A couple of weeks back I posted some images with the aim of destabilizing some of our assumptions about what early modern texts look like. In the mix was an image of a “big” book followed by a “tiny” one. It was, I think, obvious even on the computer screen that the big book was big and the tiny one was tiny. It was not, I don’t think, obvious how big and how tiny those books were. The big book is Holinshed’s Chronicles (STC 13569 copy 2), coming in at a massive 38 cm. tall; the tiny book is John Taylor’s thumb bible, Verbum sempiternum (STC 23811.2), rising to a minimal 4.5 cm. tall. But even knowing those numbers, it can be hard to translate that into something understandable without placing them side-by-side: The thumb bible is 12% the size of the Holinshed. That’s a big difference. And yet on a computer screen, when you’re…
Category: The Collation
Posts first published on The Collation, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s blog. The original posts and comments can be found by substituting “collation.folger.edu” for “sarahwerner.net/blog” on the individual post urls.
It’s the details thnt matter
There were two odd things happening in last week’s crocodile mystery, which featured an opening from the first English edition of Nicolàs Monardes’s Joyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde (STC 18005). The first was the easier to spot, assuming you paid attention to the information at the top of the page that we don’t usually pay attention to. In the headline (that bit of text that runs across the top of a page usually identifying the book or section of the book being read), there was a “thnt” instead of “that” on the left-hand side of the opening. What should the text read? Not “thnt” but “that,” as this correct headline reads:
Noticing the weirdness of texts
Sometimes it’s fun just to look at books without worrying what they are and who printed them and what the text says. And sometimes, when you do that, you notice all sorts of ways in which they’re weird—they mix manuscript and print together, they play with layout and movement, they come in different shapes and sizes, we find them in unexpected places. And so I give you a slideshow of early modern works that might destabilize assumptions about what early books were. If you click on the first of the images below, it will switch into a slideshow view that will let you see the pictures and read some brief captions that might spark some thoughts. To find out more about the works I’ve shown, you can pull up the images in our Digital Image Collection, which will let you explore them in close detail and to view their catalog…
Annotating and collaborating
This month’s crocodile mystery was, as Andrew Keener quickly identified, an image from Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Lodovico Domenichi’s Facetie and (Folger H.a.2): There is a lot that could be said about Gabriel Harvey and his habits of reading. ((Two places to start are Virginia Stern, Gabriel Harvey: his life, marginalia, and library (Oxford UP, 1979) and Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30-78.)) He was a scholar, a writer, and a prolific reader who heavily annotated his books, about 200 of which survive (the Folger holds seven of his annotated books). ((In addition to Domenichi’s Facetie, which is bound with Lodovico Guicciardini’s Detti et Fatti Piacevoli, the Folger has his annotated copies of Lodovico Dolce’s Medea Tragedia (PQ4621.D3 M4 1566a Cage), George North’s Description of Swedland (STC 18662), Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Le notti, Pindar’s Olympia, John Harvey’s A discoursive Probleme concerning Prophesies (STC 12908 Copy 2),…
Looking like a book
Last month I wrote about a book—nay, a leaf of a book—and the secret histories it reveals about how it was made, from the growth of the tree that became the woodblock to the valleys and hills that formed during the making and printing of the paper. I promised then that I’d write another post that took us into the afterlife of that book, the ways in which the future imprinted itself on it.