No, I don’t mean it’s time to write your own news sheet newsbook. It’s time to fold your ownnewsbook! Why would you want to do this? Well, for one thing, it’s a handy way to understand and demonstrate to others the general principle of early modern format: multiple pages are printed onto a single sheet in the correct order so that when folded, they appear sequentially. It’s like magic! Or, um, folding. Above is a numbered example of the same newsbook that I used as an image in my last post. The red numbers are page numbers: folded in the right way, you’d get an 8-page booklet in the order indicated. But if you look closely, you’ll see that the actual news sheet doesn’t have page numbers. Instead, there are signatures: at the bottom of the first page is a tiny, blotted “L”; at the bottom of the 5th page…
Category: Wynken de Worde
Posts about book history, reading, special collections libraries and the digital tools that help us love them
building a syallabus for early modern book history
I’ve spent a good portion of my summer thinking about how to revise my syllabus for the early modern book history seminar I teach. This fall will be the sixth time I’ve taught this course, and while it’s been working well, it’s also time to shake it up a bit. Too much familiarity with the material doesn’t breed contempt, but it can lead to a complacency. I’ve been browsing in the stacks, reading new finds, and thinking about what I want students to learn and how best to achieve that. There are some key factors that shape how I approach teaching this course. First, it’s a multi-disciplinary course, drawing students from different majors, primarily English and History, but also French, Art History, Theology, and Music. Because it’s important that all these students feel welcome in and learn from this course, it cannot be too oriented toward any single subject. On…
false endings
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the experience of reading. Part of this is about the technologies of reading, but part of this is about the nature of reading and processing words. Some context is helpful here: this spring we sold our house and moved into a new house. As part of this process, we overhauled the old house, cleaning it out and making it look fabulously inviting (those of you who watch a lot of HGTV or live in housing-market-obsessed areas will recognize this as “staging”, a term that deserves its own post on an entirely different blog). We bowed to the wisdom of our realtor, who went through our house and identified the furniture and clutter that ought to be cleared out. Right up at the top of the list were all of our bookshelves and, obviously, books. This is the point when my bookish friends yelp…
quick iPad roundup
As you are undoubtedly well aware, Steve Jobs unveiled the newest Apple money-suck toy product on Wednesday: the iPad. The most immediate response was to its tone-deaf name. I don’t actually find feminine hygiene products to be disgusting, but it’s hard not to laugh at jokes about iTampons or iKotex. That last joke really works best with medievalists; for everyone else, you need to spend so long explaining what a codex is, that the frog has been dissected and dead long before they know what to laugh at. But even aside from menstrual jokes, the best joke I’ve seen comes from a medievalist. Tom Elrod’s blog post, “Introducing the iCodex,” captures the breathless adoration of Steve Jobs’s fans and the rediscovery of reading technology. This image from the blog captures what’s smart and funny about it, as does this excerpt: With the iCodex, people can now store multiple items in…
early modern mash-ups
In my last post wondering about important book history tools developments of the last decade, I got some interesting suggestions about what else to consider. For me, they came together as part of a way of remembering how advances or shifts in technology enable different ways of studying and creating knowledge and arts. In response, I’ve been thinking about mash-ups. Peter Friedman commented on my post that a reconsideration of authorship has been developing in part as a response to new technological tools. I’m not sure I see the correlation quite like that, at least in the field of literary studies, as opposed to his field of law. But I do agree that the availability of powerful computing tools to shape and reshape preexisting creations does reshape notions of authorship as individual ownership. EMI’s anger over Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (the 2004 mash-up of the the Beatles’s White Album and…