Category: Wynken de Worde

>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…

> My last post was about the use of printed or manuscript waste in making new books; earlier posts were about the finding tabs and other tools used to help users find their way through the 1527 Vulgate Bible. Here’s a combination of those two interests: manuscript waste used to make a finding tab. This is from a 1508 Missal for the Salisbury rites of Mass, printed in Paris by Thielmannus Keruer. Notice the tab carefully sewn on–you can see other tabs sticking out of the book’s foreedge as well. And you’ll see that the gothic lettering and abbreviations system look like those of the French 1527 Vulgate Bible. Unlike that book, however, this one is printed in both black and red ink–a process that would require two separate pulls of the lever to make two differently colored impressions. If you look closely, you can see that the red text…

>On today’s Morning Edition was a great story about lawsuits and electronic information management: the essential point was that most companies do not have an electronic data management policy, and when they are sued, the cost of sorting through all those emails and instant messages can far far outweigh the cost of settling a lawsuit. The lesson a lay person should take from this is that emails can never be deleted. You think you’ve deleted what was sent to you, or what you sent, but it very well can already have been backed up on tape, or it could have been forwarded, or any other scenario that keeps it available to be retrieved in the future. My favorite quote from piece was this fabulous comment from Sharon Nelson, head of Sensei Enterprises: “Emails are the cockroaches of the electronic world.” It’s not the scurrying little feet that are the connection,…