http://twitter.com/wynkenhimself/statuses/99434066914459648 As those of you who follow me on twitter might recall, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for some time now (since the beginning of last August, to be precise). http://twitter.com/wynkenhimself/statuses/102045479528972289 For all of my nervousness that I might not finish it, ((I got a bunch of responses to that tweet from people who said they never made it through the book, which confirmed my sense that this was a real danger.)) I’ve made good steady progress and—much more importantly—I’ve really enjoyed the book. I love DFW’s writing and the characters and the loopy plot. I find that I think about them all when I’m not reading the book; they live in the back of my head and I carry them around with me as I go about my life. That’s the most I could ever ask for in a book. And few books come close to…
Category: Wynken de Worde
Posts about book history, reading, special collections libraries and the digital tools that help us love them
link catchup
Hi all—I’ve been so busy writing elsewhere that I haven’t kept up here. *sorry* But some links to some of that book history goodness in case you missed out: At The Collation I wrote a whole lot of posts, but there are two recent ones that are exactly the sort of thing I would have written about here if I wasn’t trying to shore up content over there. The first is “Learning from mistakes,” about how much I love finding printer’s errors in early books and what we can learn from their mistakes. Check out the comments, please, to help me understand what’s going on in the 1641 pamphlet that I end the post with and why Wing drives me nuts! The second post, just up a few hours ago, is “Correcting mistakes,” and it picks up from the previous post to consider how early modern printers tried to fix…
pretty picture penance
It’s been much longer since I’ve written a proper post here than I meant for it to be. In my defense, I’ve been pretty busy over at The Collation, running the show and writing my own contributions. There’s lots of good stuff over there, including a whole world of manuscript exploration that I don’t do here; check out Heather Wolfe’s and Nadia Seiler’s interesting posts if you like that sort of thing (and if you don’t think you do, browse anyway and you’ll learn that you do!). And if you’re looking for advice on using Folger digital resources, like searching Luna and the power of permanent URLs and Mike Poston’s new tool, Impos[i]tor, the tooltips series is for you. In any case, this post isn’t meant to be an advertisement, but to do a pretty picture penance: sharing some great book images, even if I don’t have the time to…
book history at mla12
Taking inspiration from Mark Sample’s compilation of Digital Humanities sessions at the 2012 Modern Language Association convention, I’ve compiled a list of book history sessions. My method of madness was to skim the session titles and descriptions and note those that seemed to focus on bibliography, print culture, or textual scholarship. I came up with 70 sessions, including my own roundtable. That seemed like too many to be of interest to many of you, so rather than fill your feed, I put together a separate page listing them all. Check out the offerings and let me know if I’ve missed any. You can browse the entire program and, if you’re an MLA member, create your own personalized schedule of sessions you want to visit (it’s a pretty nice set-up, and yet another way in which the MLA does us proud as our scholarly organization). As a side note, there are not as…
early modern women printers: an Ada Lovelace post
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, based on her 1842 treatise on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine; Ada Lovelace Day began in 2009 as a way of increasing the profile of women in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math (commonly referred to as STEM fields). I’m not in a STEM field (though I’m the almuna of a college that prides itself on turning out huge numbers of women who are). But you know who we could see as being early STEM pioneers? Printers. Early modern printers were using a new technology that had a radical impact on their world. ((Please don’t send me comments about how the printing press didn’t cause any revolutions. No one thing changes the world in isolation. But moveable type was fucking huge.)) And you know who we find in printing in early modern London? Women. Here’s a…