Category: Wynken de Worde

4 May 2013

What do we want from online facsimiles of Shakespeare?

Over at The Collation last week, I wrote a blog post providing a quick explanation for what might be gained from looking at multiple copies of digital facsimiles of the First Folio and linking to the eight copies I’ve found. Mostly what I was interested in there was the availability of such things and a taste of the joys of copy-specific reading. Here I want to look at what actually matters to me a bit more: the usability of such resources. It should be perfectly clear, but I’m going to say it anyway, just to be safe. This is my personal site and I am not representing the Folger’s point of view here, only my own as a user of such resources.

Before I look at specific examples, here’s what I want as a scholar:

high-resolution cover-to-cover images, zoomable to, say, larger-than-life size with full clarity so that I can pick out details on pieces of type;
choice between viewing as pages and viewing as a book with two-page spreads that, ideally, convey the depth of the book and the shifting balance of pages as you move through it so that I know where in the volume I am;
navigation synced to plays (with modern acts and scene divisions), to signature marks, and to page numbers so that I can easily find my way to wherever I want;
cataloging information that tells me something about the copy I’m looking at; at a minimum, shelfmark and identification of which pages are not original F1 leaves, but preferably including information about provenance, binding, marginalia, uncorrected pages, and other copy-specific details;
cataloging information that tells me something about the digital surrogate I’m looking at; at a minimum, when it was built and who built it;
a CC-NC or, even better, a CC-BY license that will allow for downloading and reusing at a minimum specific images and, preferably, the entire work, so that I can share it in my teaching and scholarship and so that I can compare multiple copies;
and since I’m dreaming here, the ability to read offline in a friendly interface so that I can access it even when I’m (gasp!) without a good internet connection;
and the ability to add my own annotations, so that I can keep track of what I’m finding.

Well. That’s not asking for much. Maybe someday all my desires will be met, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet. And it won’t happen unless we start advocating for what we need in these resources. (My focus here is on the First Folio, but my points hold for any digitized book and, to a slightly lesser degree, to any digitized textual work. We all need transparent records, digital copies that are available to reuse, and high-resolution images that convey not only the words on the item but the physical manifestation of that item.)

So in the spirit of helpful critique, here’s how the 8 copies currently available for free online stack up. (N.b. I’ve linked to catalog records where I can find them in the headlines. West numbers refer to the number given the copies in Anthony James West’s census of First Folios.¹ Full descriptions of all these copies can be found in West and Rasmussen’s Descriptive Catalogue;² quick takes on which copies have leaves missing or in uncorrected states can be found at the end of my Collation post.)

tl;dr I imagine many of you won’t read all the way through this 4,000-word post, so here’s the unsurprising upshot: digital projects don’t age well. For the First Folio, that means that what used to be cutting-edge in terms of quality and interface can, 5 to 10 years later, can be woefully behind the times in offering what users want. We need to plan ahead so that we can offer users the tools they want now while also building in reuse for future users. That means, above all, super high-quality images, open access, clear documentation, and constant exploration.

Folger Shakespeare Library, copy no. 68 (West 126)

Available as page spreads in the Folger’s digital image collection, as page spreads and as a pdf through the World Digital Library; downloadable as individual page openings and as a pdf.

This tends to be my go-to copy of the First Folio when I need to check what’s in it and when I need to zoom in for good details. I like this copy in part because it’s a complete copy—all the leaves are original F1 leaves, rather than facsimiles or replacements from other copies or later editions—and it has some nice manuscript markings setting off some passages. (I always like reminders that books aren’t pristine collectibles but objects to be used.) I also like the Folger’s digitization of it. It’s cover-to-cover, so you can see the Wodehouse bookplate in the front, and the full-page spreads show the depth of the volume as well: in this image from Measure for Measure, you can easily spot from the visible page edges that we’re still well near the front of the volume.

Folger STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68, sig. F4v-F5r

I like, too, that the images are high-resolution enough that you can really zoom in and see details. Here is a screenshot of the most zoomed-in view of the same opening (click on the image to enlarge):

screenshot of zoomed-in view of Folger's copy 68 — screenshot of zoomed-in view of Folger’s copy 68, including the navigation tool in the lower right

I also like that it’s easy to download individual images from the Folger’s Luna interface; the full-page spread that you see above is the maximum size that is allowed for downloading; click on it and you’ll see how big it is. And it’s easy to link to individual openings (see the examples that I’ve included above). If you’re a more adept Luna user (or if you’ve read Jim Kuhn’s tooltip posts in The Collation), you’ll find that you can link to zoomed-in views or to view of multiple images, too (see, for instance, this comparison of two copies). Information from the Folger’s incredibly thorough catalog records is included in Luna, so it’s easy to understand what you’re looking at without leaving the image; information is also provided identifying the image, including the signature marks (but not, however, page numbers or modern act/scene divisions). There isn’t any obvious information about when the images were taken or anything else about the dates or tools involved in the production of the digital images and interface.³

But what I don’t like about using this also comes from the Luna interface. It’s not particularly easy or intuitive to quickly find your way to specific places in the volume. If you’re looking for something in King Lear and you know your way through the First Folio already, your instinct will be to scroll through the thumbnails until you find the beginning of the play. But that gets annoying. When I was looking for a page that included some of the marginalia I mentioned, the easiest way to do it was to flip through the pdf I downloaded from the World Digital Library, find the opening that looked good, and then locate that in Luna by skimming the thumbnails. The pdf is not very high resolution in and of itself, so while it’s fine for full-page spreads, if you try to zoom in to see details, it blurs out pretty quickly. Here’s a rough equivalent to the zoomed-in view from the online version, this one from the pdf (it’s about 200%):

zoomed-in detail of pdf of copy 68 — screenshot of zoomed-in detail of copy 68 pdf

So I switch back and forth between the two when I’m trying to locate the details of something specific. It’s also worth mentioning, speaking of ease of use, that the pdf file has most of the page openings rotated 180°. The best option is to download it and then use a tool like PDF Toolkit to rotate all but the first and last two pages of the file.

