Links

— I recently discovered the aptly titled blog Do I really want to touch that with my hand? This week Holly, who works as a conservator at the University of Virginia, discusses the recent (and timely) water damage training simulation which she coordinated.  It’s really fascinating and there are lots of great pictures at Flickr.

— Check out Paul Collins’s Slate piece on the rise and fall of the semicolon.

— This week Ace Jet 170 has an awesome Found Type Friday – take a look!

— More graphic goodness from Book Patrol – a  lovely, typetastic poster for the M25 in London.

— Michael of The Dispersal of Darwin points out some very funny/sad mistakes in an exhibit of scientists’ portraits at a museum in Valencia, Spain.  Fail!

— Richard at Reading Archives offers a thought-provoking post on digital curation.

— Via Morbid Anatomy, an incredible photo exhibit, Picturing the Museum, at the American Museum of Natural History.  Also images from the newly digitized Die Kleyner Chirurgie, an anatomy book published in 1542.

— More on the library rescue (and photos) at the University of Iowa, from the Fine Books Blog.

— Video of a CNN commentator calling books for boys “emasculating.”  Via Quillblog.

— From the NY Times, a piece on the last volume of Camus’s notebooks to be translated into English.

Getting It Really, Really Wrong

The Discovery Channel is reporting today on a new study of high mercury levels in medieval monks, believed to be caused by exposure to the ink used in creating manuscripts (among other possibilities).  It seems interesting, but unfortunately both the Discovery Channel and the scientists who preformed the research err quite seriously in referring to the books as incunabula.  One has to wonder what else the archaeologists got wrong about medieval book production.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm, did not have these diseases [syphilis and leprosy] but contained mercury in their bones, scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books.

And again:

Even today “one should really not touch, or much less rub, the parchment pages of an incunabulum,” Lund Rasmussen said, adding that mercury “was used in the first place because cinnabar (a type of mercury) has this bright red, beautiful color.”

And this is the worst bit.

By 1536, books were no longer written by hand, but were instead printed, so the scientists suspect the toxic red ink literally faded from the monastic picture.

Where did they get this random date of 1536?  Printing had already spread across the Continent by 1500, even if some books continued to be produced by hand.

And of course there’s no email address or comment section.  Argh.

*edit* I found a comment submission page and wrote a note explaining what incunabula means.  I’m sure it will never be read.

The Department of Forgetting

Fascinating article over at Slate today on the FBI’s archival management system (or lack thereof.)

Not Book Related: Cool Beetle!

This weekend I went to a wedding in Sewanee and found this beautiful Rhinoceros beetle outside our hotel.  He was strong!  Once I’d picked him up it was really hard to get him off my hand and into the bushes.

Dante

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to Dante, but I finally read the Inferno this weekend.  I guess it never seemed like something I could get into, not being very religious, but I ended up loving it.  I found a copy in the library with really good commentary, and at some point in the near future I hope to find the last two volumes by the same translators.  In the meantime, some really good Dante links.

— MS Holkham misc. 48 is a late 14th century illuminated manuscript of the Inferno at the Bodleian Library.

— One my favorite sites is Renaissance Dante in Print: 1472-1629.  This online exhibit from Notre Dame exhaustively covers the early printing history of the Divine Comedy, with image links at the bottom of each page.  I particularly liked the section on Dantean cosmography, which compiles the different graphical representations of Dante’s Hell.

— The National Gallery of Victoria displays 36 of William Blake’s watercolor illustrations for the Divine Comedy, created during the last years of his life, between 1824 and 1827. The images are small, but clear.

— The William Blake Archive, UNC Chapel Hill, has an even larger digital collection, including 102 images for the Divine Comedy.  The only problems are that the image viewer is a bit buggy, at least in Firefox, and when you enlarge an image it blurs and the sides get cut off.

— Digital Dante, from Columbia University, includes a collection of small images by Gustave Doré, Sandro Botticelli and Salvador Dali.

