an armorial binding mystery

Another book from my students' projects, this one with a curious binding:

At first glance, what you might see is an armorial binding: a binding in which an owner has stamped his arms in gold tooling. No big deal, really; there are plenty of books like those in libraries. But this one is more complicated: there are TWO coats of arms, one stamped on top of the other. Here's a close-up of the center of the binding, where the arms are:

And here's the picture again with one of the two arms outlined:

A close-up of the top portion, in which you can see that there are two crowns juxtaposed and the heads of two faintly visible supporters:

Looked at in raking light, you can see that the supporter on the right looks like an antlered stag:

And the supporter on the left looks like a horse:

I can't make out the details of the arms themselves, but you can see the motto on which the supporters are standing:

My student deciphered it as "fidei coticula crux" and that looks right to me.

If you look closely at that last picture, you can see that the arms with the supporters and motto was done second: its lines cross on top of the other arms. And if you look at the original arms, you might recognize them as James I's arms: there's the harp on the bottom left of the shield, the lions and fleur-de-lis quartering the right, and the motto "honi soit qui mal y pense" circling the shield. (This gives you some sense of the arms, though that harp is a bit excessive.) (And I should point out, although it's surely obvious by this point, that I'm not particularly knowledgeable about arms and that my vocabulary choices might not be quite precise. But this is why we need help.)

So whose coat of arms is on top of James's? Is it possible it's James's favorite, George Villiers, aka the first Duke of Buckingham? According to the Burke I was looking at, not only was the family's motto "Fidei coticula crux", but he used the supporters of "a dapple grey horse" and a stag. But, as I said, I'm not super confident of my ability to deal with armorial and geneological crap, so does someone want to confirm or deny this? I'm drawn to it because if someone WAS going to stamp their arms on top of the king's, wouldn't it be great if it was him? (If you're not familiar with this period, you might want to know more about Villiers; this link should, I hope, get you into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's article on him for the next few days [though April 27th]. If it no longer works, well, this would be a good time for you to do some scouting about on your own! If you know of some reliable open access information about him, please leave it in the comments. Or go edit the Wikipedia page, which could use improvement!)


I should say something about what book this is, I suppose. It's John Smith's 1624 The generall historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles. It's a very interesting book, and there's some great marginalia in it, but that will have to wait until another post, especially since my student is still in the middle of her research! But the arms thing is tricky to decipher and the Folger catalog record identifies only one of the two crests (James's, of course), so I wanted to lend her a hand in getting it sorted out. And I certainly didn't want to lead her astray with my desire for it to be Buckingham! So please leave me a note telling me what you think and I'll pass it on to her.

O rare!

I've been looking at another book that a student was working on. It's unprepossessing on the outside, just a small, worn brown leather binding, with the remains of ties that have long since disappeared. But the book is much more interesting on the inside. Take a gander at some of the photos I snapped (I did these with my cell phone, so they're not super high quality, but they're not too bad either):

The whole book is like this, covered with marginalia. There are manicules, trefoils, asterisks, notes more and less extensive. It's a seriously used book.

And do you know who used this book so seriously? He inscribed his name right there on the title page:

O rare Ben Jonson! And while Jonson's book when he used it might seem unprepossessing, later owners certainly valued it for its association and house it accordingly, in its own locked box.

There's much more to be said about Jonson and his books but I wanted to get these pictures up before they burned a hole in my pocket. You can find the catalog record for this book here and I'll try to follow this up with a bit more Jonsonia.

(Oh, I suppose many of you got the title of the blog post, but just for clarification's sake: Jonson is buried in Westminster Abbey under a plaque that reads, "O rare Ben Johnson"--and yes, that's how it's spelled on the plaque, even though Jonson didn't spell his name that way.)

building a syallabus for early modern book history

I've spent a good portion of my summer thinking about how to revise my syllabus for the early modern book history seminar I teach. This fall will be the sixth time I've taught this course, and while it's been working well, it's also time to shake it up a bit. Too much familiarity with the material doesn't breed contempt, but it can lead to a complacency. I've been browsing in the stacks, reading new finds, and thinking about what I want students to learn and how best to achieve that.

