When the Bible is a comic.

I am not sure at what age I started identifying the Bible as a brick volume of thin pages filled with two columns of small type. This is what it is, isn't it? Generally speaking, the Bibles that I have owned all looked almost the same - whatever the language. Medieval Bibles, of course, are in a completely different class - and that is not only for the quirk in the margins and fantasy monsters in the borders.

Here is 12th century manuscript Bible of Stephen Harding . Folio 13 features the story in a format of a comic. I have not managed to find out much about the manuscript - it is held at Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon and some scanned folios can be found HERE.

Here are some more recent renditions of the Bible as a comic.

Manga Bible - a spectacular publication of the best manga drawing. 

A five-volume manga series based on the Christian Bible created under the direction of the non-profit organization Next, a group formed by people from the manga industry. Though first published in English, the books are originally written in Japanese and each volume is illustrated by a Japanese manga artist. Each book is adapted from the Bible by Hidenori Kumai.

And then there are some comics.

A few are rather edgy/risque/fresh, while the others are roughly interchangeable (to my comic-untrained-eye) that use the same style as all those other Christian books promoted in the windows of the Christian booksellers.

by Robert Crumb (very restrained!)
 Nominated for three 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards 

 by Nestor Redondo - DC Comics (1975)

 by Nestor Redondo - DC Comics (1975)

by Jeff Anderson and Mike Maddox
(resembles DK encyclopaedia, unfortunately)

by Sergio Cariello
(whatever the reviewers may say, it still looks like the cover has been designed
by somebody who spent too much time in the Christian bookshops
- and who loves Photoshop as himself)

"This action-packed rendition of the world's most awesome story 
will capture and draw you into all the excitement" 

by Silver Dolphin Books (looks interchangeable with many others)

Ressurecting Books in Birmingham

 Sir David Cannadine surveyed the history of libraries and Johanna Drucker spoke about book in the ecology of things. I could only stay for a day - such a shame to have missed two more days of so well organised and so well put together conference.

My presentation on book destruction in 1940's Lithuania turned out to be longer then I had originally intended. A huge learning experience! (and eight points into my notebook of the improvements to be made). At the end of the first day the exhibition of my fired books was unveiled (literally!)

Small Publishers Fair 2013

whnicPRESS table

My favorite small publishers fair. Not that I had enough patience to walk around every stall and check every book. It is the volume of books is what I find overwhelming -  I have only made two purchases: Amir Brito Cadôr, “A Night Visit to the Library” and Erin K Schmidt "To All the Men I've Loved Before" (how could I have not bought it before!). The buzz was great, however, and the selection of quality work was scrumptious.
I also made my very first poetry reading - what a luminous experience! Untitled by Katrina Rodabaugh for Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. The sound transcends the word and the ring of melody complements the thought. Thank you Pauline for inviting me!

whnicPRESS table

whnicPRESS table

Pauline

Marginalia: From John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog

Interesting,  well written and well illustrated blog about marginalia by John Hodgson from  John Rylands Library at The University of Manchester.

A couple of public close-up sessions recently have prompted these random musings on marginalia – the text and images that occur in the margins of manuscripts and printed books.
Today we don’t encourage students to mark our books in any way, but a whole academic industry has developed around historical marginalia and what they can tell us about how books were used, and how readers have engaged with books (and each other) over generations.

We can analyse and classify marginalia in various ways: text versus imagery; contemporary decoration and annotation as opposed to later additions. However, one of the delightful aspects of marginalia is that they defy easy categorization. While some forms of marginalia were clearly planned, if not executed, by the original scribe or printer, the process of book production in manuscripts and early print cultures did not have a clear cut-off point: it was customary to decorate early printed books, for example, and the transition from production to reception was gradual and ambivalent. Likewise, it is not straightforward to differentiate text and imagery. MORE

Digitised scrolls: from the Pond at Deuchar to the Trip to London

Helen Douglas The Pond at Deuchar

There is a well known anecdote about how Helen Douglas wanted to produce a scroll as an app to accommodate The Pond at Deuchar.  Apple refused (!)  the idea, because the app did not include any more functions than scrolling the scroll (!).

