This is a post I put together as part of an ongoing conversation with a group of folks who aren’t early modernists but are interested in media. I thought I’d look back at some examples of early print that disrupt our sense of what was typical. In the back of my head I was thinking about Matt Kirschenbaum’s work in Mechanisms and the sorts of tensions between how we perceive media and how it manifests itself—I’ve written about some of those ideas here, too, in my continuing curiosity about the distance between how we imagine early print and how it was experienced. But I’ve not added to that writing here, and have instead just collected some pictures of things that struck me (well, I did include captions). So let your imagination run wild in exploring what we might see or not see in these things. Use the slideshow to navigate through the images; click on any individual picture to expand it. All images are from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and full details for each image can be found in this group in their digital collection. Feel free to leave comments with your thoughts or links to more images.
Enjoy!
print begets manuscript
manuscript or print? (it’s cataloged as manuscript)
when print is not enough (tip in blank pages to add your own notes)
finis or not finis?
print begets manuscript, redux
preprinted and prepaid
learning to write
printed shorthand
a key to annotating
writing and reading Latin (or, early modern Busytown)
hand rubrication (adding red ink to a page printed in a font that didn’t catch on)
waiting to be finished
waiting to be finished, redux
fill in the blank (“Purposely that space I left, that as many as I shall persuade … may set their hands to their definitive sentence”)
don’t like it? excise it
hand coloring
coloring becomes discoloration
sewing in a movable figure
diagrams, print and manuscript
commentary surrounds text
commentary interacts with text
metamorphoses
parallel text translation
how do you display multiple languages?
shape poetry: do you read this from left to right or top to bottom?
ignoring the gutter
plate marks, and battle diagrams
a hand-colored woodprint
the woodblock that made it
orient the page to yourself
orient yourself to the page
eat your books (bookworms aren’t metaphors)
paper and wood and horn
chalk and paper
one sheet, one proclamation
one text, one sheet
one sheet turns into four leaves
one sheet accidentally preserved (binder’s waste)
accidentally saving the earliest edition of “The Tunning of Elinor Running”
when the paper is crooked, so is the print
illustrate your bible
what’s in a title page? title or occasion description?
title page or advertisement?
white on black
architecture and print
tables summarizing content
what’s underneath that skin?
and what’s under those organs?
and what’s under those?
and what’s underneath?
and what’s?
printing off the weekly dead
big
small
tiny and oblong
tiny and tall
tiny book, big picture
patterns not words
the power of black
a humble son writes to his powerful mother
a humble author dedicates to his powerful queen
protect your data (early modern security for a deed)
black and red and black (a prayer for my lord or my lady?)
calculations are only as accurate as their maker (“Beare with defectes the use is necessarie”)
how do you fit a long winding road onto a single opening?
how do you list all the gifts to Elizabeth for the new year?
the inside of a letter…
…folds in on itself to become its envelope
books aren’t flat
manuscripts can have heft
and books are sometimes blank
updated 18 November 2015 to switch gallery display
