Sometimes you look around at what you’re doing and you realize that it’s time to do something else. For me, that time is now: I’ve left my job at the Folger. For the immediate future, I’ll be concentrating on writing A Handbook for Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–1800, which is under contract with Wiley Blackwell. The book is intended to introduce undergraduate and early graduate students—and everyone else!—to how hand-press books were made and to working with them, whether in your hands or on screen. Those of you who have been relying on Philip Gaskell’s wonderful but dense A New Introduction to Bibliography will find A Handbook a more accessible introduction in the classroom. And those of you who know nothing about early modern bibliography and have no idea why you’d want to teach it will become converts to the joys of the subject. Along with writing A Handbook, I’ll be developing an open-access website with lots of images…
Year: 2015
Correcting with cancel slips
Thanks to my last post, when Mitch Fraas and I were looking at how different copies of the same book handled having a printer error (Judas instead of Jesus, in that case), I’ve spent the last week with cancel slips on my mind—those pieces of papers that are pasted in to correct printing mistakes. Once you start looking, you can find cancel slips in a huge range of uses and states. (And as long-time readers know, I’m always interested in printer’s mistakes and how they can be corrected.) What do you do if you’ve misprinted one of three propositions central to the 1599 Westminster conference? You print the corrected third proposition and paste it over the error—cheaper than reprinting the whole sheet (the whole book is only two sheets long) and easier than pasting in a canceled leaf. Of course, for shorter errors, printers often included a list of errata—known mistakes…
Keeping your Jesus and Judas straight
Co-written by Sarah Werner and Mitch Fraas One might think that when printing the New Testament, one would want to avoid at all costs mixing up Jesus and Judas. However, this month’s crocodile shows that such mistakes did happen: As two commentators simultaneously identified the mystery, the image shows a well-known misprint from the 1610 Geneva Bible (STC 2212) in John 6:67, in which instead of Jesus speaking to the apostles, Judas is identified as the speaker. Bible errors can be amusing in and of themselves, but what brought this one to our attention is a recent class that Mitch Fraas was teaching with Zachary Lesser at the University of Pennsylvania. For that class, they pulled out Penn’s copy of this bible, and discovered that the error had been hand corrected:
resources: digitized early printed books
Sometimes I give talks about the challenges and opportunities for digitizing early printed books. I prefer to do this by looking at lots of different examples, including lots of different reproductions of different copies of the same book or different reproductions of the same copy of a single book. I keep a periodically updated list of these things to draw from when I’m teaching, and I thought some of you might like to draw on it as well. It’s a page of links rather than notes on my thoughts on the subject, but in some cases, they’re books I’ve written about before and I link to those pieces. In any case, I hope you find my digitization examples useful, and in turn, I’d love to hear from you if you have other fruitful examples that will help us think about the subject. It’s always incredibly fun for me to talk with folks about this stuff,…
Twelfth Night
What better play to consider on the twelfth night of Christmas than Twelfth Night? Although there are discrepant practices today whether the Feast of the Epiphany—marking the visit of the Three Kings to Bethlehem to worship the Christ child—is celebrated on the 5th of January or the 6th, in Elizabethan England, the Epiphany was celebrated on the 6th. Like other festivities in the season, Twelfth Night was a time of topsy turvy celebrations inverting social order: boys crowned in mock religious processions, heavy drinking and lavish feasts, parody and misrule replacing stern morality. It was, of course, also marked by song and performance. So, what does this all have to do with Shakespeare’s play?