Hi all—I’ve been so busy writing elsewhere that I haven’t kept up here. *sorry* But some links to some of that book history goodness in case you missed out:
At The Collation I wrote a whole lot of posts, but there are two recent ones that are exactly the sort of thing I would have written about here if I wasn’t trying to shore up content over there. The first is “Learning from mistakes,” about how much I love finding printer’s errors in early books and what we can learn from their mistakes. Check out the comments, please, to help me understand what’s going on in the 1641 pamphlet that I end the post with and why Wing drives me nuts! The second post, just up a few hours ago, is “Correcting mistakes,” and it picks up from the previous post to consider how early modern printers tried to fix their errors and how readers didn’t always heed their corrections. Don’t tell those Collation people (especially that cranky editor SW) but I think there’s going to be a third in the series looking more closely at how readers respond to errors in books.
I also put together a course site for my Folger seminar on “Books and Early Modern Culture.” The syllabus is there, including the assignment descriptions. Only class members can access the readings themselves, but there’s also a page listing a whole lot of open-access resources for studying early modern book history. I even put together a list of all the books my students have studied over the years, and wrote about that collection at The Collation as well as a post about the experience of two students working with different copies of the same book.