There are some key factors that shape how I approach teaching this course. First, it's a multi-disciplinary course, drawing students from different majors, primarily English and History, but also French, Art History, Theology, and Music. Because it's important that all these students feel welcome in and learn from this course, it cannot be too oriented toward any single subject. On the other hand, it is a course at the Folger Shakespeare Library and one that draws on the strengths of the Library's collections; that means that the focus of the course is explicitly early modern, concentrating on the last fifteenth century through the end of the seventeenth. The last major consideration in shaping this course is that its purpose is to provide students an opportunity to do hands-on research with rare materials.

Rather than moving through the period chronologically, or through some haphazard thematic pile-up, I decided from the course's first incarnation to foreground the methodological differences in thinking about books and their histories. The syllabus is organized in three units: the first considers books as physical objects, the second studies the relationships between books and culture, and the third explores books as vehicle for texts. (Actually, because it appeals to my corny sense of humor, the syllabus isn't divided into units but volumes, along with a preface and an introduction; there are actually also some interludes, but I really need to find a book-centric metaphor for those.) In many ways, these approaches sync up with disciplinary interests: analytical bibliography, history, and textual studies. Leslie Howsam's great book on Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture is tremendously useful in thinking through the disciplinary orientations of the field which is, after all, a big mash-up of approaches and histories. To a large degree these separate frameworks are fictional: you can't think about books and culture without knowing something about the process of making a book, nor the other way around. But dividing the syllabus this way keeps the issue of how we think about books front and center, an especially useful tactic when we are also trying to think about how we are not thinking about books.

That tactic is only useful if students are aware of it, so we begin the course with a session that explicitly asks, "What is the history of books?" It features Robert Darnton's classic essay, of course, along with some D.F. McKenzie and Roger Chartier, with the three selections bearing the burden of tracing the different ways in which we might approach the field. The next session on incunabula gives students a way to start thinking about the approaches in larger terms before we get down to the nitty gritty of how books were made. We only spend a couple of weeks on this, focusing mostly on the big points: different formats and impositions, the practice of casting off and setting type, recognizing chain lines and watermarks, and differentiating between woodcuts and engravings. (Those of you in the field will recognize the quarto imposition in the image at the top of this post.) I'm not always sure how much time to devote to this. Some semesters it feels like we're spending too long (or at least, too long reading Gaskell, which is a bit of a slog and is often overkill, but is still the best thing for what I want them to learn). Other semesters it feels like we're racing through this section too fast. But if we spend longer on the physical book, that cuts into the time we have to think about books in other ways; if we spend less time, they don't know enough about the process of making books in order to ask important questions later on.

The second volume of the class moves from the physical making of books to the book trade and intersections between books, printing, culture, and economics. I structure it roughly around the roles of makers and users: we look at the role of printers and the Stationers Company, think about the creation and deployment of authors, and the use of books by readers and libraries. This has been the trickiest part of the syllabus to set--so many possibilities, so little time! This year I'm really looking forward to using Andrew Pettegree's new book, The Book in the Renaissance, which talks about books in exactly the right sort of blended approach and complexity for my purposes. I'm really loving this book, and it's been getting some great reviews: it's both smart and accessible and even if you're not a student in a book history course, it's well worth reading. Also, look at that beautiful cover! Other key readings come from Zachary Lesser's Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, Bill Sherman's Used Books, and Ann Blair (I'm really looking forward to the arrival this fall of her new book, Too Much to Know, which, like Pettegree's book, is coming out from Yale and, also like his, is priced at a reasonable $45 for a hardcover). There's also some more Chartier and Darnton, mixed in with a small dose of Foucault and de Certeau, of course. The real payoff of this section, however, comes in the interplay of the readings with the students' research projects: the readings model different ways of thinking about the questions being raised, but the work is in making those questions and approaches useful when working with the book in hand.

The course wraps up with a couple of weeks thinking about how the material forms of books affect the transmission and reception of textual meaning. We go back to questions of printing, but this is really the textual scholarship showdown: what does an editor do? I like Robert Hume's piece on "The Aims and Uses of 'Textual Studies'" (PBSA June 2005) to start students thinking about what makes a 'good' edition, and I'm very fond of Random Clod's "Information upon Information" (TEXT 1991), which is smart and funny and outrageous. We combine those readings with a lot of looking at different examples of editing, from the more typical to the more crazy (the Middleton Collected Works is chock full of different and provocative editorial practices--and there's now a paperback edition for only $40!).