If you’re looking for a specific play, it’s possible to construct a search to just pull up, say, Measure for Measure in copy 68. Use “Advance Search” to search “Call Number” for “STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68″ and “Image Details” for “Measure for Measure”; when you get the results, sort them by “Multiple Page Sort Order” and *phew* you’ve got your play. There used to be links on the Folger’s website for early copies of the plays, including in F1 and relevant quartos, and my understanding is those should be restored soon (I’ll update this with the relevant link when that happens).

The World Digital Library’s interface is built around the same images that the Folger provides through Luna. It seems like it should be slightly easier to navigate (instead of going through thumbnails, you can click arrows to turn to the next or previous opening), but I find the transitions between the images to be so slow as to be more frustrating than helpful.

The Folger has licensed this, as with the rest of the items in its digital image collection, with a CC-NC license.

Folger Shakespeare Library, copy no. 5 (West 63)

Available as page spreads in the Folger’s Digital Image Collection, as a pdf from Octavo editions, and as page spreads through the Rare Book Room; downloadable as individual page openings and as a pdf.

This is my go-to pdf, though not my go-to online digital copy. It’s a good copy of the First Folio—only a few original leaves missing⁴—and was one of the first really high-resolution digitizations of the First Folio that was easily available. Octavo chose it as the basis of their edition of the First Folio, published on CD-ROM in, I think, 2001. That edition, available for purchase but also freely through the Folger’s catalog record, is rich not only for the nice digitization of the First Folio, but for the incredible contextual material accompanying it, including essays by Arthur Freeman, Stephen Orgel, and A.R. Braunmuller, as well as a copy of Peter Blayney’s amazing booklet on the First Folio. It’s a wealth of information. (The pdf file at the Folger has been corrupted; at the moment it has the contextual material, but not F1 or Blayney. I think it will be replaced with a better file soon; I’ll update this when that happens.) If I had to recommend one digital First Folio to an interested non-specialist, the Octavo pdf is what I’d choose, given the strengths of its digitization, its ease of navigation, and its fabulous contextual material.

The pdf is easy to navigate—you can use the arrows to move back and forth, of course, but each play and act/scene is bookmarked so that you can jump straight to it. And the resolution is ok, maybe slightly better than the WDL pdf of copy 68:

screenshot of zoomed-in detail of copy 5 pdf

The digital copy in Luna has the same interface advantages (cover-to-cover! full-page openings showing depth!) and disadvantages (argh, navigation!) of copy 68, but you can’t zoom in to quite the same level of detail in copy 5:

screenshot of zoomed-in detail of Folger copy 5

The images through the Rare Book Room are the same as in Luna, but with a different interface. I like the ability to use arrows to navigate through the book, but it doesn’t let you zoom in very much.

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Arch. G c.7 (West 31)

Available online in page spreads, downloadable as individual page images, and eventually as a pdf (I’m positive I saw something about this latter point somewhere, but now I’m not finding my steps back to it; I hope it’s actually true and not something I totally hallucinated).

This is the most recent addition to the collection of digitized First Folios; you can learn more about the publicly funded campaign to digitize it on the project’s blog, “Sprint for Shakespeare.” It’s also a (kind of) infamous copy of the First Folio. The Bodleain acquired it in 1624 and then—gasp!—subsequently got rid of it, apparently in 1664 when the Third Folio (which it purchased) made the First “obsolete.” The Bodleian’s copy of the First reappeared at the University in 1905, when Gladwyn Turbutt (an Oxford undergraduate whose family owned the book since the early eighteenth century) brought it in for advice about the binding. It was immediately recognized as the long-gone Bodleian deposit copy and the Turbutt family delayed its sale to the highest bidder (*cough cough Henry Folger*) to give the Bodleian a chance to raise the money to purchase it, which it did. What makes this copy interesting is not only the Bod’s foolishly getting rid of it and its spectacular return, but the fact that the book remained in its original binding and showing all the wear-and-tear of its usage.

The online interface of this copy’s digitization comes in two options. The first is through the BookReader interface developed by the Internet Archive. It lets you navigate the book either through thumbnail images or in one-page or two-page spreads. There are bookmarks to let you easily jump to specific acts and scenes in specific plays, and in the two-page opening view, you can easily see a visualization of page edges to show where you are in the volume and to flip ahead to specific pages:

our favorite opening in Measure for Measure, as in the Bodleian's interface — our favorite opening in Measure for Measure, as in the Bodleian’s interface

I generally find this a good way to navigate a book—it’s easy to work out where you are and to get to where you want to be. The fake visualization of the fake edges is a little weird, though, and while I love the pop-up that shows you where your mouse is when it’s jumping ahead, I couldn’t actually get the book to jump when I clicked on the margins. And in this particular incarnation, however, I’m disturbed by the gutter issues. Since many of the images of individual pages includes a glimpse across the gutter of the opposite page (not a bad thing for an individual image), when they’re stitched together into a page opening, the weirdness across the gutter is, well, weird.

On the other hand, working with the individual page images is super easy. There’s a link that takes you to pages of thumbnails, each of which is identified both by signature mark and by play title and page number; the image below, for example, is labeled “F4v / MM p.68.”

downloadable image from the Bodleain's copy — downloadable image from the Bodleain’s copy

It’s a good resolution (click on the image above to be able to enlarge it to its full size), and I like the touch of including the ruler to indicate the leaf’s size. It’s also wonderful that the Bodleian has released this under a CC-BY license and clearly indicates what that means in terms of usage. They have a great statement on the site’s accessibility, too (it looks like that’s something required by Oxford; I wish more places would keep accessibility in mind as they are designing their sites). I wish the site was more clearly linked to the cataloging information (I got to the catalog record by navigating through the link to the Bodleian’s main website in the upper right corner of the site and the searching in the catalog for the shelfmark). And I haven’t figured out an obvious way to be able to link to specific openings in the book view, although you can link to individual page images (check out the front pastedown, for instance!).

