what those libraries were in The Toast

I thoroughly enjoyed “How To Decorate Your Dream Library” by Amy Collier for The Toast. But because I am me, I was made insane by the lack of captions identifying any of the libraries pictured, so I went ahead and worked my way through them. Go read the article, laugh heartily, and then come back to find out the libraries and photography credits. (A side note: How hard is it, really, to include this information in the original article? Most of the licensing on these images is some version of Creative Commons Attribution. But where’s the attribution in The Toast? It’s bad form. If I were a friend or family member of Jorge Royan, who took a slew of these and whose work is stunning, or any of the others, I’d be pretty pissed that I made my work available under an open license and that places couldn’t be bothered with…

it’s history, not a viral feed

For months now I’ve been stewing about how much I hate @HistoryInPics and their ilk (@HistoryInPix, @HistoricalPics, @History_Pics, etc.)—twitter streams that do nothing more than post “old” pictures and little tidbits of captions for them. ((I despise them so much I’m not going to link to them or list them all. You’re clever. You can figure it out.)) And when I say “nothing more” that’s precisely what I mean. What they don’t post includes attribution to the photographer or to the institution hosting the digital image. There’s no way to easily learn more about the image (you can, of course, do an image search through TinEye or Google Image Search and try to track it down that way). Alexis Madrigal recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic revealing that @HistoryInPics is run by a couple of teenagers who are savvy at generating viral social media accounts to bring in money: 

Noticing the weirdness of texts

Sometimes it’s fun just to look at books without worrying what they are and who printed them and what the text says. And sometimes, when you do that, you notice all sorts of ways in which they’re weird—they mix manuscript and print together, they play with layout and movement, they come in different shapes and sizes, we find them in unexpected places. And so I give you a slideshow of early modern works that might destabilize assumptions about what early books were. If you click on the first of the images below, it will switch into a slideshow view that will let you see the pictures and read some brief captions that might spark some thoughts. To find out more about the works I’ve shown, you can pull up the images in our Digital Image Collection, which will let you explore them in close detail and to view their catalog…

media transitions

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…