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

outside the box

___________
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Groucho Marx.
____________

The last contributions for the CODEX BETWEEN THIS AND THAT book are dropping in. There is a range of views. Moreover - about 77% of people who agreed to write in are somewhere between superb and outstanding at “thinking outside the box”.   I am astounded by the span of thoughts and vocabulary used.  
Q1: Is it because those people are thinking their thoughts and not mine that they seem  so much more creatively insightful?

The ability to think in novel and useful ways has been the defining feature of humans. We invented the wheel, which is nothing like any of the mutations and instruments found in nature. We invented the codex so perfect, it had not changed it’s fundamental structure for over a thousand years. We invented electricity and lightbulb. And then we coined the term “lightbulb moment”.

This week’s Horizon (still available on BBC iPlayer)) was about the brain and the insight and how all of that works: how without thinking logically and methodically we come up with extraordinary ideas. Insight moments, as it turns out, are fleeting and elusive - no wonder I struggle to capture them! They do not come from nowhere, but they are a result of a chain of events and they require awareness bordering obsession. Each problem has an insight bubbling in the background. It is the right hemisphere, apparently, that is capable to making far reaching connections.  
Q2. Do people, who are blind in the right eye - so all input information is first streamed to their right hemisphere - make more insightful associations?

In two weeks I am going to the lecture by Professor Vincent Walsh about lightbulb moments. I expect it will be currious and illuminating. ←This sounds like one of those James Bond puns. Very uncreative of me.

The River of Lost Souls by Isabel Greenberg

Beautiful, funny and clever.

codex: between this and that

 

collective investigation into codex and many contexts of its existence

a book + an exhibition + performances + workshops

private view: April 26, 2013 @ bookartbookshop,  London