Holiday

It seems that just yesterday I was waiting anxiously for my book history course to start, but last week I had my final classes.  Now I’m on my own, with two more essays due in June and my dissertation to complete over the summer.  And, in the near future, a job search to begin.  Starting tomorrow, though, I’m taking a much-needed holiday with two friends—meeting them in Frankfurt, spending the 27th in Germany (we’ll see if I can finagle a visit to the Gutenberg Museum), then flying to Cairo for a week in Egypt.  I’m not sure what’s more exciting at this point, visiting the landscapes of my childhood imagination or just being away from cellphones and the internet for a week.  And I bought some actual novels to take along; haven’t seen one of those in a while.  So I’ll be out of touch for a bit, but should have good photos when I get back.  Maybe I can find some nice Thoth imagery in Luxor.

That is not most books.

I wanted to point out a great interview at The Casual Optimist with Ben and Eric of the Book Cover Archive.  They talk about the impetus behind the site, favorite cover art, and books they’d love to redesign.  The last question is the inevitable ‘Are we finally seeing the end of print?’  The response is thoughtful and, in my opinion, spot on.  Eric explains that most books are not anything special, and that e-books could actually lead to more readers and a renewed emphasis on fine books and independent bookshops.

(That’s my opinion as a book lover, techie, and environmentalist.  The historian part of my brain shouts, ‘But we can learn about a culture from their trashy novels!’  Oh, shut up for once historian lobe.)

Matching

Can you ever have too many bookmarks?  Especially when you can get some as cool as these, found via WebUrbanist:

They’re handmade, but the price tag is still a bit hefty at $29 for the set, as you have to buy all three.  They should replace gray with a neon green version, so it looks like you’ve been hanging out at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

I want to take the red one for an afternoon in the park while wearing one of my favorite t-shirts: Stab Me in the Heart Why Don’t You by luchaworkshop.

It is too late for this.

Why is Reuters referring to Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus as the ‘Atlantic Code‘† in a story on the volume’s current unbinding?  Repeatedly?  I’ve never heard ‘code’ used in place of ‘codex’ when referring to volumes of Leonardo’s work (and I recently spent a lot of time on the subject as part of my anatomy research), so is this some specific terminology I’m unaware of or has Reuters royally screwed up?  My guess is the latter, since codex (a bound book, which is what the da Vinci notebooks are) has basically nothing to do with the word code in modern usage (though I believe they share a Latin root).

Checking the Wikipedia page for the Codex Atlanticus, I see that someone has titled the volume ‘Atlantic Code’ there as well.  Possibly someone who thought that codex was just Latin for ‘code’ or who was maybe confused by the title of a famous book/movie?  Or maybe they thought that codex referred to the code Leonardo wrote in?  Is this where Reuters picked up their mistake?

Now that the error is out there, a search for ‘atlantic code’ brings up multiple sites copying the Reuters story, as well as several others that may be independent errors (a few are written in terrible English).  I did a very cursory search and couldn’t locate any earlier news pieces using the term code.  A 2007 AP story on the same volume uses codex throughout.  *sigh*  Why do these things happen at 11.30pm?  Someone let me know if I’m wrong and code is perfectly acceptable. Of course I’m right.  Thanks Jeremy, I thought I was loosing it for a few minutes there.

† Yes, they did, in fact, fail to italicize it.

What to Read…

…if you’re interested in book history: a short list of foundational works and other helpful material.  This list is very Europe and print-centric, but I would encourage you to become comfortable with the theoretical aspects of the material and then branch out to whatever sub-topics interest you.

The Coming of the Book (L’Apparition du livre) by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (1958):  Lucien Febvre was one of the founders of the influential French Annales School, which emphasized a sociological approach to history rather than the ‘important people/events’ perspective that had dominated nineteenth century historical discourse.  Whereas earlier historians had analyzed the impacts of specific printers or nations, Febvre and Martin saw printing as a social movement intimately connected to the intellectual and cultural environments of early modern Europe.  The Coming of the Book provides a detailed overview of printing history, beginning with the introduction of paper into Europe and moving on to the technological issues of printing, the structure of printing firms and the journeyman system, the geographical distribution of printing, the book as commodity, and the cultural impact of print.

