book technologies

Digesting turkey hasn’t been helping with my processing thoughts for this blog, so I’m going to do the classic blog thing of directing you to some other blog posts:

At Mercurius Politicus, Nick Poyntz has a great post on “Information technology and early modern readers“, thinking about bookshelves and the ways in which the organization of books in physical space shapes their use. He looks at the libraries of Montaigne, Cotton, and Pepys, each of which were organized differently and suggests different ways in which those libraries were processed. Nice quotes from these early modern scholars and great links to more images.

A less scholarly approach but more visually lush take on libraries can be found at the reoccuring “bookporn” series at A Historian’s Craft. Post #19 has some great shots of the library at St John’s College, Cambridge, with its fabulous call number indexes. (Of course, I’m partial to the Folger, both the Old Reading Room and the New Reading Room.)

Over at d i a p s a l m a t a are some fabulous images from a couple of Renaissance anatomy books. They’re not just any anatomy books, however, but flap books, the kind where you lift the flap to see what lies beneath the skin, or muscle, or skull. The images themselves are great. But they are also a prompt for some thoughts on the challenges on digitizing early modern books; an earlier post on vovelles touches on this thread as well.

[Corrected: Yes, for those of you who caught this post when it first went out, there was a typo in the post title; it’s now corrected, thanks to blogging technologies!]