Author: Sarah Werner

>Today’s feast: this beautiful illustration of a book worm from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. Published in 1665, with beautiful copperplate engravings based on Hooke’s own drawings, Hooke’s work is a foundational work in the history of science. And it provides us with the first depiction of a bookworm: This Animal probably feeds upon the Paper and covers of Books, and perforates in them several small round holes, finding, perhaps, a convenient nourishment in those hulks of Hemp and Flax, which have pass’d through so many scourings, washings, dressings and dryings, as the parts of old Paper must necessarily have suffer’d; the digestive faculty, it seems, of these little creatures being able yet further to work upon those stubborn parts, and reduce them into another form. This picture came from the Project Gutenberg’s eBook of Hooke’s…

> An earlier post joked about “cockroaches of the book“. Then I was thinking not about scurrying little pests but about printed waste. But I don’t want to overlook the relevance of critters to early modern books, so: what do you see in the image above? Tiny little black circles? Did you guess? They are worm holes, the traces of where little bookworms ate their way through this book (you might recognize it as the 1527 Bible I’ve discussed before). Read more about wormholes in ABC for Book Collectors:

>Over on the wonderful blog Got Medieval is a discussion about what terms define the medieval period and about the slipperiness between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What are the seven terms that define the Middle Ages? According to Got Medieval’s students, “knights, things found on or around knights, and peasants” (my summary really doesn’t do that classroom exercise justice; it’s well worth reading). Got Medieval offers his own list, based on his tag cloud: “Beowulf, King Arthur, Marginalia, Manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, Popes, and Latin.” A recurring feature on the blog is “Mmm… Marginalia“, a highly entertaining look at medieval marginalia. I certainly wouldn’t want to argue that marginalia or manuscripts should not be strongly associated with the medieval period. But what about books? The first book printed with moveable type was Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible, completed in 1455. Given the complexity of the task, it’s likely that Gutenberg…

> In my last post, I mentioned Hamlet’s practice of commonplacing, or recording things of note in his writing tablets. I want to return to Hamlet to look at commonplacing from a slightly different angle–not what is written, but what is written upon. Below is the first part of the speech from which I quoted before. For context, you should know that Hamlet is speaking to himself after his first encounter with his father’s ghost and during which the ghost exhorted Hamlet to “Remember me.” Remember thee?Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seatIn this distracted globe. Remember thee?Yea, from the table of my memoryI’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,That youth and observation copied thereAnd thy commandment all alone shall liveWithin the book and volume of my brainUnmixed with baser matter. . . . .(Hamlet, Arden3, 1.5.95-104) Hamlet’s description of…

>At tea on Friday (the Folger heartily endorses everyone in the Library to stop for 3:00 tea–a great practice that is fruitful in ways beyond caffeine intake) with a couple of friends, I was struck by some of the oddities of blogging. Marshall Grossman was talking about the blog he writes for the Huffington Post, and about how bits of his blog crop up all over the blogosphere. Blogs are tremendously self-replicating that way: lots of them consist primarily of quotes from and links to other blogs. Marshall was talking about how disconcerting it is to see his name and his words show up marshalled to the service of someone else’s agenda. That, of course, is true for print essays as well–we all take other scholars’ insights and use them to help shape our own. But what struck me is how much easier that it with blogs. You just cut-and-paste…