The Bodleian’s biggest strength is combining ease of use for non-scholars and for scholars. By using the Internet Archive interface, they’ve made it friendly for general browsers to look through the book. (As Pip Willcox said in a tweet to me, given that the public funded the project, the Library felt strongly that it had to be fully open-access—and, obviously, that it had to be friendly to use.) And by separating the book into individual page images, they’ve made it usable for scholars like me. That, I think, is key to successful digital First Folios—they need to work not only for the finicky experts but for the general user. And I think the Bodleian has mostly achieved that, unlike most of the other digital copies.

Meisei University (West 201)

Available online as individual page images with transcriptions of marginalia; downloadable as individual page images. Akihiro Yamada’s book on the marginalia and his transcriptions is available in its entirety as well.

This is a fascinating copy of the First Folio, and the most interesting copy of the ones that have been put online. It has extensive early modern marginalia dating, according to Akihiro Yamada’s study of it, from the 1620s or 1630s in a Scottish hand. There are underlinings, dots, and marginal notes focusing primarily on summarizing the play. The annotations are understandably the focus of this interface; it’s really not designed to read the play easily, but does offer a range of ways into the marginalia. You can navigate to individual pages by choosing the play and either act/scene/lines or through-line numbers; you can also navigate by signature marks or by image number. Once you’re at a page, you can then use the arrows to browse to the next or the previous image. It’s not instantly obvious—the landing page is a black screen instructing you to “Please Search Page Image” rather than the first leaf of the volume. But once you’re on an image, you have the option of enlarging the page (the initial result is thumbnail sized), enlarging the marginal notes, and reading a transcription of the note.

Here, for example, is a screenshot of a page from Measure for Measure, enlarged to its largest side, along with a detail of the marginalia and its transcription:

screenshot of Meisei copy showing marginalia and its transcription

As you can tell, the page itself doesn’t enlarge particularly well, though the details of the marginal notes are a bit better. You can also download a page image:

downloaded page image from Meisei copy ( (c) Meisei University)

It’s pretty small, but its resolution is okay (as elsewhere, click to enlarge to its full size). Their copyright page states that “All rights reserved; no part of this database may be reproduced or reprinted in any form, except for non-profit-making, educational or scholarly use. In such cases, please cite the copyright of Meisei University and write to the contact address.”

As I said, though, the point of this digitization isn’t to read the First Folio, it’s to study its marginalia. So while you can search by page image, you can also search the marginalia, using either the “lexicon” option (words that appear in Yamada’s index) or the “concordance” option (words from the entire marginalia corpus):

I don’t really have a project that would use this, but I like that they’ve enabled it. The (comparatively) low resolution and the sometimes not-intuitive interface are likely residues of the project’s age: it began in 2002 and ended in 2008. Quibbles about that aside, it’s wonderful that Meisei, which bought the book in 1980, has taken these steps to make its riches explorable.

Since I’ve already gone on long enough, and am feeling a bit burnt out, my examinations of the remaining online First Folios is going to be speedier.

University of Pennsylvania, Furness Library (West 180):

Available as individual page images and possible to save as jpegs. Penn’s interface makes it easy to navigate the First Folio by play or by page number. It’s also possible to compare F1 to other works if you follow the “select a text for comparison” option in the upper left—if you’re interested in Hamlet, there’s a lot of goodies in there, and it’s nicely displayed side-by-side. Information about the specifics of the copy or of the image aren’t obvious. (I happen to know that this interface was put together in the mid-1990s, since I had grad school friends who worked on it.) The book begins not with its cover (although you can catch glimpses of it and page edges here) but with the blank recto of Ben Jonson’s poem, “To the reader” (sig. ΠA1r). (Penn also has a copy of the Peter Blayney booklet I mentioned above, which is handy to know if it’s not available through the Octavo pdf.)

Penn's First Folio, with our Measure for Measure page in its largest state — Penn’s First Folio, with a screenshot of our *Measure for Measure* page in its largest state

Brandeis (West 153) and New South Wales (West 192)

I’ve grouped these together because they are both available at Internet Shakespeare Editions as individual page images than can be saved as jpegs. The Brandeis copy is also available through Perseus, though I find that interface doesn’t have much to recommend it over the ISE. Neither one of these is a great facsimile (the NSW is oddly pink and there’s a lot of bleed-through in the Brandeis—shooting with a black page behind the leaf would have helped with that, wouldn’t it?), but the interface is easy to navigate. I particularly like how if you’re looking at a specific place in one copy, you can jump straight to that location in the other copy. There’s also a nice “compare” feature, just as in the Penn above, but here with more options.

Miami University (West 174)

Available online as individual page images that can be saved as jpegs. I love that Miami has done this but it’s very hard to use and the quality of the digitization, by current standards, is not good. It’s easy to initially find your way through the book to a specific play, as you can see from the screenshot below, and it generates a stable URL to bring you back to a specific page (here’s my MM example).

the navigation interface for Miami's copy — the navigation interface for Miami’s copy

Once you’re at the page you want, you can zoom in pretty deeply (the pull-down menu says “100%”) but it’s actually larger-than-life-size, as you can tell if you click on the image below to see its full size.

detail of Miami's MM — detail of Miami’s MM

I’m not a big fan of the quality of the image (bleed-through is a lot more distracting in images than it is in real life), but it’s more than usable. What I find really difficult is that once you’ve zoomed into the image, you lose all the navigation tools—the sidebar menus that let you move to different pages completely disappears. Even if you return to a smaller size (the zoom level pull-down is still at the top of the screen), that doesn’t return the sidebars. Perhaps there’s a metaphor in here, about not being able to see the forest for the trees.

