A lot of what we post at The Collation is weighty, chock full of information and detail and (I hope!) interesting facts about our collections, library work, and early modern studies. But sometimes all you want is to look at a picture, right? Or maybe chime in with your sense of why something is interesting, yes? So with this post we are inaugurating an occasional series featuring curious things from the Library, whether a collection item or something used to care for the collections. What makes this series different from our other posts is that I’m not going to tell you what you’re looking at! I’ll post an image of an object (or a specific detail of an object) and you’ll guess what it is. After a week or two, I’ll post the answer and a discussion of what we can learn from it. We’ll start with one that’s not too…
Author: Sarah Werner
modern adventures in printing
In keeping with the spirit of my last couple of posts, this one is also about printing, but this time as an activity that my students and I did in our Books and Early Modern Culture seminar. The Folger is lucky to have a small-scale replica hand press, thanks to the resourcefulness of Steve Galbraith, our former Curator of Books, who tracked down the work of a group of engineering students from Bucknell who had designed and built the press for a senior project, and who then built a second one for us. The Library’s used the press as part of exhibits, in demonstrations for Shakespeare’s Birthday celebration, and with students. Usually there’s only time for students to set their names in type and to print off a single broadside. But this time, I decided that there was room in the syllabus to try a bigger experiment: choosing a text,…
link catchup
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…
correcting mistakes
In my last post, I wrote about my joy in finding printer’s errors and what we might learn from them about early modern printing. In this one, I want to look at some examples of what printers do to correct their errors. Mistakes happen, as I tell my kids; it’s what you do about your mistakes that matters. So, what do you do when you make a mistake? You fix it! In most cases, you’d hope that the error came to light during a proof stage so that you can correct it before you start your print run. Sometimes, however, you find mistakes during a print run; in that case, you can stop the press to replace the incorrect type with correct type. (“Stop the presses!”) The petition I wrote about in the last post, where I was focused on the curious shadow-type, is also a good example of the different…
learning from mistakes
One of my favorite categories of early modern books are those that show errors, small mistakes made in the process of printing them. I don’t love them because I like to laugh at them. I love finding them because they remind me that books are made by people and they carry with them traces of their making. Books don’t just magically appear.