Last week’s crocodile mystery may have been a bit too mysterious, but I hope that today’s post will inspire you to look for similar mysteries on your own. Here’s a close-up detail of what I was asking about: As with nearly all photographs shared on this blog, if you click the image, a larger version will open in a new window. What might have looked like a smudge if you hadn’t enlarged the image, is now clearly a smudge worth paying attention to! More specifically, it’s a smudge made up of individual lines and whorls, a smudge made by an inky printer’s fingers. One of the reasons that I didn’t share only this detail in last week’s post is that I wanted the whole context for the fingerprint to be visible. The assistants in a print shop have long been known as printer’s devils, a name assumed to stem from…
Author: Sarah Werner
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: May edition
First, my thanks to all of you who suggested new names for this series on identifying objects in our collection. The best suggestion came from Jeremy Dibbell, on twitter, who found this perfect moment in Antony and Cleopatra: LEPIDUS: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile? ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. LEPIDUS: What color is it of? ANTONY: Of it own color, too. LEPIDUS: ’Tis a strange serpent. ANTONY: ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet. (2.7.43-52) ((New Folger Shakespeare Library, eds Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, New York: Washington Square Press, 1999.)) There are many things to love about this passage. But for my purposes here,…
where material book culture meets digital humanities
Below is the text from a talk I gave at the Geographies of Desire conference, held at the University of Maryland on April 27-28. Almost everything that I said there is something that I’ve said here before, so faithful readers won’t find much that’s new. But I promised I’d stick it up here, so here it is! If you’re simply looking for the set of links to the resources I mentioned, you can find those on Pinboard. I haven’t included all of my slides here, but you can find those here. I haven’t included all my ad-libbing either, but you would have had to have been there for that. “Where material book culture meets digital humanities” Discussions about early modern books and digital tools have tended to focus on one of two responses. One of the first things that people focus on is the amazing access that digital tools have…
book dealers’ descriptions and catalog records
Mike Widener (Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law Library) wrote a great post about his practice of adding dealers’ descriptions to catalog records of rare books; Jeremy Dibbell included it in his link roundup; John Overholt tweeted about it; and then the conversation began. I’ve storyfied it and embedded it below (you can also go straight to Storify to see it). I wanted to capture the conversation, but we all also wanted to hear a wider range of responses and have a longer conversation about the value and potential pitfalls of this practice. It’ll end up on the EXLIBRIS-L listserv as well, so I’ll include a link to all that when it happens (thanks, John!) but in the meantime, read and comment: [<a href=”http://storify.com/wynkenhimself/adding-book-dealers-descriptions-to-catalog-record” target=”_blank”>View the story “adding book dealers’ descriptions to catalog records” on Storify</a>]
infinite reading
http://twitter.com/wynkenhimself/statuses/99434066914459648 As those of you who follow me on twitter might recall, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for some time now (since the beginning of last August, to be precise). http://twitter.com/wynkenhimself/statuses/102045479528972289 For all of my nervousness that I might not finish it, ((I got a bunch of responses to that tweet from people who said they never made it through the book, which confirmed my sense that this was a real danger.)) I’ve made good steady progress and—much more importantly—I’ve really enjoyed the book. I love DFW’s writing and the characters and the loopy plot. I find that I think about them all when I’m not reading the book; they live in the back of my head and I carry them around with me as I go about my life. That’s the most I could ever ask for in a book. And few books come close to…