A final note, for those of you who actually read all the way through this: I am delighted that all these copies exist and that all these institutions have made them openly available. Where I offer criticisms it’s in the spirit of love and improvement. As I said above, it’s amazing how quickly these projects age: ones built just a decade ago look impossibly old-fashioned and not up to snuff. By looking at how they all stack up, I hope anyone thinking about how to digitize copies of books not only thinks about how they’re being used but how they can be remade so that they continue to be used.⁵

Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, 2 vols (Oxford UP, 2001). [↩]
Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West, eds, The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (Palgrave 2012). [↩]
My experience of using the Folger’s Digital Image Collection that the record usually indicates when the image is a digitization of film and when a full-page spread is the result of stitching together two page images, so I would assume those are not relevant here. [↩]
I’m pretty sure my notes from West have it as only missing one leaf, but the Folger’s catalog shows it as missing three [↩]
Also, if you really did read this far, you’re my kind of nerd. Thank you. [↩]

24 February 2013

multivalent print, or, learning to love ambiguity in three easy lessons

Below are the slides for and the approximate text of a talk I gave at the 2013 MLA convention as part of a panel on “Convergent Histories of the Book: From Manuscript to Digital” organized by Alex Mueller and Mike Johnston. I spoke ex tempore, so my text here won’t precisely line up with what I said at the MLA, but the gist should be the same. I’ve indicated where the slide changes are and after each change have inserted a footnote linking to source and, where available, a link to the image. I’ve also indicated my indebtedness to other scholars, particularly Jeffrey Todd Knight and Adam Smyth, in the notes.

I want to talk today about how early print complicates any trajectory from manuscript to digital, focusing on some common mistaken assumptions that are made about early print. The first assumption we make is that print replaced manuscript, that once the printing press was invented, writing by hand withered away. [slide 2] But print is not the opposite of manuscript. Indeed, we might understand print as having spurred on an increase in handwriting. When people think of the first printed work, they usually think of the Gutenberg bible. [slide 3]¹ But Gutenberg’s first printed work was an indulgence, printed in 1454 and, as you can see, filled out by hand on 27 February 1455. Gutenberg wasn’t the only early printer to print indulgences. [slide 4]² This is an indulgence printed in 1498 by Wynken de Worde. It hasn’t been filled out; in fact, it wasn’t ever cut into individual indulgences to be sold. What you’re looking at is a sheet of indulgences and the only reason it survived is because it was used as part of the binding of a book. Other categories of printed forms were popular aside from indulgences. [slide 5]³ This is a legal document, a summons from the Exchequer filled out on 1 August 1622. [slide 6]⁴ And this legal document from 1677 makes Francis Read of Giggleswick Bailiff of the Wapentake of Ewecross.⁵

All of these documents were designed for the insertion of handwriting. But writing flourished on texts even when the print wasn’t inviting it. [slide 7]⁶ In this copy of Polychronicon, printed by Caxton in 1482, an early user has supplied the missing final leaves with his own manuscript copy. Is that book manuscript or print? It seems pretty clearly print: the bulk of the volume is print and the manuscript provides access to missing print. [slide 8]⁷ This copy of Aristotle’s Ethics was so heavily annotated by its owner that the margins of the pages were not enough: he added in blank leaves to give himself more room for his notes. Is this book print or manuscript? We value it for the manuscript additions, for the dialogue between print and hand.

[slide 9] As these books make clear, print is not closed, finished, done at the moment of printing. [slide 10]⁸ We all know that print wasn’t fixed; books were printed with errors all the time, and errata notes calling attention to them. This 1624 example is one of my favorites: “There are many other errors, which being but small, I entreat the courteous reader to correct as he findes them.” [slide 11]⁹ In this 1673 book, a user has gone through and made the corrections the errata list invites him to, here crossing out “company” and writing in “presence.”¹⁰

But not all marginalia responds in the way that a book invites. [slide 12]¹¹ In this copy of Caxton’s 1483 printing of Confessio Amatis, a mid-sixteenth-century owner has gone through and crossed out “pope” and, in this instance, cleverly substituted “abominable” for “honourable.” But not all of the marginalia in this book responds to the text, or even works against the text. [slide 13]¹² In the blank space on this leaf is recorded the date of the writer’s marriage: “Chrystofer Swallowe was marryed the 12th day of July in the yere of oure lorde 1553 whiche was the seventhe yere of the Reigne of kinge Edward the Sixth …. and in the firste year of the Reigne of our most Excellent and worthie princes Queyne marie the fyrst.” [slide 14]¹³ And across the bottom margins of another opening is a deed of land involving Swallowe and “Dorithe his wife.”

[slide 15]¹⁴ Early readers also used print for their own purposes in other ways, taking books apart and reassembling them to make their own meaning. A famous example are the Little Giddings bible concordances (here showing one at Harvard). The Little Giddings community wove together the four different gospels to produce one narrative of Christ’s life, cutting words out of the gospels and pasting them together in their harmonies. If you look closely at this image (or follow this link to see other pages from Harvard’s copy), you’ll see the small slips of paper that have been carefully rearranged and glued to make a new text.

