My last post focused on my frustration with the assumption that digitization is primarily about access to text: But access is not all that digitization can do for us. Why should we limit ourselves to thinking about digital facsimiles as being akin to photographs? Why should we think about these artifacts in terms only of the texts they transmit? Let’s instead think about digitization as a new tool that can do things for us that we wouldn’t be able to see without it. Let’s use digitization not only to access text but to explore the physical artifact. I spent the remainder of that post brainstorming some suggestions about what digitization might enable other than access to text, and there were some great comments about the ramifications of textualizing the digital that I’m still mulling over. In this post I want to offer some examples of why we might want to…
Tag: printing
that thei they thnt
My students are in the process of choosing the books they’re going to work with this semester, so I’ve been looking at lots of books I haven’t seen before. One of them is an English translation of Nicholas Monardes’s Historia medicinal, a 1577 book with one of those glorious long titles: Ioyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde, wherein is declared the rare and singuler vertues of diuerse and sundrie hearbes, trees, oyles, plantes, and stones, with their aplications, aswell for phisicke as chirurgerie, the saied beyng well applied bryngeth suche present remedie for all deseases, as maie seme altogether incredible: notwithstandyng by practize founde out, to bee true: also the portrature of the saied hearbes, very aptly discribed: Englished by Ihon Frampton marchaunt. (Want more info? Check out the record on Hamnet.) In doing her description of the book, my student noticed something funny about the headlines. They…
the small joys of looking at books
Take a gander at this book I was looking at today: Boyer’s The compleat French-master, 1699, Folger Shakespeare Library, Call Number: 263- 520q Can you see what’s going on here? It looks at first glance like the top page has been folded back, revealing the text of the previous leaf. But that’s not it. You’re looking at the verso side of sig. H4 and nothing else. Can you see now that it’s only one leaf? Here’s an image of what this leaf looks like in other copies of this book: And now do you see what’s happened? During printing, this leaf got folded over in the press, and the inside of the fold missed the type (that’s the blank streak) and the outer part of the fold was, once unfolded, misaligned. Print the image off and fold it to see for yourself! Here’s the recto side of the leaf:…
reading blanks
A while back, Whitney Trettien posted about a reference she’d come across to an intriguing book called “The First of April: a blank poem in commendation of the suppos’d author of a poem lately publish’d, call’d Ridotto, or, Downfal of masquerades.” Whitney wasn’t able to see the work itself–the ESTC record lists copies only at NYU and Penn–but when I was up in Philadelphia last month, I stopped in at the University of Pennsylvania’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library to take a look. It is, as Whitney indicates, a curious thing. What makes it curious is that this is a “blank poem” that is not blank in the sense of “blank verse”, which is the way in which Richard Steere’s 1713 work uses the phrase: Rather, “The First of April” (probably published around 1724) is blank in the sense that the pages are blank: as Foxon notes, “The poem is indeed…
DIY newsbook
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…