As some of you know, I am the queen of folding exercises. ((I’m not really the queen of folding exercises. If I was, I’d do more than the easy formats. I’m more like the JV champion of folding, having mastered 4° and 8°. I still stumble over making my own 12°s and I aspire to 18°s. Then I’ll be the Empress of Folding.)) It’s the only way to understand early modern book formats, and I like puttering around coming up with better ways to demonstrate this to my students and even to my blog readers (see here and, most recently, here). Because it’s that time of year when I get my syllabus in order and because, thanks to my week at Rare Book School’s Introduction to the Principles of Bibliographical Description, I have format on my brain, it suddenly dawned on me that instead of just handing out my one-sheet syllabus…
Category: Wynken de Worde
Posts about book history, reading, special collections libraries and the digital tools that help us love them
carnivalesque 86
Hello, and welcome to Carnivalesque 86, the early modern edition! Step right up for a look at things small and large in the world of early modern blogs. I’ve been puzzling through the relationship between the fairly new field of big data in the humanities and what might be its opposite, small data, and so many of the posts that caught my attention are ones that are navigating between individual objects and networks of data. One of the objections that I have to big data is that I’m drawn to the ephemeral and the hard-to-measure. In “Early printed book contains rare evidence of medieval spectacles,” The Harry Ransom Center’s Cultural Compass blog takes a look at that trickiest of ephemera, not the object itself but the traces it left behind. The medieval manuscript used as the endpapers to a 1568 printed work show the outline of a pair of medieval glasses….
june catch-up
Hi, all. Some online book-history-related tidbits you might be interested in: 1) The Folger Bindings Image Collection is now up and running and is gorgeous and full of tasty metadata to help you find what you’re looking for! 2) Jen Howard asked a great question about looking for readings about reading and the results are now being collected in a Zotero library. Please add your suggestions. 3) The talk that I posted here led to a great conversation with Glenn Fleishman, who wrote it up for The Economist’s Babbage blog! (a bit of horn self-tooting there, sorry, but it was pretty exciting in what has otherwise been a glum stretch of time) And this is a heads’ up and a plea: I’m hosting the next early modern edition of Carnivalesque at the end of the month, so I’m eager for your recommendations for great blog posts. There’s a handy web…
where material book culture meets digital humanities
Below is the text from a talk I gave at the Geographies of Desire conference, held at the University of Maryland on April 27-28. Almost everything that I said there is something that I’ve said here before, so faithful readers won’t find much that’s new. But I promised I’d stick it up here, so here it is! If you’re simply looking for the set of links to the resources I mentioned, you can find those on Pinboard. I haven’t included all of my slides here, but you can find those here. I haven’t included all my ad-libbing either, but you would have had to have been there for that. “Where material book culture meets digital humanities” Discussions about early modern books and digital tools have tended to focus on one of two responses. One of the first things that people focus on is the amazing access that digital tools have…
book dealers’ descriptions and catalog records
Mike Widener (Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law Library) wrote a great post about his practice of adding dealers’ descriptions to catalog records of rare books; Jeremy Dibbell included it in his link roundup; John Overholt tweeted about it; and then the conversation began. I’ve storyfied it and embedded it below (you can also go straight to Storify to see it). I wanted to capture the conversation, but we all also wanted to hear a wider range of responses and have a longer conversation about the value and potential pitfalls of this practice. It’ll end up on the EXLIBRIS-L listserv as well, so I’ll include a link to all that when it happens (thanks, John!) but in the meantime, read and comment: [<a href=”http://storify.com/wynkenhimself/adding-book-dealers-descriptions-to-catalog-record” target=”_blank”>View the story “adding book dealers’ descriptions to catalog records” on Storify</a>]