Sufaces: Skin

[Image: Claudia Parmigianni, Deiscrizione. May 1973. Galleria L'Uomo e l'arte, Milan. From Schema Informazione, Florence].

Schemes: Printing Manuals

Joseph Moxon's Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing (London, 1683) was the first printer's manual to be published in the English language. It is probably the most famous early modern printer's manual, having been treated to exhaustive bibliographic study by Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (Oxford University Press, 1958). However, there are other significant manuals from which one may glean distinctive practices associated with book production. In the late 1960s, Philip Gaskell published an annotated bibliography of printers' manuals to 1850. In 2005, David Pankow curated an RIT exhibition of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century printers' manuals that focused on English and American works. More recently, the San Francisco Public Library has compiled an online bibliography of printers' manuals. In comparatively analyzing these extant works, one notices divergent perceptions about the origins of printing in western Europe, trade economics, and hieratic positions within printing shops. Some manual writers assess orthography and punctuation in addition to fundamental materials and technical production. As Frans Janssen has noted, Moxon's situation was by no means typical for a seventeenth-century printer. He was a Royal Hydrographer, Fellow of the Royal Society, a translator, a publisher of globes and maps.

[Pictured above: Lay scheme from Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, vol. 2 (London: 1683). Special Collections Department, Tulane University Library].

Spaces: Research Libraries

Terry Belanger will be speaking at Columbia University on Monday, March 24th 2008 on the topic of research libraries and teaching the history of the book. Since the title of his forthcoming presentation is "Noli me tangere," one would imagine that access restrictions are on his mind. Notable research collections focused on the history of books, printing, and related arts frequently have imposed handling and use restrictions in order to safeguard and preserve the scarce, the fragile and the rare. Pressing one's hands flat against the text block (as the Toledan cleric Francisco de Pisa does here) while posing long hours for a portraitist is generally not acceptable, unless you own the book. Using hand lotions, post-it notes, pens or markers is also offensive.

Some notable American collections for teaching the history of the early modern book are:

The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY

The Daniel Berkeley Updike Collection, The Providence Public Library, Providence, RI

The John M. Wing Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL

[Pictured above: El Greco. Portrait of Dr. Francisco de Pisa. c. 1610-14. Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX]

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.