— The World of Dante, created by the University of Virginia, is a great resource and has a lovely gallery that includes images from Yates Thompson 36, a strikingly beautiful 15th century illuminated manuscript held by the British Library.  The gallery also displays Dantean art by Botticelli, Doré, Alessandro Vellutello and John Flaxman.

• Carnal Sinners – Yates Thompson 36, British Library.

Egypt and the Engraving Machine

The man above, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, was the inventor of the modern pencil and the world’s first engraving machine.  I’ve been reading about him in Napoleon and the Scientific Expedition to Egypt, an online exhibit from the Linda Hall Library (all the images in this post are from the LHL.)

Conté was one of Napoleon’s 150 savants, intellectuals charged with the study of Egypt’s culture and natural history during the French invasion, which began in 1798.  Conté was known as a mechanical genius (he was put in charge of the expedition’s balloon corps,) but had originally been a portrait painter in pre-Revolutionary France.  As a cultural observer in Egypt he made detailed studies of local trades and technologies, and he became responsible for publishing the expedition’s scientific record, the Description de l’Égypte, after his return to France in 1802. (Though he died in 1805 before the project was completed.)

The Linda Hall exhibit explains the necessity for mechanical engraving in producing the Description:

The first edition of the Description de l’Égypte eventually included 837 copperplate engravings, most of them impressively large elephant folios and some of them even bigger, double-elephant folios that were twice as large.  A single plate might require hundreds of engraved lines to faithfully portray, for example, the cloudless Egyptian sky.  The sky had to appear dark at the top and fade gradually to a pale expanse at the horizon… It stretched the limits of human ability, and the time to complete a single plate by traditional methods could be up to six months.

Conté’s machine (pictured below in an engraving from the Description) made it possible to quickly create long, uniform lines in a variety of depths.  This cut production time down from months to days for each plate, though it still took 20 years for the entire work to be completed due to the vast amounts of material and the difficulties of compiling and organizing all of it.

I’ve been reading about this engraving machine all over the internet and I’m still not 100% positive about how it worked, though it looks simple enough.  I’m also curious to know if it was embraced in Europe and whether it had an impact on engraving in general.  I don’t know much about engraving, though, so it’s hard to say.  (Come to think of it, I have lots of unanswered questions like, ‘what happened to make the eye patch necessary?’)

The next image is the example page, showing the different engraving patterns the machine was capable of producing (click for a larger version):

And here’s a complete engraving, demonstrating how the machine was able to give texture and depth to the sky (click for a larger image):

I particularly liked this quote, from a 2006 NY Times piece, about the engravings:

The versatile Conté met the challenge of the images’ imposing scale and fine detail by inventing an engraving machine that yielded a more subtle spectrum of grays relatively easily…. Perhaps this facilitated the almost preternatural fusion of subject and medium that distinguishes these prints. The geometry of ancient Egyptian architecture, illuminated by harsh Egyptian light, could not have been better suited to the eerie formalities of the engraving technique and its miragelike effects.

If you’ve found this interesting I definitely recommend checking out the entire exhibit.  The content is very satisfying, with lots of commentary and images, and I was totally enthralled reading about a bunch of nerds on an extended scientific adventure (quite often the artists would paint other savants painting Egyptian artifacts!)  The engravings in the Description are some of the most enduring images of Egypt created by Europeans, and I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve seen one in a history book or documentary, so it’s very nice to have the whole story.

You can also view the entire Description online via the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.  The presentation is somewhat unfortunate, but the images are nice and can be enlarged.

Links

— Deeplinking points to an interesting, photo-filled piece in the Quarterly Conversation on three book artists.

— Via Ministry of Type, a set of truly amazing 3D foam letters.

— Bibliodyssey posts an eclectic and beautiful set of newly digitized Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts from the Bodleian Library.

— From the FAIL Blog, how did you get that backwards b? Pwned.

— New York Times article (with photos) on the upcoming auction of the Richard Green collection of scientific books at Christies.

