Scripts: Hannah Watson, Hartford Printer

After her printer-husband Ebeneezer died of smallpox in September 1777, Hannah Bunce Watson (1749-1807) entered a business partnership with the young newspaper printer George Goodwin, and the pair published The Connecticut Courant. Running a newspaper in the colonies was no easy feat. Ebeneezer Watson's earlier difficulties obtaining paper resulted in his having to suspend the newspaper's publication for a month (December 1775), during which time he opted to open his own paper mill in Manchester. When that mill burned down three months after his death, Hannah Watson and Sarah Ledyard (the widow of Ebeneezer Watson's partner in the paper mill) appealed to the Connecticut Assembly for aid. Conceiving of the paper mill as a "public necessity," the assembly allowed the two widows permission to raise rebuilding funds through a public lottery.

Watson and Goodwin printed Bernard Romans's Annals of the Troubles in the Netherlands in 1778 with a two-color title page employing a Caslon typeface. William Caslon (1693-1766) designed the type prior to 1725 and by the Revolutionary War period, it was the preferred type in America, used by the Philadelphia printer John Dunlap for the first printing of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). In the example shown here, notice the eighteenth-century long-s in the lower case and its ligature "st" (in the word "most").

For more on two-color printing (focused on the Renaissance), see: Margaret M. Smith and Alan May, "Early Two-Colour Printing." Printing Historical Society Bulletin 44 (Winter 1997/1998): pp. 1-4.

[Pictured above: Bernard Romans, Annals of the Troubles in the Netherlands, vol. I. Hartford, CT: Watson & Goodwin, 1778. Special Collections Department, University of South Florida Tampa Library]

Digital Resources: Gutenberg Jahrbuch

Gutenberg Jahrbuch is available from 1929-2000 in pdf format through DigiZeitschriften. Lotte Hellinga's "Printing History as Cultural History" 76 (2001): pp. 20-26 may bring some nostalgic sighs for the NEH group's day at the Senate House Library. For those interested in early modern era printing manuals beyond Moxon, check out G.A. Crüwell’s "Ein österreichisches Formatbuch" (1931): pp. 252-256.

Scripts: Cuneiform

Denise Schmandt-Besserat's recent When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007) addresses the reciprocal relationship between writing and art in the ancient Mesopotamian world. In examining pottery and wall paintings, stone reliefs and seals, Schmandt-Besserat claims that circa 3500 b.c.e., writing impacted art, which became more linear and capable of suggesting narrative. As writing became more phonetic and syntactical, and Mesopotamian rulers became more focused on eternal life, inscription and representation were more effectively wrought together. This artifactual-textual interface reached its peak, according to Schmandt-Besserat, with the circa 1750 b.c.e. Stele of Hammurabi, now in the Louvre Museum.

She presented a portion of her research at the June 2004 Annual Meeting of the Media Ecology Association, held in Rochester, New York.

[Pictured above: Babylonian cuneiform tablet: Instructions to workmen on the threshing floor, c. 2038-2030 b.c.e. Special Collections Department, University of South Florida Tampa Library]

Book Use & Fair Use

INTRODUCING THE BOOK

A snippet from a television show called Øystein & Meg (Øystein & I), produced by the Norwegian broadcasting channel (NRK) in 2001. It’s written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad.



A FAIR(Y) USE TALE

Created by Bucknell Professor Eric Faden, whose crew cut together thousands of extremely short clips from dozens of Disney cartoons, to explain copyright and fair use.

Voice of the Shuttle: resources in book history

Some of these resources we've already mentioned, but many not, and the link connects to the rest of the site, too.

http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=3785