After having spent the summer thinking about how to shake up the syllabus, I've come right back to where I started: the structure of the course is still the best way to go about doing what I want to do. I've tweaked some of the readings, and I'm looking for a different set of rare materials to bring into the classroom to help us put the readings into action. But I'm actually pretty happy with how we're going about things.

There is one place that I would like to make changes, and that's in the interludes or case studies. In the second half of the course, we have a couple of sessions devoted to single topics that let us bring together all three legs of our book study triangle. In the past, we've had one class devoted to Bibles and one class devoted to Shakespeare. Both work really well for thinking about how the materiality of books shape the reception and use of texts and interact with the cultural forces at play and being generated. Plus, both give me a chance to bring some lovely books into the classroom. (And, given my training as a Shakespearean and as a performance scholar, it's fun to have a class to talk about those books and about the interplay between performance and print.) The downside, as I see it, is that both draw on ideas of The Book in ways that don't displace what is already a tendency in the class and in the field: to think in terms of books rather than other printed objects. I try to talk about this in class frequently: books are just one of the things that made up the printed output in the early modern period. Broadsheets, indulgences, and almanacks, for instance, are just some of the things that were as important as books--as Peter Stallybrass and others have pointed out, it's the printing of these ephemera that sustained early printers, not the big books that we now value. I could do a class on newssheets, and am considering that, although given my comparative unfamiliarity with that world, it does make me a bit nervous. I'm also considering focusing on some more utilitarian books instead, like school books, perhaps.

There are two other qualifications for this syllabus, which I recognize, but they remain. The first is that this really is a print-centered course. It doesn't reflect my own sense of the ways in which manuscript and print coexisted in the period and influenced each other. Part of my reluctance to bring manuscripts in has to do with teaching students paleography; as it is, I spend an hour or so doing a quick-and-dirty introduction to basic secretary hand and mixed italic. (Okay, it's not dirty; we read a letter from Henry Cavendish to his mother, Bess of Hardwick.) I also don't want to open up the focus of the class too far, or to start worrying about handling manuscripts. I do try to bring in ideas of manuscript culture in other ways, but it isn't a regular feature of the course.

The other qualification is how England-centric the class is. One of the reasons I'm pleased about having Pettegree's book to work with is that it really encompasses a much wider range of print practices. But the fact is, most of my students are working on English literature or history, and so many of the resources that we have available to us (the STC and the Stationers' Register, just to name the two biggest ones) are focused on England, thanks to scholars' long-standing fascination with Shakespeare. I'm not super happy with an England-, or even more accurately, a London-myopia but that's going to take me a while longer to change.

I'm going to continue tinkering with my syllabus, but since class starts at the end of next week, it will soon have to be done, and then you'll find it online at the Folger Undergraduate Program's homepage. I haven't talked about what sort of assignments students do, or the kinds of research they've done in the past, but there are some posts describing some of those projects, and you'll find the assignments detailed on the syllabus once it's up.

In the meantime, a quick word about the image at the top of this post: It's the front and back of an issue of a 1648 newspaper, The Moderate. If you download the images (follow this link) and print them on the front and back of a regular-sized sheet of paper, you'll have your very own small-scale newspaper and folding exercise. Have fun!

the most influential book history tools of the decade

It's that time of year again. Indeed, it's that time of decade. That's right, everywhere you look, top ten lists abound. I'm not sure why we need to list ten of things we find remarkable. But it's made me start thinking: what would be on my top ten list of notable early modern book history events or tools of the decade?

Right up there at the top would have to be digitization, from EEBO to Google Books to The Shakespeare Quartos Archive. The ability to access facsimiles of works without having to travel thousands of miles, potentially saving time and money and carbon emissions and wear and tear on the books, has fundamentally changed how we conduct and teach early modern books and book history. EEBO and Google Books have been mostly about access, but Shakespeare Quarto Archive is not only about access but about developing digital tools for studying texts. (Read my posts on digitization to see some of the pros and cons I see with this development, since it's too complicated of a subject to rehearse here. Again.)

I'd say, too, that book history and early modern blogs have seen remarkable growth over the past ten years. Blogs have enabled a conversation between far-flung scholars and devotees of early books that wouldn't be otherwise possible. I've learned a lot from Mercurius Politicus and diapsalmata, as well as Early Modern Online Bibliography and Bavardess (I've learned from many others, too, and have links to them on my blog--this is just a ruthless short list of a handful that I go to the most often). They've done good things for libraries, too, opening up interest in collections and, I like to imagine, the use of our materials, across levels of scale and resources. The Beinecke has a great bunch of blogs (early modern, paleography), and I enjoy reading "Notes for Bibliophiles" from the Special Collections at the Providence Public Library. I've pleaded before for more early modern literature blogs, but I've really enjoyed what is out there, literature or not, early modern or post modern. Especially as someone who only came to this field a few years ago, I've learned a lot from reading your blogs and have been grateful for being part of this community.