— I recently discovered the hilarious blog Got Medieval, which makes me want to apologize to my own readers for being so horribly unfunny all the time. This week Carl has some excellent comments regarding Sydney Shep’s recent work on emoticons and the possibility of medieval precursors to the :-).

— With the arrival of summer everyone is getting all crafty. William at Hang Fire Books created his own corkboard, and Bibliophile Bullpen posts YouTube instructions for making an origami book.

— Bookride discusses a childhood classic, The Velveteen Rabbit.

— Brian Cassidy investigates his Kindle with a loupe and ponders the uncanny valley hypothesis. Also via Book Patrol, a neat Guardian article on writers’ rooms (with lots of pictures,) and a link to the online version of the art exhibition, People Reading.

— Philobiblos has a great links list this weekend – do check out the NPR story on the rescue of rare books from flooding at the University of Iowa.

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.)

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.”

Technological Determinism Makes You Stupid (Not Google)

Today’s post is about a long article in the Atlantic Monthly in which the author argues that the internet prevents us from focusing on long articles.

Hrm.

I found this piece both overly alarmist and annoyingly deterministic. Carr argues that the internet, like previous media forms, alters not only our daily habits but the very essence of our neurobiology. And because the internet is inevitably fast-paced and distracting, it results in skimming rather than “deep reading,” turning us from intelligent, thoughtful individuals to hyper, impatient and shallow cretins.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

In reality the internet, or any other form of technology, is what we make of it, guided by both individuals and by social norms or institutions. It’s easy enough to avoid the condition that Carr describes simply by altering the way you interact with the internet. Leaving blinky, ad-filled sites for mature and thoughtful online spaces (which do exist,) exerting self-control when it comes to checking email and mobile phones, changing browser settings (or the browser itself) to calm your monitor down, cleaning off the desktop, making an effort to engage with serious literature and periodicals on a daily basis and leaving time for contemplation, long walks, etc. Certainly one would not argue that in public spaces you have no choice but to step in McDonalds rather than the bookstore. The same logic applies to the internet.

Carr’s piece, however, is full of this type of pronouncement. Here’s another example of the rampant determinism:

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.

In actuality, most historians of technology will probably tell you that the clock did not, alone, bring about a change in the mindset of society. Instead, it was the changing social sphere (the emergence of capitalism, the growth of transportation networks and the scientific revolution) that created the need for accurate clocks in the first place.

Another annoying aspect of the article is that Carr focuses on Google as a leading contributor to the problem, again, very deterministically and by making use of a bizarre comparison with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of scientific management. Taylor’s methods were used to control workers in factory settings, and while this did bleed over into life outside the factory, the analogy breaks down pretty quickly when it comes to the internet. The last I checked no one can force me to search more efficiently. Google may work at making the algorithms better on its end, but that doesn’t affect the way that I choose to search, the keywords I enter, or how I parse and use the results.

I understand that there are serious concerns with Google’s page ranking system, and the ways that information can be either down-ranked or promoted by the algorithms (or censored entirely,) but this doesn’t seem to be Carr’s concern. He appears more worried by the idea of search as artificial intelligence that will one day replace thinking. Is it the case that people will replace cognition with Google? Perhaps, but I believe that these are the types who would not be very thoughtful in the first place, even in a Google-free environment. Not those who are reading the Atlantic Monthly on a regular basis, certainly.

Because, wait, haven’t we heard all this before? TV springs immediately to mind. Yet the dire predictions of a zombie nation seem not to have come to pass. Some people waste their lives in front of the tv, but others who are inclined toward reading and scholarly past-times, or sports, or socializing, are not forced into zombiehood just because there is a TV in the living room. Similarly, some scholars of the early modern era bemoaned the printed book, fearing that it made possible the rise of shallow, extensive reading versus the intensive reading of a few books over the course of a lifetime.

