[update 4/16/2020: The project that I describe here has continued to spin out in various directions that I describe in my March 10, 2020 post, “notes on feminist bibliography,” and in a publication for Printing History, “Working Toward a Feminist Printing History,” the preprint of which has been deposited into the Humanities Commons repository.] Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly curious about how we might imagine and create feminist book history. And so I was thrilled when I saw that Valerie Wayne was leading a seminar at this year’s Shakespeare Association of America conference on “Women, Gender, and Book History,” and I’ve been delighted to be part of such a smart and engaging crew of scholars. We’ll be meeting at the tail end of the month and I’m looking forward to our conversation and to feedback on my contribution. But I’m not done with wrestling with this yet,…
Tag: students
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…
an armorial binding mystery
Another book from my students’ projects, this one with a curious binding: At first glance, what you might see is an armorial binding: a binding in which an owner has stamped his arms in gold tooling. No big deal, really; there are plenty of books like those in libraries. But this one is more complicated: there are TWO coats of arms, one stamped on top of the other. Here’s a close-up of the center of the binding, where the arms are: And here’s the picture again with one of the two arms outlined: A close-up of the top portion, in which you can see that there are two crowns juxtaposed and the heads of two faintly visible supporters: Looked at in raking light, you can see that the supporter on the right looks like an antlered stag: And the supporter on the left looks like a horse: I can’t make…
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:…