This one is a bit more idiosyncratic, but watching my kids learning to read has given me a new appreciation for reading in general and for the emotional ties we have to books. Over the past ten years I've seen both my kids start reading and start loving books; I've actually also gotten to see both of them start learning Hebrew as well, which brings home the whole weirdness of written languages and learning to recognize letters as making up words and those words as having recognizable (and deployable) meanings. I continue to find the transition from gobbledygook to spoken language amazing, and the movement from spoken to written language is equally fascinating. I have one child who refused to read on his own until he had it mastered; the first book he read was The Borrowers, which is crazy ridiculous for a first-time book. My other child insisted on figuring out the reading thing before he'd even started school and made tons of mistakes along the way; those rhyming books like "Pat sat on the cat" were a key exercise for him, if a bit tedious for me. Watching them learning to read in their own ways provided insight into literacy in a way that I otherwise wouldn't have appreciated. What does it mean to be literate? Does it mean to haltingly read rhyming books? To understand the metaphorical implications of Bilbo's fight against Smaug? To pronounce written characters in words whose meaning you cannot understand? (For something of the emotional resonance of reading with children, see this post.)

This might also be myopic, but I think a growing interest in the pedagogy of book history and bibliography has been another development. In my discipline of English literature, at least, bibliography and textual studies had a marked decline in graduate programs--when I was in grad school in the early 1990s, in a program that is now characterized by a strong interest in the history of the book, there were not only no requirements for mastering descriptive bibliography or editing, there were few opportunities to learn those subjects. My sense, without having conducted formal studies of the subject, is that this was characteristic of the field in those years. Once upon a time, PhD students were required to have a knowledge of bibliography and editing; those requirements fell by the wayside, and an interest in those subjects has only recently reemerged and trickled down into graduate and undergraduate programs. As someone who runs a program teaching these subjects to undergraduates, I might easily be accused of myopia here, but I do think that an increased interest in teaching these subjects is not characteristic only of the Folger but of many programs. (I've blogged some examples of the work my students have done in my courses.)

Back to technology, here's another one that people didn't necessarily see coming: audiobooks. That's right, the rise of the iPod has led not only to the rise of iExcess, but to an increase in audiobooks. Remember when we used to listen to books on tape? Remember how awkward they were, how limited the selection was? I used to go to my public library (the fab Philadelphia Free Library) to try to find books on tape to get me through the ten-hour drive home to Michigan. It wasn't so easy to do. But now, thanks in part to Audible's large library, there are a slew of options out there. And listening on your iPod is so much easier than flipping tapes over. Neil Gaiman had a nice piece on NPR last month pointing out the unexpected rise in audiobooks. I love me a good audiobook. But I love, too, the way this reminds us that technology doesn't always have the effect we expect it to. Audiobooks were on their way out, and the decline of the cassette tape seemed only to confirm that fade. But then came along MP3s, and the rebirth of audiobooks.  

I am, alas, only up to five, which is well short of the ten that make up most lists. So I turn to you, dear readers, to help flesh this out. What would you point to as developments over the past decade that have shaped our understanding of early modern books and book history? Twitter? Amazon? The recovery of Durham's stolen First Folio? Kindle? The pdf of the Stationers' Register? Don't let my perspective dictate yours--I'd be thrilled to expand my horizons with your help!

And with my advance thanks for your thoughts on this subject, please add my best wishes for a happy new year!

updates and welcomes

I've been swamped recently, so just a quick post with some updates and links:

First, thanks to Lorem Ipsum's suggestion on my last post about the catalogue entry for James's Essayes of a prentise, the Folger's record has now been updated! The author is, of course, James I, as that is the standard form of his name, but the note has been clarified to read "By James VI of Scotland and (later) James I of England, whose name (Jacobus Sextus) is given in an acrostic on A1r." So thanks to Lorem Ipsum and to Deborah Leslie!