Thus, the whole thing seems just another iteration of the old, tired complaints. I suppose that’s what’s so frustrating for me. It’s not so much his attitude to the internet, but his poor grasp of information history and historical theory in general, which disappoints but doesn’t really surprise. Carr does give a shallow overview of book history on the final page, musing that new media technologies like writing and printing have often given rise to dire predictions not unlike his. Yet in the end, he brushes off these concerns:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

What he fails to do entirely is justify his conclusion that the internet, by its very nature, prevents “deep reading” while print, by its nature, encourages thoughtfulness. To go back to my earlier point, the internet is what you make of it, and it is as well suited a tool for intensive reading as it is for skimming the headlines, celebrity gossip and latest YouTube videos. Compared to words on screen, there is nothing intellectually special about the printed page, save for an emotional attachment that many of us feel for it, for the pleasure of holding, leafing through and smelling a book (and the fact that some people have difficulty looking at computer monitors for extended periods.) But you could just as easily pick up a printed copy of the Enquirer as a volume of Voltaire, and likewise, spend an hour engaged with a scholarly article online rather than skimming search results.

Carr ignores the more complex perspectives offered by book history and concludes by predicting a troubling future in which the internet makes us more machine-like than HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Don’t buy it.

Links

— I have a close friend who’s lived in Knoxville for several years, and one of our favorite places in town is the print shop Yee-Haw Industries. I was happy to see it profiled in yesterday’s New York Times travel article 36 Hours in Knoxville, which describes Yee-Haw as “part gallery, part stationery shop, all handmade coolness.” They’re right on the money with this piece – the owners will, in fact, happily take you through the workshops showing off all the wonderful antique types and printing equipment they’ve collected, which is just what happened the first time I visited. I’m particularly taken with their greeting cards, especially Feathered Friends, which I’ve had framed as a set.

Oh, and my friend works at one of the restaurants mentioned in the article.  She actually got to talk to the Times fact-checker, how cool is that?  Unfortunately, they should have asked her how to spell y’all.

— Jeremy of Philobiblos has a great in-depth look at Robert Darnton’s recent NY Review of Books piece, discussing points where he agrees and disagrees with Darnton.

— Hang Fire Books is giving away ephemera!  I have to say, that’s definitely the weirdest found note I’ve ever seen.  The giveaway is going to be a regular feature, so keep your eyes open.

— At Book Patrol, Brian Cassidy chronicles his adventures with his new Kindle.  I have similar mixed feelings about the Kindle, and while I think that it’s a great idea (especially for magazines,) they could have done more work on the design.  (I’m a total Apple snob, what can I say?)  I haven’t used one yet though, so it’s nice to read his initial impressions in the follow-up post.

— BibliOdyssey posts nice images from a newly digitized 1719 edition of Maria Sybilla Merian’s Metamorphosibus Insectorum Surinamensium.

— Notes for Bibliophiles, the blog of the Providence Public Library Special Collections Department, shares Heath’s Infallible Counterfeit Detector, at Sight.

— What may be Jane Austen’s hair is going up for auction on June 18.

— I’ve been following the on-going controversy over proposed age banding of children’s books by British publishers.  Author Meg Rosoff seems to be the only voice in support of the plan, but I found her reasoning pretty insipid.  Speaking from my experience as a kid who was reading adult books from a very young age, I can only say this is a bad idea.  Even without age banding on books I still had trouble with the local librarians who, shooing me from the adult stacks, completely ignored my protestations that I’d already read all the good stuff in the children’s section.  Fortunately, my parents were much more enlightened, and I’m definitely a better person for it.  So three cheers for Philip Pullman!

Mr. Pullman told The Daily Telegraph: “I don’t mind anybody having an opinion about my books. I don’t mind a bookseller deciding they are for this age group or that, or a teacher giving one of my books to a child because they think it is appropriate.

“But I don’t want to see the book itself declaring officially, as if with my approval, that it is for readers of 11 and upwards or whatever. I write books for whoever is interested. When I write a book I don’t have an age group in mind.