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.
Author: Sarah Werner
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…
David and Goliath, redux
I know what you’re thinking. Gee, this looks familiar: And it ought to. Compare it to this: The first is a Book of Psalms from the British Library’s collection, with an embroidered binding depicting David and his slingshot on the front panel and David with Goliath’s head on the back. The second is our friend from my last posting, a Book of Psalms from the Folger, with an embroidered binding depicting David with Goliath’s head and, yes, David and his slingshot. I’ll wait while you compare the two (clicking on each image should bring you to an enlargeable picture). That’s right–they’re the same! Of course, they’re not exactly the same. The BL binding reveals that what I took as a cheesy grin from Goliath is actually a mustache, the Folger David holding Goliath’s head has a unibrow that the BL David does not, and the Folger binding has…
David and Goliath
It has been nearly a month since I last posted, for which I can only apologize. Although that might be an eternity in blog-days, in real-life days, the time has just flown by, what with the excitement of college basketball and grading and Passover and the annual Shakespeare Association of America conference. Oddly, there were very few obvious points in common among those events, but there I was, nonetheless. I can, I think, actually find a common thread among some of them with this picture: What is this, you ask? It’s The whole booke of Psalmes: collected into English meter by Tho. Sternhold, Jo. Hopkins, W. Whittingham, and others, conferred with the Hebrew, with apt notes to sing them withall. Newly set forth, and allowed to bee sung in all churches, of course, printed in 1639 and here with a stunningly gorgeous embroidered binding. And who is that on the…
Carnivalesque 48
Welcome, one and all, to Carnivalesque 48, the early modern edition! As should come as no surprise, some of the most interesting posts on early modern studies in the last few months have come from two sources. Both Mercurius Politicus (written by Nick Poyntz) and diapsalmata (Whitney Anne Trettien) routinely have fabulous posts; I’ll single out a couple here, but really, their blogs are worth reading regularly. Mercurius’s Killing Noe Murder discusses Edward Sexby’s 1648 pamphlet justifying the murder of Cromwell; part of Nick’s concern is the production and distribution of the pamphlet, a theme he takes up in a broader examination of the rise of newsbooks in The Great Game. There is some more material book history over at diapsalmata, where Whitney has been looking at the practice of cut-ups in a series of posts. The first draws connections between early modern commonplacing, Dada cut-ups, and digital poetry–a great…