In Which I Divulge My Place of Employment
I hadn’t intended to discuss my job here, but now I have a good reason to—we’ve started a blog!
I’m working at Peter Harrington and writing The Cataloguer’s Desk. It’s an informal look at daily life as a bookseller, the interesting items we come across, and shop news and events written by myself and a coworker. I uploaded out first post today on Moon Writing, one of the earliest systems of printing for the blind, and the incredible 60 volume Bible that was published in Moon script. We also have a new Twitter feed. It’s all very exciting and I hope you enjoy reading it.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Still Alive
During the past four months I have not been trapped under a stack of books in a lonely corner of a library sub-basement. Or entangled in an international bibliographical conspiracy stretching from the Parisian catacombs to the highest levels of government (or at least I haven’t noticed).
What I have been doing is: finishing my dissertation, which was due in September, finding employment, visiting home for a few weeks, starting my new job at an antiquarian bookshop in London, finding a flat, graduating, sending in my visa application, and generally sorting things out. As well as enjoying the absence of academic deadlines, though I’m already exploring options for starting a PhD in book history.
So a stressful transitional period is ending and I’m ready to think about writing again. But I wanted to take a second and thank everyone who’s been reading the blog for the past few years, linking to my posts, and providing feedback and information. It’s really incredible to be part of this tightly-knit biblioblogosphere, and I wish I could meet more of you in person.
Special thanks also goes to those who helped with my job hunt, particularly the people who went out of their way to assist me in person; all the advice and emotional support has truly meant a great deal to me. I feel incredibly lucky to not only have a job, but one that I enjoy and consider a real career. If you know me well you will understand how very strange it is when I say that that I’m eager to get out of bed in the morning.
So yeah, thanks everybody, and back to regularly scheduled posting.
Blurry graduation at Senate House.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (4)Memento Mori Part I
Quid me mihi detrahis? Who is it that tears me from myself? – Ovid, The Metamorphosis Book VI
I recently began an essay on the evolution of images in anatomy books between 1450 and 1800, and I thought I’d share some of my early research. All the images I’ve used are from the National Library of Medicine, which has an excellent historical anatomy exhibit. Clicking on the pictures below will take you to the appropriate section of the NLM website for more images, biographies, and bibliographies. (And a word of warning, some might find the illustrations graphic, disturbing, or not safe for work.) Part II will hopefully appear sometime next week.
Sources:
- Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning by Andrea Carlino
- The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture by Jonathan Sawday
- The Art of Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today by Rifkin, Ackerman, and Folkenberg.
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Although curiosity about the body has long been a feature of human culture, anatomical science stagnated during the Middle Ages, a time when the words of classical authorities were valued over discovery. Rather than working from observation or experimentation, medieval scholars compiled, rewrote, and annotated older medical works, particularly those of Galen. It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages and Renaissance that increasingly literate and intellectual segments of society, renewed interest in science and discovery, and advances in printing resulted in the production of new anatomical treatises that eclipsed the achievements of the past and led to the foundation of modern anatomy. But these new volumes were not purely scientific or didactic. Luxury texts intended for an erudite, upper-class audience beyond the medical profession, they mixed art, science, and religion to create dramatic meditations on the natures of flesh and soul and the meaning of the body’s short existence.
Fasciculus de medicina
The first printed anatomy book was published in Venice in 1492 by the Gregorio brothers. A Latin translation of a work by a little known German physician named Johannes de Ketham, it was planted firmly in the medieval medical tradition. The book, which included treatises on subjects such as bloodletting, urinoscopy, and dissection, became an important teaching text, but its sumptuous woodcuts were also geared toward an audience of wealthy intellectuals. A major success, it was republished in 1493 with new illustrations showing contemporary medical scenes including a dissection, and it appeared in twelve editions within a decade. Though produced by a workshop, the designs are good examples of the clean, classical style of Venetian Renaissance illustration. Below is the traditional zodiac man as well as a dissection scene, which portrays an anatomy lesson as performed in the late Middle Ages. The young lector reads from an anatomical text, most likely Galen, while the sector, an uneducated barber/surgeon, preforms the dissection, and the ostensor, a high ranking professor, translates the words of the lector and directs the sector. At this time dissection was not an act of observation and discovery, but was a tightly controlled public ritual intended to reinforce the authority of classical medical texts. The illustration indicates the importance of the text by the prominent placement of the lector relative to the other figures, including the higher ranking ostensor.
Isagogae breves
This book, published in 1522 and 1523 by the humanist physician Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, is credited as the first printed anatomy text based on direct observation of the body. Berengario was deeply skeptical of traditional anatomical practice, saying that a good anatomist ‘does not believe anything in his discipline simply because of the spoken or written word: what is required here is sight and touch.’ Though the woodcuts are artistically and anatomically crude, part of their importance lies in their reflection of Italian Renaissance culture. Berengario was an art collector, and many of the figures are based on rediscovered classical art, religious images, and important works by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Berengario recognized the importance of anatomical knowledge for artists, and he recommended his book for their use as well as that of medical students. The half-flayed figure below is in the traditional pose of an Apollo with light rays. Other illustrations represent the redemptive potential of dissection, which was believed to help atone for the sins of the criminals whose bodies were commonly used for this purpose. Several images of partially draped female nudes indicate a tension between sexual modesty and the display of dissected reproductive organs.
