings, etchings, and relief etchings.

Fascinating stuff. Without the Blake Archive, I would not be able to teach Blake the way that I do.

Posted by at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Slate presents a slide-show of artwork created from the results of a homophobic book vandal's assault on the San Francisco Public Library.

Posted by at 9:05 PM | Permalink

The latest volume of Romantic Praxis is entitled Romantic Libraries and includes three essays:

• What Was Mr. Bennet Doing in his Library, and What Does It Matter?, by H. J. Jackson
• Bibliographical Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book-Object , by Ina Ferris
• "Wedded to Books": Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists, by Deidre Lynch

The "about" page reads:

This volume seeks to make more visible in Romantic studies not just the ubiquitous bookishness of the period but the role of the physical book in personal and cultural identity-formations. In different ways, all three essays in the volume concentrate on how the public and national role of libaries as institutions of circulation was not only given affective charge but also often unsettled by an individual relationship to books and by the formation of private libraries as personal sites of collection and memory.

Posted by at 6:34 PM | Permalink