I’d be veeeerrry interested in the University of Edinburgh’s postgraduate program in Material Cultures and the History of the Book, which starts this fall. It sounds like a pretty hardcore one-year program: a central course in Cultures of the Book, plus another in either Book History, Media Theory, and Communications or Working with Collections. Then two electives chosen from a rather fascinating list, although I’d really want something along the lines of British Print Culture and the Enlightenment. Then a 15,000 word diss that's due in August.

Sounds like a helluva sabbatical year, eh?

Posted at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It’s been awhile since the last one of these, eh? A lot of this is from SHARP-L, but a couple come from other sources that I (sadly) forgot to note when I filed them.

Bembo’s Zoo, a very stylish abecedarium that plays with typography.
A Harvard Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext
The Munich copy of the Gutenberg Bible has been digitized. Bettina Wagner mentioned on the SHARP-L that this copy is one of only two which contain the table of rubrics, a printed list of headlines which served as a guide to the rubricator.
Book History Online, The International Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries.
Bibliopolis, which is devoted to the history of the printed book in the Netherlands.

And finally, two essays to look into re genre and/or authorship:
Hochman, Barbara. "Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era: An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading." Book History 7 (2004), 143-170.
Satelmajer, Ingrid. "Dickinson as Child's Fare: The Author Served up in St. Nicholas." Book History 5 (2002), 105-142.

Posted at 2:24 PM | Permalink

The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland in now available for the bargain price of $180 per volume on Amazon. (Ahem.) It sounds fascinating, though, especially for those of us who practice a certain slant of book history. Peter Hoare, the general editor, described it thusly on SHARP-L:

This is the first scholarly history of libraries in these islands to cover the whole period up to the present day. It aims to include libraries of all types (institutional and private), as well as the development of library buildings and furnishing, their user communities - and not least librarians and their colleagues in related areas of endeavour, the evolution of today's profession.

The Vatican comes out of the closet and embraces Oscar Wilde.

Dangers of the "Book of Nature" metaphor.

I want to be a Culinary Philologist in my next life: The Cookbook as Literature, an excerpt from Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: literature, culture, and food among the early moderns.

Preserve the serial comma!

An Estonian site entirely devoted to bookclasps. If this is your bag, be sure to click around — there’s much more here than first meets the eye. (via Bibliodyssey.)

Posted at 9:00 AM | Permalink

The Book Arts Web (via futureofthebook.com)
Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie
Animated da Vinci Illustrations
Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Your Books by Adrian Johns

Not a book: The Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek computer:

Scientists have finally demystified the incredible workings of a 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator built by ancient Greeks. A new analysis of the Antikythera Mechanism, a clock-like machine consisting of more than 30 precise, hand-cut bronze gears, show it to be more advanced than previously thought—so much so that nothing comparable was built for another thousand years.

Posted at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of several by Anagram Bookshop

What people said about books in 1498.

Ancient Greek curse tablets

What we talk about when we talk about books

̶Back around aught-six, some folks had this crazy idea called ‘net neutrality...’ A short cartoon I’ll use in next semester’s Internet Tools & Issues class.

Adobe tries again with e-books: the Digital Editions reader

SlideShare, “a YouTube for PowerPoint.” (via jill/txt)

Not a book:
The Micropolitan Museum: The Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimeter

Posted at 11:00 AM | Permalink

Via the excellent nonist, now discovered and blogrolled:
Eleven presses that made history
Hot library smut
The Virtual Typewriter Museum and The Classic Typewriter Page

And the complete works of Darwin are now available online (via Digital Koans and One Pot Meal)

Not bookish:
LucasFilm has C&D’d Diesel Sweeties. (No permalink available, but scroll to the 10/20/06 blog entry.)

Posted at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bookish links, some of which have been composting for awhile:

The title is shamelessly stolen from this fantastic blog, which I immediately blogrolled upon discovery. (via scribblingwoman. Several of these might have come from her awhile back, now that I think of it. I should just give it up and port Miriam’s feed over here, really, except she might mind that.)

Katherine Anne Porter stamps!

