Digesting turkey hasn’t been helping with my processing thoughts for this blog, so I’m going to do the classic blog thing of directing you to some other blog posts: At Mercurius Politicus, Nick Poyntz has a great post on “Information technology and early modern readers“, thinking about bookshelves and the ways in which the organization of books in physical space shapes their use. He looks at the libraries of Montaigne, Cotton, and Pepys, each of which were organized differently and suggests different ways in which those libraries were processed. Nice quotes from these early modern scholars and great links to more images. A less scholarly approach but more visually lush take on libraries can be found at the reoccuring “bookporn” series at A Historian’s Craft. Post #19 has some great shots of the library at St John’s College, Cambridge, with its fabulous call number indexes. (Of course, I’m partial to…
Category: Wynken de Worde
Posts about book history, reading, special collections libraries and the digital tools that help us love them
chains & ephemera
Two different and opposing examples of print today, both of which respond to some of my earlier thoughts about the material presence of books and their durability or lack thereof. The first is what I think of as a book with a seriously material presence: Thomas a Kempis’s Works printed in Nuremburg in 1494 and bound in a contemporaneous pigskin binding with beautiful blind tooling, heavy brass corner bosses, clasps, and an iron chain. Now that’s a book! And not one you could take with you on your travels, either. But, of course, that is one of the reasons it has survived: it is heavily armored. (More details in our catalogue.) My other example is its opposite, something that I find amazing it has survived at all: a newspaper from September 1648 called The Moderate (although its user has renamed it as The Immoderate Rogue). It’s just one sheet of…
almost as good as a book
I’ve now read Virginia Heffernan’s column in today’s New York Times Magazine multiple times, and I am no less confused by it than when I began. Her focus in “Pump Up the Volume” is the Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader. And her basic point seems to be that it is almost as good as a book. This is why I’ve had to read the column multiple times. That’s her point? It’s almost as good as a book? That’s really what her description keeps coming back to. One of the great things about the Kindle, Heffernan insists, is that it is so un-electronic, so unlinked to the internet: Unlike the other devices that clatter in my shoulder bag, the Kindle isn’t a big greedy magnet for the world’s signals. It doesn’t pulse with clocks, blaze with video or squall with incoming bulletins and demands. It’s almost dead, actually. Lifeless. Just a lump…
the Holocaust and libraries
A friend shared a recent article with me from Der Spiegel that touches directly on the subject of books and owners and their emotional and historical connections. The piece, “Retracing the Nazi Book Theft,” examines the legacy of the Holocaust for German libraries: thousands of books that were stolen from Jewish owners and that remain in the collections of German libraries. This photo (from the article) is of Detlaf Bockenkamm, a curator at Berlin’s Central and State Library who been tracing the former owners of books stolen by the Nazis. Here he is standing with some of those books, part of the Accession J section, consisting of more than 1000 books acquired by the Nazis “from the private libraries of evacuated Jews” and then integrated into the Library’s collection. Just as paintings were systematically taken and claimed by the Nazis, so too were books and other cultural and valuable items….
the intangibles of books
My recent posts have been focusing on books that have been handed down from one generation to the next, books that allow us to see evidence of the social transactions of books and the links they forge between family members. But we wouldn’t be able to see that evidence if the books themselves weren’t in such good shape to begin with. The photo above is of one of my favorite books, and I mean that in a very material sense, not a textual sense: I love this particular book because it was my father’s when he was a boy. I remember it sitting on his bookshelves in our house, and him telling me how fond he was of Robert Louis Stevenson. I’ve never actually read Kidnapped. And I’m not going to be able to read this copy. It’s so fragile that the front cover came right off as I removed…