The Harmonies are a particularly famous example of this reworking of texts, and are often discussed by later readers as shocking: Can you imagine cutting apart your bible and remaking it? [slide 16]¹⁵ But there are other examples of what Adam Smyth calls “reading with scissors” in this period.¹⁶ John Gibson’s commonplace book, put together while he was imprisoned in the 1650s, cuts out and repurposes print material with his manuscript additions. [slide 17] Gibson is not the only one to remix works. This copy of Mary Sidney’s translation of Philippe de Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death (1600) has been supplemented an early user with images cut from Richard Day’s A booke of Christian prayers, hand colored and pasted in, and with manuscript couplets.¹⁷

It didn’t always take wielding scissors to remake texts. [slide 18]¹⁸ Since many early books were not sold bound, buyers could choose how and when to bind them, sometimes bringing together multiple works within one binding. In this case, a seventeenth-century reader created a compilation of verse works, ranging from narrative poetry to love lyrics and epigrams and binding together five printed works and one manuscript. As the work done by Paul Needham on Caxton and Jeffrey Todd Knight on Renaissance sammelbände shows, sometimes the books early modern readers created are surprisingly different from what we expect.¹⁹

One of the reasons for our surprise is that we don’t often encounter early modern works in the same manner in which early modern readers would have. [slide 19] Our notion of what is important, of the difference between print and manuscript, of what readers do with texts, has been shaped by the assumptions and practices of collectors and curators in the nineteenth century. The questions that I asked about whether we consider a specific work print or manuscript are not questions without important implications for researchers. In most libraries, print and manuscript are cataloged separately, often with different curators in charge and with different policies and grants in place. Early modern readers might not have differentiated between print and manuscript, but nineteenth-century caretakers of those books did, and often remade them according to their notions of what was appropriate, assumptions that continue to govern how we treat and encounter early books.

[slide 20]²⁰ As we just saw, binding together different works into a single volume was one way early readers made and encountered their books. It was a particularly handy way of treating plays, which were slim works that didn’t always need to be bound individually. This list shows the contents of one such volume, a collection of thirteen plays and interludes housed in one binding. But this is no longer how we encounter this volume. [slide 21]²¹ In 1961, these plays were separated from each other and rebound individually. The binder’s note in the back of each play records what it once was; the original table of contents remains with the first play in the collection. But the sense of the plays as a gathering is gone. [slide 22]²² What we see are slim, tidy playbooks, not the heterogenous collection they once were.

[slide 23]²³ Sometimes we are lucky and we catch a glimpse of what was. [slide 24]²⁴ But more often we encounter early works through the interventions of later assumptions about what they were, our view of the seventeenth century shaped by nineteenth-century lenses. What we think we know about early print—that it is distinct from manuscript, that it is fixed and stable—are mistaken lessons that obscure the ambiguities and complexities of what print was and can be.

Gutenberg indulgence, Mainz 1454, John Rylands Library, Manchester; http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/s/l023vj [↩]
Indulgence for the benefit of the confraternity of St. James of Compostella printed by Wynken de Worde (1498), Cambridge University Library. shelfmark Inc.Broadsides.0[3552]; http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/inc/history_37.html [↩]
Summons from the Exchequer to the Fee farmer of the Priory of Caxford, 1622, Folger Shakespeare Library. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/dkfy3d [↩]
[Miscellaneous Public Documents.] Noverint universi per presentes nos [manuscript] printed not after 1677. Folger Shakespeare Library. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/2h197c [↩]
The idea of print spurring on manuscript through an increased use of forms comes from Peter Stallybrass, who has given numerous talks on the subject (see, for example, his 2013 Miraeus lecture. [↩]
Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon, as translated by John Higden and edited by William Caxton, 1482, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=161534 image by Sarah Werner: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/8422379404/ [↩]
Aristotle, Ethics, 1562. Sixteenth-century Annotated Books: A Collection of 30 editions in 18 volumes (Warboys, Cambs.: Roger Gaskell Rare Books, n.d.). The books in this catalog are now owned by Houghton Library. [↩]
John Smith, A Generall Historie of Virginia, 1624, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=164134 image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/8421544841/ [↩]
Richard Flecknoe, Epigrams, 1673, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=134774 images of book: http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/dp4552 [↩]
For more on the mistakes in that book, see my blog post “Correcting mistakes” in The Collation. [↩]
John Gower, Confessio Amatis, 1483, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=161517 set of images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/sets/72157628802792177/ [↩]
ibid [↩]
ibid. [↩]
Bible. N.T. Gospels. English. Authorized. 1630. [Little Gidding concordance] [Little Gidding, 1630.] Vault A 1275.5. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45243608 [↩]
John Gibson, commonplace book, 1650s, British Library (BL Additional MS 37719). For more on Gibson, see Adam Smyth’s “‘Shreds of holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England” English Literary Renaissance (2012) 452-81. [↩]
Smyth’s work on fragmentary texts and cut-ups has influenced my own sense of the practice. See his “Shreds of holinesse” (cited above) and “‘Rend and teare in peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England” in The Seventeenth Century (2004) 36-52. [↩]
For more on this book, see Heather Wolfe, “Dye to live, live to dye” The Collation April 2012; http://collation.folger.edu/2012/04/dye-to-live-live-to-dye/. [↩]
British Library C.39.a.37. For more on this volume, see Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 304-340, esp. 335-38 [↩]
Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton (Library of Congress, 1986). In addition to the two Knight works cited here, see his forthcoming book Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (U Pennsylvania P, 2013). [↩]
Table of contents on front flyleaf of Folger STC 4965; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/t1nq03; for more on this volume see Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Fast Bind, Fast Find: The History of the Book and the Modern Collection” Criticism 51 (2009): 79-104. [↩]
Binder’s note in the back of Folger STC 11473.2; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/i1bd29 [↩]
Binding for STC 11473.2; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/4054tw [↩]
A sammelband of early plays; Folger STC 4619; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/bi7cg8 [↩]
A view of some of the Folger’s Shakespeare quartos; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/66x7b7 [↩]

10 August 2012

my syllabus is a quarto

As some of you know, I am the queen of folding exercises.¹ It’s the only way to understand early modern book formats, and I like puttering around coming up with better ways to demonstrate this to my students and even to my blog readers (see here and, most recently, here). Because it’s that time of year when I get my syllabus in order and because, thanks to my week at Rare Book School’s Introduction to the Principles of Bibliographical Description, I have format on my brain, it suddenly dawned on me that instead of just handing out my one-sheet syllabus (the bulk of my syllabus is online), I could hand it out as a folding exercise!