Must order: The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, by William St. Clair.

A lovely page on incunabula from Harvard. Definitely for use in future courses.

(Incunabula or incunables are the very first examples of books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed with moveable type in Western Europe. They range from the very first examples of the two-column Latin Bible produced by Johann Gutenberg in the 1450s to works printed through the end of the year 1500. The term incunable derives from the Latin word cunabula for “cradle” or “origin,” hinting at their status as the earliest of all books. Incunabula are also sometimes referred to as "fifteeners" from their appearance in the fifteenth century.)

The USCB reading list for Literature and Theory of Technology/Media/Information is most interesting. Because God(ess) knows I need more things for my own list o’ stuff to read.

The complete archives of the Royal Society Journals are available online now, causing much jubilation among science-y members of my department.

The first writing in the Americas has now been dated at 900 B.C.

And Metaspencer is doing some very interesting exercises with writing technologies in his classroom.

Posted at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The annual conference for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing will be here at UMN next year! I’m excited, since my diss work has become quite involved with the history of the encyclopedia. That, and one of my most excellent mentors, Michael Hancher, is organizing the shindig. And the Twin Cities book arts community is participating. Here’s the CFP for those of you who are interested in such things:

SHARP 2007 Conference: Open the Book, Open the Mind

The fifteenth annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) will be held in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota on July 11-15, 2007. SHARP is the leading international association for historians of print culture, enlisting more than 1,200 scholars world-wide; its members study “the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print, including newspapers, periodicals, and ephemera,” as well as the history of books. The
forthcoming conference is organized in cooperation with the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota; University of Minnesota Libraries; Minneapolis Public Library; Minnesota Historical Society, and Minnesota Center for Book Arts — a part of Open Book.

(Continued below the fold)

Continue reading "SHARP 07 in Minneapolis" »

Posted at 9:04 PM | Permalink

Particularly for Miss Frizzy:

SHAVED:

When the binder has trimmed off the whole margin of a leaf and touched ink, but has not actually cut off more than the outer edge of any printed letters, the result is indicated by such terms as ‘HEADLINES slightly shaved’, ‘some SIDE-NOTES shaved’, or ‘CATCHWORDS shaved on pages 16-20’. He has grazed the text and drawn blood; and it is proper that the synonym for shaved, in this context, should be touched; but it is hardly a wound, which would justify text cut into, or cropped.

Carter, John, ABC for Book Collectors, 181

Posted at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted at 7:24 PM | Permalink

If you happen to be a copyright history geek, Patterson‛s Copyright in Historical Perspective is absolutely it for an overview of events from the 1484 Statute to the mid-nineteenth century. I‛m still working my way through it, but am mightily impressed. I suspect that if one read it back-to-back with Mark Rose‛s Authors and Owners one would have a fairly good handle on the invention and development of formal copyright and authorship. (Or I hope so, because that‛s more or less what I‛ve done, in addition to various articles.)

One thing you don‛t usually see addressed in IP history texts is the oral-aural distribution of knowledge in preliterate societies and the eventual shift to containment of knowledge in medieval scripts, which began to shift information flows. I‛ve done a little reading on this for my current history project, but need to know so much more. This is the reason for my sudden interest in book history (and Ong and Havelock), and I hope to read more on that this summer.

Posted at 10:20 AM | Permalink

In my holiday haze, I neglected to mention that George has linked a number of 2005 History of the Book events.

Posted at 5:09 PM | Permalink

I asked a newly pseudonymous blog-friend for a reading list on the History of the Book, and he obliged me. And then he blogged it so I can link it in my blog-files! If you happen to be knowledgeable about this area, both of us would like to hear your thoughts.

Posted at 9:04 AM | Permalink

Dream Anatomy, an online exhibition of anatomical prints sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. (via Scribblingwoman.)

The Birth of Printing: Gutenberg to Gates (By the Springfield Library, with commentary and hi-res scans)

Update: Also the history of Chinese bookbinding by the British Library.

And The Silk Road: the development of the book and the invention of printing, also by the British Library.

Posted at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)