Eventually the app for this artist's book was born and the pond can be enjoyed online HERE.  It is a beautiful conversion from one medium to another, that maintains the original fluidity and depth of immersion. In fact, the experience of the digital scroll excels as submersion into the work due to the level of detail that zoom option provides.

For comparison, here are a few more digitalised scrolls (by academic institutions, mainly):

Lake Zhiyang and the Eastern Lake 1663

There is a phenomenal incentive from the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago - they now uploaded online a library of digitised  Asian scroll paintings. What a resource!

The Center for the Art of East Asia initiated the Digital Scrolling Paintings Project to support the teaching of classes on East Asian painting. The temporal and spatial qualities of handscroll paintings are lost in photographs of selected sections that are reproduced in books and projected in the classroom.  Although used widely in current art education and the study of these works of art, such reproductions seriously distort the nature of handscrolls by erasing their sequential anad participatory viewing process. The display of these paintings in long cases in museums also is not the way in which these paintings were made to be experienced. With the assistance of the Humanities Computer Research Department, the Center developed a prototype for digital scrolling technology as an exciting tool to simulate the viewing experience and to improve understanding of handscroll paintings.

Dead Sea Scrolls

In 2011 Google and Israel Museum in Jerusalem uploaded the oldest known biblical manuscripts Dead Sea Scrolls online in a high-resolution format, so they become available to all everyone (with a reliable and fast internet connection, that is).

Ripley Scroll (1477)

Ripley Scroll (1477) has been scanned-in as a very VERY hi-res very long photo and uploaded online: a delightful level of detail, that can otherwise be only enjoyed with a magnifying glass. In simple terms, it is an alchemical manuscript that shows in pictorial cryptograms the production of the philosopher's stone (the elusive ingredient that produces incorruptible gold out of lesser metals; and/or the elixir of life). A very detailed description of the scroll is on BibliOdyssey (among numerous other treasures that can be found there).

 

Artist unknown, Trip to Town (London: William Sams, 1822). Box embossed: E.P. Sutton & Company; Sangorski & Sutcliff. GA 2005.01039

 And finally, here is this charming Georgian device Trip to London that has been digitised by Princeton University. It is a box with a twelve plate scroll that contains a story about a very unfortunate  honeymoon journey to London by a recently married Mister O'Squat and the Widow Shanks. 

Here is a POST from Booktryst (June, 2013) about the scroll, including this very interesting snippet of information.

It is not found in Tooley or Abbey, has no copies recorded by OCLC/KVK in institutional holdings worldwide, no copies at auction since ABPC began indexing results in 1923, no copy in the collection of the British Museum, nor is it found in the annals of our sister TV series, Divorce Court. It is an incredibly scarce item, as rare as a Taylor Swift long-term relationship.

Hanukkah Illuminated: A Book of Days

A beautiful contemporary illumination "Hanukkah Illuminated: A Book of Days" - a project conceived by Ellen Frank, professor of literature and artist.

Ellen Frank’s Hanukkah Illuminated: A Book of Days is the first modern illuminated and handwritten story of Hanukkah. A devotional work of art that combines illuminated paintings with unique texts, Hanukkah Illuminated speaks in a contemporary voice while echoing the great illuminated paintings which flourished in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Book sales||commitment to reading.

"In South Korea, where book sales there were down 20% in 2012, the drop was blamed on a simple phenomenon: “Korean’s don’t read books and don’t read newspapers,” wrote The Korea Times.

Earlier this month a New York Times Op-Ed, called out Mexico as “The Country that Stopped Reading” and blamed a failing education system for the lack of commitment to reading.

Clearly, despite the best efforts of the publishing industry to innovate and advance into the digital age, something else is being lost. Could it be something as straightforward as a lack of focus on fostering literacy and a love of books and reading? Or are there larger social and economic changes afoot?"

by Edward Nawotka, Publishing Perspectives