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts by D.F. McKenzie (1986):  This book, based on a series of lectures given in 1985, is a crucial theoretical work in book history.  McKenzie explains that the importance of bibliography (the description and classification of texts) lies in what it can tell us about history.  Rather than a dry recitation of facts about the structure of a text, bibliography should be used to establish a broad socio-historical understanding of text producers, book readers, and their cultures.  Most importantly, he demonstrates that the structural aspects of a text (of any kind) affect its reception and use, and explains the impacts of evolving materiality on reception.  (Some of his ground-breaking work was done on New Zealand history and the reception of the Treaty of Waitangi; it is included in the volume.)

The History and Power of Writing (Histoire et pouvirs de l’écrit) by Henri-Jean Martin (1988):  Writing is such an integral part of our lives that we seldom step back to look at it critically, asking what meaning it had to past societies and what it means today.  It is important, though, to understand the ways that our ancestors viewed the written word.  Similar to The Coming of the Book, The History and Power of Writing is a social history of writing throughout western history, from the development of the first alphabets to industrial printing.  My favorite part was Martin’s discussion of writing in ancient Greece, where the art was viewed with skepticism as a mental crutch, particularly by Plato.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979):  This is definitely the most controversial work of book history.  Eisenstein’s thesis is that the fixed and stable nature of print led directly to the scientific and Protestant revolutions because, for the first time, many accurate, identical copies of books could be quickly produced and distributed.  Her book generated intense debate immediately upon its release and in the years following, but today most book historians reject the bulk of Eisenstein’s theory as overly deterministic.  Rather than social change occuring as the result of a specific technology, they see printing as one part of a complex of cultural, intellectual, religous, and technological changes.  Additionally, historians such as Adrian Johns have pointed out that printed text, especially in its first centuries, was not as fixed or reliable as Eisenstein described it.  For responses to Eisenstein, see ‘How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?’ by Anthony Grafton, in The American Historical Review, volume 107 (1) pp. 87-106 and also ‘The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book’, the introduction to The Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns.  Digging deeper, Eisenstein’s work owes a debt to that of Marshall McLuhan – The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962).

The Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns (1998):  Our society automatically attributes different forms of authority to books.  We trust that the title, author, and publisher listed are accurate and that the contents are what they claim to be, but this has not always been the case.  Johns’s lengthy but thoroughly engaging work provides an in-depth description of the culture of book production in early modern London, from the roles of authors, booksellers, and printers to the influence of the government and the powerful Stationer’s Company.  But, beyond the descriptions of everyday life in the early modern book world, he lays out a powerful argument about the nature of print and the ways that authority is not inherent in the technology (as Eisenstein states), but is constructed by individuals and social forces.  I would recommend this work not only to those studying the histories of books and technology, but to anyone interested in modern copyright law and piracy issues.

The Business of Enlightenment by Roger Darnton (1979):  I’ve been a fan of Darnton since my undergrad days, before I even knew that book history was its own field.  A cultural historian focusing on eighteenth-centuy France, Darnton directs much of his gaze to books and their creators.  The Business of Enlightenment explores, in great detail, the personalities, business decisions, and social forces behind the publishing history of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.  If you’re not up to 600+ pages on an encyclopedia then I definitely recommend his other books, especially The Great Cat Massacre (1984), a collection of essays on ‘episodes in French cultural history’ revolving around text and written in Darnton’s lucid and engaging style.  And yes, there is a real cat massacre.

ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter and Nicholas Barker (first published 1952, continually revised and updated):  This is a delightful book for anyone interested in book collecting and book history.  A reference work that’s actually intended to be read, it’s essentially an encyclopedia of important book terms with often witty explanations (as an example, see the entry for ‘chronological obsession’).  While the ABC is available as a free pdf from the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, I recommend checking out the print edition, as part of the enjoyment of the book comes from the labeling of its parts with their correct names such as ‘free-endpaper’, ‘fore-edge’, and ‘pagination’.

A few more that I don’t have time to write about:

• A History of Reading in the West ed. by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier
• A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
• The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose
• The Order of Books and The Culture of Print by Roger Chartier
• The English Common Reader by Richard Altick
• A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism by Jerome McGann
• Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

Intuitive, Touch-Based Interface

I <3 you so much, Penny-Arcade.

Check out the news post, where Tycho explains that, ‘…books are still an incredible – even competitive – technology.’

(PA guys: if you see this, let me know if you’d prefer me to take the comic down.)

Memento Mori Part II

A few weeks ago I wrote about the evolution of anatomy illustrations, promising that the second part of the series would appear the following week.  If you’ve been waiting, I apologize, but I have a good excuse—Scientific American contacted me about doing a similar slideshow for their website, which has just gone live.  Very exciting!  There are ten images, a couple are based on my previous post, but most completely new: check it out.

Inappropriate Places for Reading

If you follow me on Twitter you know that a lot of idiotic stuff goes on in my dorm, but I think that what happened yesterday was the greatest fail so far.

To provide some background, I share a bathroom with the other women on my hall.  There are two shower stalls (not enough for the number of people they serve, but that’s beside the point) set up in a similar fashion to the toilets.  There’s a divider that doesn’t go all the way to the floor or ceiling, the showers share a floor, and the water drains down to a (pretty gross) trough outside the stall.  Though usable, the showers are not a pleasant place to be, filled as they are with soap scum, questionable stains, and other people’s hair.  There’s not a bench to sit on or any place to put your things, which have to go in the floor.  Like a McDonald’s,  the International Hall bathrooms are designed to encourage an in-out mentality.

One stall was occupied when I went to the shower yesterday, so I stepped into the empty one.  And the first thing that I saw was a huge paperback resting precariously on top of the divider.  The weirdo person next door took the book down as soon as she heard me come in, so I didn’t get a good look, but it appeared to be a novel.  Something the size of, let’s say, a paperback Neal Stephenson.  (But definitely not Neal Stephenson because that would make this person fairly cool, which we cannot have.)

So here I am, standing in a damp shower stall in my bathrobe thinking, “Have five months of book history finally driven me mad, or does that person have a codex in the shower?  With the water running.”  A lot of things went through my head in those few minutes.  Why would you take a book in the shower?  I understand the bathtub in your own (clean) home, but the dorm shower, seriously?  Where there isn’t even a dry place to put it, or a comfortable seat?  Not to mention that if you’re using a public shower it’s pretty impolite to take up time with non-cleansing-related activities.  Had she done this before, or was it a rash experiment?  Pleasure reading, or a disastrously procrastinated assignment?  And now that it’s no longer resting on the divider, what is she doing with it?

At least one of my questions was answered within seconds, as I heard a sickening thwack and turned to see the poor book lying with its spine broken, its leaves covered in the soapy water and whatever else lives on the floor of a public shower.  She tried to retrieve it quickly, but the damage was done.   (I pity the used book dealer she will attempt to sell it too, as she inevitably will.)  And when she left it was an enormous struggle for me to not peek around the curtain to discover her identity.

Since then I can’t stop thinking about shower book person.  Did she try to finish the soaking-wet book?  Has she learned her lesson?  Like most of us, I’ve taken books to some pretty odd places, but I thought it might be good to create a list of zones where you actually shouldn’t be reading at all.  Please feel free to chime in with your own.

• while surfing/skiing/skydiving, etc.
• a burning building
• sewage treatment pond
• a riot
• Level 4 bio-containment unit (unless it’s on microbiology)
• demolition derby
• neo-nazi book burning party
• slaughterhouse
• reactor core
• the lion enclosure at the zoo