A couple of stories have been making the rounds this week, reminding me how deep and powerful reading can be. Top at the list is Sonia Sotomayor and her love of Nancy Drew, a biographical detail that features in the White House’s official press release about her nomination and has been repeated in countless stories. Today’s Sunday New York Times expands the significance of Nancy Drew and the Supreme Court: it’s not only Sotomayor who read her as a girl, but Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Part of the article focuses on the appeal a “nice” girl like Nancy holds for women challenging male professions. Nancy Drew gets to rule her own life, be as smart as she wants to me, have adventures, and still be loved and respected. But the article also includes a second observation from Melanie Rehak, author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the…
Month: May 2009
tweets not sheets
Looking for pithy thoughts about early modern printing? Wynken de Worde is now on Twitter! You can follow wynkenhimself or just scroll down to the bottom of the right sidebar to see his feed. And it’s not procrastination. It’s the expansion of his unerring instincts for cross-referencing and promotion that made him the great printer that he was. Um, I mean, is. (Keeping track of the time-period switching and the gender-changing is trickier that you might guess.) And so that you can more fully appreciate the joke in the title: the sheets in question are of course not sheets on your bed, but the sheets of paper that are the basic unit of measurement for early modern printers, who thought of books–and the cost of books–in terms of the number of sheets it took to print them. Funny, right? That Wynken, he’s got a sense of humor.
Is Othello a sad book?
Some time ago, you might recall, I had a bit of a fascination with Frances Wolfreston. (I know, and I totally agree: what’s not to be fascinated by?) From those posts came a lovely missive out of the blue–a colleague at Penn sent an email telling me that they also have one of her books: Right there at the top of the first page of the text is that familiar inscription, “frances wolfreston her bouk,” but added onto this, in the same hand but a now fainter ink, is something even better: “a sad one.” The book in question is Othello (in this case, the 1655 edition, otherwise known as Q3, or the third quarto). I love the personalization of the inscription–we’ve seen Wolfreston inscribe her name in other books, but it’s not as often that we come across her commentary. And as commentary goes, this note was a productive…