And so, after much fiddling with Word (which really isn’t the right tool for this sort of thing), I have at long last produced my syllabus in quarto format!

I’m pretty crazily excited about this. I didn’t number the pages of the syllabus, because that would be giving the game away, but I did try to include lots of hints to figure out what order the pages go in: there are signature marks on the second and third leaves, lots of numbered sequences, and a clear title page. I’ll let you know how it goes in class. I had fun, if nothing else, but I think it might help us start a semester-long conversation about the physical properties of texts.

If you want to examine it more closely, a pdf of it is here; just print as double-sided to try it out yourself. And if you want to make your own quarto syllabus (or quarto text), I made up a Word template that will make it a bit easier for you. Take it, use it, and have fun folding!

I’m not really the queen of folding exercises. If I was, I’d do more than the easy formats. I’m more like the JV champion of folding, having mastered 4° and 8°. I still stumble over making my own 12°s and I aspire to 18°s. Then I’ll be the Empress of Folding. [↩]

23 June 2012

carnivalesque 86

Hello, and welcome to Carnivalesque 86, the early modern edition! Step right up for a look at things small and large in the world of early modern blogs.

I’ve been puzzling through the relationship between the fairly new field of big data in the humanities and what might be its opposite, small data, and so many of the posts that caught my attention are ones that are navigating between individual objects and networks of data. One of the objections that I have to big data is that I’m drawn to the ephemeral and the hard-to-measure. In “Early printed book contains rare evidence of medieval spectacles,” The Harry Ransom Center’s Cultural Compass blog takes a look at that trickiest of ephemera, not the object itself but the traces it left behind. The medieval manuscript used as the endpapers to a 1568 printed work show the outline of a pair of medieval glasses. The post, by Micah Erwin, provides a quick history of eyeglasses and some context for how unusual it is to come across such traces. What should we learn from such traces? I’m not sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

Sometimes the traces left behind are not of things, but of people and institutions. In “Pew-hopping in St Margaret’s Church,” from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s The Collation,¹ Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts) and Kathleen Lynch (Executive Director of the Folger Institute) look at a pew chart from around 1600. The chart shows the names of the people who occupied specific pews, including successive holders, with later names written over and obscuring earlier names. With the help of some multi-spectral imaging, some names that hadn’t been visible were revealed. Working with some account books, they begin to suggest some of the stories that lie behind this document, small pieces of data that point to a larger story about societal structure.

You never know what you’re going to find when you’re working with early modern documents. Early Modern John has a lovely post about the bits and bobs he’s come across in his research, things that aren’t going to make it into his thesis but that are nonetheless compelling moments. In “Mountebanks and mounted priests: An International Archives Day post,” EMJ describes finding references to a mountebank and his son selling wares on the Pont Neuf and reflects on the power of that image: “the image of man and boy hard at work on the lord’s day, hanging their crocodile skins, setting out their jars, and preparing to dazzle a crowd – of believers, sceptics, hecklers, passers-by – has stayed with me all week.” The impact that image has on us today is one of the things I find most compelling in small data research: the glimpses of past lives, the daily minutiae of days gone by. I know there’s a big picture out there, but I care about that big picture because of these small moments.

If you’ve been a reader of my blog, you’ll know that one of my favorite places of these small glimpses is in the text and margins of books. We interact with books in such personal ways, and books can travel far and wide across place and time. Alun Withey’s post on “The mystery of ‘Sansom Jones’ – the phantom Welsh doctor” (at the eponymous Dr Alun Withey) tells the story of exploring an early modern manuscript and its authorship and provenance. A twentieth-century annotation describes the book as having belonged to a Sansom Jones, but Withey hasn’t had success in tracking down this person, nor in tracking down any of the sources for the material in the manuscript. It’s a book of medical remedies that appears to date to the early seventeenth century, but who are the people whose names appear in the book? (If you’re looking for confirmation that the past is a different country, by the way, Lisa Smith’s post at Wonders and Marvels on “The Puppy Water and Other Early Modern Canine Recipes” will tell you more than you probably wanted to know about the use of puppies in health remedies.)

But if books are great examples of traces of individual histories, they are undoubtedly equally part of a large network: if texts didn’t circulate, if there weren’t important intersections of commerce and culture, books wouldn’t end up in anyone’s hands. Early Modern News Networks has been sharing some information from a fairly new research project on methods of studying transnational circulation of news and newspapers. In “Rennes and some thoughts about mapping communication networks,” Joad Raymond explores some of the challenges the group is facing in thinking about how to visualize these networks. What are the limitations of maps for these purposes? On the one hand, their man-made features aren’t consistent from one period to the next (country boundaries are notoriously unstable), but using geographical features to locate the networks misrepresents the factors that shaped the circulation of news. This gets at one of the trickiest aspect of thinking in big data terms: how do we determine what differentiates one set of data from another, and how do the tools we choose to explore the data affect what questions we can ask? I know that we face similar challenges in thinking about small data, and I know that adept researchers are aware of the limitations of sets and tools, but this post nicely illustrates some of the problems in thinking about how we represent and work with print networks. (Not connected to my network theme here, but related to the question of circulation and commerce, is “Hans Peter from Langendorf,” a lovely post at The Renaissance Mathematicus about some early Nürnberg printers.)

There are networks of booksellers and buyers in the early modern period; there are networks of booksellers and buyers in the modern period, too. Brooke Palmieri (who blogs at 8vo) and Daryl Green (from St Andrews’ blog, Echoes from the Vault) co-wrote a compelling piece about the benefits of blogging about rare books. In “Bloggers of the World Unite: Rare Book Bloggers and the Links They Build” (cross-posted at their two homes) they write about the benefits of writing public-facing posts about what might seem an esoteric subject (I know you, faithful readers, need no convincing on this part!) and the community that is created through such work. It is, again, a vision of a world of people and things that moves between near and distant, small and large.