De humani corporis fabrica
One of the most famous medical texts of all time, The Fabric of the Human Body (1543) by Andreas Vesalius, was the first truly modern anatomical book. Vesalius was a Flemish surgeon of the University of Padua who had been trained in the Galenic tradition. Based on his own experience with dissection he rejected Galen as the ultimate authority and argued that surgeons should make their own observations, and he corrected many Galenic mistakes, such as the multi-lobed liver, that had been passed from text to text through the Middle Ages. Vesalius and his collaborators were also some of the first people to grasp the full potential of the printed book, using the title page, illustrations, initials, and chapter/paragraph subdivisions to create a harmonious and practical work. Vesalius’s illustrations were most likely based on his own careful drawings, and he worked closely with the woodcut artist Jan Stefan van Kalkar, a member of Titian’s studio. This partnership resulted in extremely accurate and detailed work, better than anything that proceeded it. But these are not just sterile medical images—the cadavers display human emotions of sadness, despair, and mourning. The skeleton below ponders mortality in a memento mori which would reappear throughout western culture, including in Shakespeare. The second appears to pray, or to be bent in agony. Throughout the book dead trees and barren landscapes, representing death, are contrasted with churches and the promise of eternal life.
De dissectione partium corporis humani
Charles Estienne, a member of the famous printing family of Paris, began work on this book during the 1530s, hoping it would replace the Isagogae breves of Berengario. He had been a student in Paris at the same time as Vesalius, sharing the former’s interest in dissection and the belief that direct observation was more important than the words of authorities. Unfortunately, while Estienne’s book contributed some new discoveries to the science of anatomy, it was plagued by legal issues regarding the artwork and was not published until two years after De humani corporis fabrica. One of the interesting aspects of Estienne’s book is that it includes a number of woodcuts of nude women that were, according to Rifkin, originally intended as ‘genteel humanist erotica’, but were altered by partial dissection and the inclusion of anatomical information relating to reproductive anatomy. Included are Bathsheba being spied upon by David (below), as well as the goddesses Venus, Antiope, and Proserpina. A good example of the complex relationships between art, medicine, books, and sex during the early modern era.
Warning: Contact Your Dr. If You Experience Melancholia or Gout
From The Kiss of Lamourette by Robert Darnton:
In a tract of 1775, J.G. Heinzmann listed the physical consequences of excessive reading: “susceptability to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, hemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria, and melancholy.
Of course, this was pre-prescription drug era, when you actually had to make an effort at something to get fun side effects.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Argh
I’m having terrible glitches with the new WordPress image captioning system, and I can’t get the post below to work correctly, so I’ve removed the captions. If you want to find out more about the images, just click them to go directly to the websites. In the future I’ll return to my old methods.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Reading Online Follow-Up
Jeremy has posted his own response to the Atlantic Monthly article Is Google Making Us Stupid? He makes some great points, noting that, like Carr, he finds reading on the internet to be different to print, and less pleasant. In a counterpoint to my post he says of the web that, “It’s an excellent delivery system – getting material for reading has never been easier – but I’ve never found it a very pleasant place for doing the actual reading.” But he, too, disagrees with the thrust of the article, which is that the internet is altering our minds and limiting our capacity to absorb information in traditional ways.
In what I think is an interesting postscript, Slate has a piece today on the ways that we read online. The author discusses the theories of usability expert Jakob Neilson, who analyzes what people are looking for online and how best to present information in this context. I found this interesting, especially because Neilson (unlike Carr) bases his recommendations on actual research and mathematical modeling (and he doesn’t make value judgements about technology.)
According to Neilson there are important differences in reading print and reading via the web.
Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an “information scent.” We move on if there doesn’t seem to be any food around.
It’s an interesting article with lots of good links, but I could barely handle the format, which made use of Neilson’s theories regarding bullet points, short paragraphs, bold text, spaces, etc. Supposedly this draws the reader’s attention and makes it easier to get information, but it made my brain hurt. I’ll take a dense, four page piece any day, and I’ve never had a problem reading that kind of thing online. (In fact, last year I reread both The Hound of the Baskervilles and Sense & Sensibility via my laptop, so I suppose everyone has different tolerances and I’m a bit of an outlier statistically.)
But what’s nice about this viewpoint is that it says there will always be a place for traditional print in our increasingly digital world. Instead of doomsday scenarios in which digital media either replace print because they’re more efficent or, as Carr argues, ruin our ability to interact with books, we should be able to maintain a nice balance. (I haven’t read the entire essay linked to below, but it looks fascinating.)
Filed under Uncategorized, books, digital media, internet, print, reading online, technology, typography | Comment (0)We’ll do more and more reading on screens, but they won’t replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It’s contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal.” He describes the white stuff as “a still point, an anchor for the consciousness.”
Fun With Fonts
Slate has an interesting piece today by Jason Fagone, called YouType: The strange allure of making your own fonts, about the website FontStruct and the online community of amateur typographers.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably like me, and you have a job in which you stare at a screen all day. And it’s not even your screen. It’s somebody else’s pixels and windows and letters. Make a font and you start to screw with the scenery—the banal yet elemental DNA of your daily existence. It’s as if you could design and build your own subway turnstile or change the color of a Starbucks cup from off-white to fuchsia. Here’s a program that lets you commit a small, safe, infinitesimally subversive act and then share it with the world.
I visited the page of one of the fonts Fagone mentions in the piece, WPA Gothic. I, too, have a soft spot for the graphic arts of the 30s and 40s, so this one really appeals to me. The font creator also links to the wonderful WPA book poster that inspired the font:
More WPA posters are available at the Library of Congress website.
Filed under 1930s, 1940s, FontStruct, Uncategorized, WPA, fonts, graphic design, internet, posters, typography | Comment (0)