So the mysterious eye of this month’s crocodile belongs to no other than Shakespeare, as some readers immediately recognized: More specifically, it is Shakespeare’s left right eye as depicted in the third state of the Droeshout engraving from one of the Folger’s copies of the First Folio. If you’re wondering why I chose his eye as the June crocodile, that previous sentence is key: the portrait of Shakespeare engraved by Martin Droeshout for the First Folio exists in 4 different states, 3 of which can be seen in copies of the First Folio (the fourth state wasn’t introduced until the Fourth Folio in 1685). The first thing to remember in understanding this series of images is that copper plates can be altered, even in mid-production, so that changes can be introduced to an image. (To refresh your understanding of how engravings and etchings are made and how long copper plates can be…
Author: Sarah Werner
Carnivalesque 103
Welcome to Carnivalesque 103! Carnivalesque is, in its own words, “an interdisciplinary blog carnival dedicated to pre-modern history (to c. 1800 C.E.)” and I’m delighted to play host for this issue. If you’ve spent any time doing research into the past, you know the frustrations of not being able to find what you’re looking for. If you’re lucky, you’re as smart and interesting as Alun Withey and you can use that experience to strengthen your sense of possibilities. In “The Agony and the Ecstasy: Hunting for 17th-century medics with few sources!” (a post on his eponymous blog), Withey tells us about the difficulties in tracking down early modern Welsh medics. For many reasons, as he explains, it’s hard to pin down specific practitioners, even though he’s quite sure they must have existed. The question, he writes, is “how far the deficiencies of the sources are masking what could well have…
Waste not, want not
As all three commenters worked out, this month’s crocodile image is of printer’s waste used as endleaves. You can see the end of the book on the left side of the opening below (note the “finis” marking the end of the text) and the quarto imposition of the scrap paper used as part of the binding on the right side (note the brown-stained holes near the right edge, left by the clasps that were once there): Printer’s waste is not an unusual thing to see in bindings from this period. Paper was needed to create the binding structure, leftover paper from printing books is available, and voilà! Waste not, want not. Why was there so often scrap paper from the printing process? One reason has to do with the practice of printing by sheets, which are then assembled into gatherings and into the final book: if you want 500 copies…
From tweet to resource
This is the story of how a tweet can grow into an amazing scholarly resource. (And it ends with a plea for you to help!) Just over a year ago, in January 2013, I was looking through the Folger’s collection of Greek texts so that I could find works for a course assignment on describing books. (My intent was to drum into them the necessity of looking at books as an activity that is separate from reading them—and what better way to do that than to ensure that they’re in a language they cannot read?) As part of that browsing, I pulled up a 1517 Aldine edition of Homer’s works, and was blown away by the abundance of annotations in the first part of the book. And so I did what I often do when I see something exciting in the reading room, thanks to the Folger’s policy permitting reader…
some #altac advice
I was recently part of a panel organized by Holly Dugan at George Washington University on the topic of #altac and #postac careers. The storify from the tweets is worth reading through for the insights from my fellow panelists, Alyssa Harad, Evan Rhodes, and Meredith Hindley, and for comments from the audience. ((Miriam Posner was supposed to skype in but technical difficulties meant that she could only contribute via twitter.)) The first part of my talk was a reperformance of the “make your own luck” pecha kucha I did for MLA 2013 and have already shared here, but since I felt the urge to share some advice for students and faculty on the topic of pursuing #altac careers, I thought I’d post those.