Next up, a post that looks at how we teach the next generation of scholars: Michael Ullyot’s “Teaching Hamlet in the Humanities Lab” (at another eponymous blog) describes a course he taught that had undergraduates explore Hamlet with various text mining tools that allow fairly easy explorations of networked information. The post is from a talk he gave at the Renaissance Society of America conference and it gives a good overview of some of the big data work that is being played with out there. If you’re curious about how these tools might be used to help us understand early modern drama, you’ll find lots of leads here. I would love to see a follow-up post that reflects on what sort of work the students ending up doing and how they responded to the tasks set them. Maybe if we ask nicely . . .?

Ullyot actually describes the course as “an introduction to digital methods of reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet — or rather, to the digital methods of provoking, testing, and tweaking their hypotheses about the text.” And I guess I could accept that reading Hamlet meaning working with its text. But Hamlet is more than that: it is its physical incarnation, in the many forms in which it has circulated, from early printed book through post-modern theatrical performance. And digital methods is more than focusing on textual analysis. I’ve written before about some of my hesitations about digital tools and what they aren’t yet offering the study of early modern books. I haven’t yet worked through what I imagine an explicitly small-data approach to humanities might offer us, but that articulates some of where I’m coming from.

I’m going to going to give Adam Hooks the last word, since he’ll bring us back to small data and what it tells us about the larger world. In his most recent post at Anchora, “Breaking Shakespeare Apart,” he writes compelling about the value of thinking about Shakespeare in terms of bits and pieces. How much is Shakespeare actually Shakespeare when the great book that we fetishize is made up of bits and pieces that come apart and get put back together again?

Thanks to all of the great writers whose posts are featured here; I learned a great deal from each of them, and from the many other wonderful early modern posts that I didn’t include here. It’s a privilege to be part of this network, large and small!

disclaimer: I run and write for this blog [↩]

12 June 2012

june catch-up

Hi, all. Some online book-history-related tidbits you might be interested in: 1) The Folger Bindings Image Collection is now up and running and is gorgeous and full of tasty metadata to help you find what you’re looking for! 2) Jen Howard asked a great question about looking for readings about reading and the results are now being collected in a Zotero library. Please add your suggestions. 3) The talk that I posted here led to a great conversation with Glenn Fleishman, who wrote it up for The Economist’s Babbage blog! (a bit of horn self-tooting there, sorry, but it was pretty exciting in what has otherwise been a glum stretch of time)

And this is a heads’ up and a plea: I’m hosting the next early modern edition of Carnivalesque at the end of the month, so I’m eager for your recommendations for great blog posts. There’s a handy web form for you to use and I welcome your own moments of self-promotion, so there’s no reason not to recommend away.

29 April 2012

where material book culture meets digital humanities

Below is the text from a talk I gave at the Geographies of Desire conference, held at the University of Maryland on April 27-28. Almost everything that I said there is something that I’ve said here before, so faithful readers won’t find much that’s new. But I promised I’d stick it up here, so here it is! If you’re simply looking for the set of links to the resources I mentioned, you can find those on Pinboard. I haven’t included all of my slides here, but you can find those here. I haven’t included all my ad-libbing either, but you would have had to have been there for that.

“Where material book culture meets digital humanities”

Discussions about early modern books and digital tools have tended to focus on one of two responses. One of the first things that people focus on is the amazing access that digital tools have given us to early modern works. Instead of schlepping from library to library across the globe—a series of journeys that many scholars could not easily afford—we can access nearly all extant early modern printed English books, and many continental ones, from our desktops. Thanks to EEBO (Early English Books Online), ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), and Gallica (the digital collection of the Bibliothèque nationale), among others, digital facsimiles are available for us to consult and download entire works from the early modern printed world.

There are limitations, of course. One is the quality of the images. EEBO consists of digital facsimiles not of early books, but of microfilms of early books. As a result, it doesn’t always capture what we might want it to. Here we see an image from EEBO of the second quarto of Hamlet.

eebo hamlet — opening from a Folger Q2 Hamlet, as in EEBO

You can see one column of text on each page, along with a whole bunch of other junk. [slide] Here’s the same page opening from the Folger’s reproduction of that book:

folger hamlet — same opening, same copy, in a high resolution image from the Folger

There’s still ink bleeding through from the other sides of these leaves, but it’s a bit easier to sort out what’s what.

Then there’s this, another image of not-quite visible ink mixed in on the page:

primer eebo — opening from a 1557 Primer, as in EEBO

But this is an instance of red ink not reproducing clearly.

primer folger — same opening, in a high-resolution image from the Folger

And because the red isn’t visible, you miss in the EEBO copy what’s really a great mistake on this page, the moment where the phrase “of the five corporall joyes of our Ladie” is really a correction for the mistaken “joyes of our lorde.”

primer ladie correction — never mix up your lord and your lady

My favorite EEBO moment, however, is this one: the title page of a 1612 elegy mourning the death of Prince Henry.

lachrimae negative — the title page of STC 23576 as in EEBO

This is how the image appears in EEBO; but this is how the image appears in their reproduction of the second state of this edition.

lachrimae positve — title page of STC 23577 as in EEBO

Do you see what happened? It’s a mourning book, and it was printed on pages bordered in black and sometimes entirely in black, with a xylographic title page, that is, a title page in which white lettering appears on a black background. But when the microfilm was being processed, someone clearly didn’t believe what they were seeing and they assumed it was a mistake, that it should be black on white, and so they reversed the negative, producing a facsimile of a book that doesn’t exist.

There are resources that provide higher quality digital facsimiles of early modern books and that, unlike EEBO and ECCO, are free to use. The Folger has digitized many works in their entirety, including all copies of the pre-1642 Shakespeare quartos and a couple of first folios. The British Library has digitized some of their collection, cover-to-cover, as have many other libraries, including that of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, University of Oklahoma, and the Bavarian State Library. The English Broadside Ballad Archive now includes some high-resolution color facsimiles, and the Universal Short-Title Catalogue (covering all books printed in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries) includes links to digital copies from many European libraries.

