Month: June 2008

>At tea on Friday (the Folger heartily endorses everyone in the Library to stop for 3:00 tea–a great practice that is fruitful in ways beyond caffeine intake) with a couple of friends, I was struck by some of the oddities of blogging. Marshall Grossman was talking about the blog he writes for the Huffington Post, and about how bits of his blog crop up all over the blogosphere. Blogs are tremendously self-replicating that way: lots of them consist primarily of quotes from and links to other blogs. Marshall was talking about how disconcerting it is to see his name and his words show up marshalled to the service of someone else’s agenda. That, of course, is true for print essays as well–we all take other scholars’ insights and use them to help shape our own. But what struck me is how much easier that it with blogs. You just cut-and-paste…

> My last post was about the use of printed or manuscript waste in making new books; earlier posts were about the finding tabs and other tools used to help users find their way through the 1527 Vulgate Bible. Here’s a combination of those two interests: manuscript waste used to make a finding tab. This is from a 1508 Missal for the Salisbury rites of Mass, printed in Paris by Thielmannus Keruer. Notice the tab carefully sewn on–you can see other tabs sticking out of the book’s foreedge as well. And you’ll see that the gothic lettering and abbreviations system look like those of the French 1527 Vulgate Bible. Unlike that book, however, this one is printed in both black and red ink–a process that would require two separate pulls of the lever to make two differently colored impressions. If you look closely, you can see that the red text…

>On today’s Morning Edition was a great story about lawsuits and electronic information management: the essential point was that most companies do not have an electronic data management policy, and when they are sued, the cost of sorting through all those emails and instant messages can far far outweigh the cost of settling a lawsuit. The lesson a lay person should take from this is that emails can never be deleted. You think you’ve deleted what was sent to you, or what you sent, but it very well can already have been backed up on tape, or it could have been forwarded, or any other scenario that keeps it available to be retrieved in the future. My favorite quote from piece was this fabulous comment from Sharon Nelson, head of Sensei Enterprises: “Emails are the cockroaches of the electronic world.” It’s not the scurrying little feet that are the connection,…

>In today’s New York Times Opinion page is an elegy lamenting the decline of copy editors in the newspaper business and the lack of awareness about copy editors and the feats they make possible. What is it that copy editors do, you ask? Lawrence Downes sums it up: As for what they do, here’s the short version: After news happens in the chaos and clutter of the real world, it travels through a reporter’s mind, a photographer’s eye, a notebook and camera lens, into computer files, then through multiple layers of editing. Copy editors handle the final transition to an ink-on-paper object. On the news-factory floor, they do the refining and packaging. They trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions. But they also do a lot more. Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted…

> In my earlier post about the glorious 1527 Latin Vulgate Bible, I commented on the density of the text block. My point then was that verses were not numbered, and that a reader needed to use the marginal alphabetical system to cross-reference different biblical moments. Now I want to look again at that dense, dark, gothic lettering to notice something else: the handwritten annotations. One effect of the dense text is that it doesn’t have easily visible placemarkers. In addition to making it hard to cross-reference, it makes it hard to skim. Where’s that reference to the Tygris river again? Look for it–not in the printed text, but in the handwritten notes in the margin. Just by the printed letter “C”–the word “Tygris.” Many of the notes in the margin act as placemarkers of that very simple sort. Here’s where Phison is mentioned, here Gehan, here Tygris, here the…