Digital tools have, without a doubt, increased our access to facsimiles of early modern books. If I can sit in my study in Rockville and study Erasmus’s 1516 translation of the New Testament by looking at a copy currently held in Basel, that’s a win.

If one dominant way of thinking about digital tools and early modern books is in terms of access, another has been in terms of text. Access is about text of course—what we’re gaining access to is the ability to read texts. But there are also digital tools that don’t simply read texts, they distant read them. EEBO-TCP can make research a bit easier if you’re interested, say, in sassafras and want to find instances of it being discussed. In the right hands, you can do much more interesting types of computational analysis that can reveal things that would be difficult to see otherwise. Recent work by Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope, for instance, reveals that genre is marked not only in terms of plot, but also linguistically at the sentence level—histories and comedies and tragedies are genres that are grammatically inflected. That seems like a win to me, too.

These tools that I’ve just described rely on the ways we have always read books, albeit with increases in distance or speed (you can read a book held at the Folger Shakespeare Library from your study in Gdansk; you can analyze the texts of the entire Shakespeare corpus in a matter of minutes rather than years). I want to take this moment to wonder what new possibilities we might imagine. How might we use digital tools to look at texts differently? How might we use digital tools to represent texts differently? Can we move away from reading text to studying the physical characteristics of text, characteristics that can reveal important information about the content of the text and the cultural and historical creation of the artifact?

The multi-spectral imaging done by the Lazarus team of the Archimedes Palimpsest gives a hint of how digital tools might let us see things that would otherwise go unseen. The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 13th-century Byzantine prayerbook written over a 10th-century manuscript containing writings of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, as well as multiple other works from various periods. Using multi-spectral imaging, along with other tools, the team was able to recover visual access to much of the earliest writings in the book. Google took the project’s dataset and made a “Google book” of the earliest state of the codex resulting in a digital reproduction of a book that exists, but is not visible to us just by looking at it.

One recent paper about the use of densitometers to study levels of dirt on the pages of medieval manuscripts suggests that we can learn about book usage through analyzing how and where dirt is distributed across a book. It might seem obvious that pages that are used more often will be dirtier, and that is in part what the author found, but the use of the densitometer revealed that it’s more complicated than we can always assess with the naked eye. The paper’s author, Kathryn Rudy, points out, for example, that she had assumed that two different patterns of dirt on an opening came from two different users, but the densitometer’s analysis suggested that the patterns were similar enough that they were likely to have been made by the same person—perhaps they held the book in different ways suitable for different prayers. The analysis also pointed out that even books that retain visible marks might have been cleaned by modern owners to such a degree that the dirt is no longer viable as an analytical tool, something that might help us think about the changes books undergo during modern ownership.

Studying the distribution of dirt is just the beginning of how we might begin to use technology to help us understand books in new ways. A colleague in Antwerp reports that German books held in Belgium smell different than German books held in Germany. The cause lies in how the paper was treated: paper needs to be treated with sizing agents so that it handles ink properly (instead of absorbing ink, ink sits on the surface of the paper and dries there, producing crisp and legible marks). His speculation is that books in Germany were sized in a multi-stage sequence, with the last step taking place after the book had been printed, perhaps as part of the binding process. Books that remained in Germany after they were printed went through this final process; books that were shipped outside of Germany seem to have missed that final stage, resulting in a noticeably different smell because of their different chemical properties. If this is the case, the smell of early German books can help scholars understand not only the physical acts of making paper and books, but can help us trace the circulation of early printed works. Using computers to analyze the smells of books and software to map those smells could help researchers learn how books were made and sold and used.

We could also use new technologies to explore other the other senses we use when handling books. The feel of paper (or parchment) is another element of books that has more to offer than nostalgic fetishizing: the thickness, color, and pliability of paper can tell us about the costs of production, in part, but also give insight into the experience of using the book and its intended audience. How might the characteristics of feel be represented in digital media? Could a 3D printer replicate samples of different paper qualities? Could we project back from a paper’s physical characteristics today to how it might have appeared and felt when it was made?

The three-dimensional aspects of paper extend beyond what can be felt by human touch. The process of making books in the letterpress period—and the process of writing on leaves of paper and parchment in all periods—is a process of putting pressure on the paper, leaving behind an indentation on one side of the leaf and an extrusion on the other side of the leaf. In most cases, the indentations are visible because the instrument causing them (type, woodblock, stylus) left behind ink markings. In other cases, there are indentations without ink, sometimes caused when two sheets of paper are accidentally run through the press, sometimes left behind when the bearing type used to even out the blank spaces in a page leaves behind blind impressions.

033452 — Folger STC 7043.2, leaf F1v under raking light (click to see this image compared to one under normal light)

There are also the indentations left behind during the papermaking process from the wires and frames used in the forms. Once we start thinking in these terms, we can find more topographical variations on leaves of paper: wormholes, dog-eared corners, holes left from stitches sewing gatherings and the binding together, plate marks from engravings. What might we learn from visualizing books not as texts to be read but as topographical maps?

Another option would be to use digital tools to visualize the context of books, to encounter them not in isolated codices, but in libraries. This 360° panoramic view inside the Strahov Monastery’s Library in Prague lets you see not only the entire room, but to zoom in to see the titles of the books on the shelves. This is primarily a pretty picture, but imagine if this technology was married to something that let you look at catalog records of the books that you’re seeing, or to switch from catalog records to a view of a book on a shelf.

strahov zoomed out long view — screenshot of a zoomed out view of Strahov Library

strahov detail — titles on books at the far end of the library

If we could use digital tools to estrange ourselves from our books, to defamiliarize what we think we know, we might learn something new about how they were made and how they are used. People keep pointing out to me that we are in the incunabula age of digital texts. We are. And that’s what makes it so exciting.