As for the binding, which I suggested might be a presentation copy from James to Burghley, my friend Adam points out that Burghley's library was rebound in the early 18th century, so surviving presentation copies to either Burghley or his son Robert Cecil, are quite rare. My student had conjectured that this book was not part of Burghley's library past the mid 1600s since it doesn't appear in the 1687 Bibliotheca Illustris, which record the contents of the Burghley library put up for sale. (I have to say that I haven't actually looked myself to verify whether this book is included or not, so if this is a mistake, feel free to let me know!)

That's it for the updates. The image accompanying this post is a timely one: it's a 1331 mahzor, or High Holiday prayer book, that has just been placed on exhibit at the Israel Museum. It's from the Jewish community in Nuremberg, and amazingly survived not only the 1499 expulsion of Jews from Nuremberg, but the Holocaust and the ravages of the twentieth century. You can read more about it at Tablet magazine. Shanah tovah to those of you celebrating the new year!

And a special shout-out to my fellow blogger, Mercurius Politicus, who has finished his dissertation and welcomed his new son!

Here's to new starts of all sorts--and to--maybe!--more timely blogging in the future.

UPDATE: Ooops! I forgot to issue congrats to bookn3rd, who has also finished dissertating and has joined the ranks of working stiffs. Welcome!

essayes of a prentise

Another example of a student project today, this time at the intersection of politics and poetry as well as of England and Scotland: King James's The Essayes of a prentise, in the divine art of poesie. This book is a collection of poems and translations by James, as well as "A treatise on the airt of Scottis Poesie." Published in 1584 in Edinburgh, James was then King James VI of Scotland, and net yet King James I of England, a title he didn't take until 1603, although the book is cataloged by the STC as authored by James I. (The STC record is the source of the Folger's catalogue entry for the book; there are standardized rules for all cataloging, of course, but it seems to me misleading to think of this work as being by the King of England, rather than an aspirant to that title.)

There are some great things about this book, including the fact that it's written in a Scots dialect. Are you surprised that James would write a treatise on poetry? He addresses that very surprise in his preface:

"ze may marvell paraventure, quhairfore I sould have writtin in that mater, sen sa mony learnit men, baith of auld and of late hes already written thairof in dyvers and sindry languages: I answer, That nochtwithstanding, I have lykewayis writtin of it, for twa caussis."

If you want to know the two causes, you'll have to read the essay yourself. (By the way, I've regularized the u/v usage, as I typically do in transcriptions for this blog, and I've reproduced the long "s" form as our modern "s", but you'll have to provide your own accent to make sense of the rest of it.)

As you might imagine, part of James's aim is to argue for the particularity of Scottish learning: the rules for English versification are not and should not be the same as those for Scottish. Just as poesie is also politics in the treatise, so it is throughout the book, which proceeds wtihin a network of Protestant politics, from the Huguenot who printed it while in exile in Edinburgh to the substance of the works.

The book itself has a wonderful sense of presence, including lots of white space and even blank pages (a sure sign of luxuriousness, given the cost of paper). The layout of these poems is a lovely example of early shape poetry:


One of the most interesting aspects of the book isn't what is in it, but what binds it:


That's a beautiful, and unusual, orange vellum binding, with tooling, including the name of its owner, W. Lord Burghley. According to research done for a Folger exhibition, this binding is nearly exact that of another copy of this book, one which is tooled with the name "W. Lord Hunsden". The existence of the two bindings, plus the face that this binding does not resemble the bindings of other books Burghley owned, suggests that it could be a presentation copy by James VI to Burghley--bringing us back to the intersection of poesie and politics.

It was the binding that brought my student to this book--Michael came across it by browsing through Hamnet for "tooling" and "ties". But, as we've seen before, when you start looking at a book from one point of view, others open up, so that he moved from physical object, to text, to social and networks--none of which, of course, are separate from each other.

the primer in englishe and latine

Last year, at the start of each semester, I gave you something from a school book to celebrate the return of classes: in the fall it was Lily's Latin grammar; in the spring, Comenius's picture book. This semester, I think I'll give you something slightly different to celebrate the return of students: a look at some of the books my students worked with last spring.

First up, this 1557 English book of hours:


The student who was working on this book was a theology major and chose it, I think, to have a chance to think about Catholic liturgy and print. There's a lot to be learned about liturgy in studying it. The title of the book signals some of the basic issues at play: The primer in Englishe and Latine, set out along, after the use of Sa[rum]: with many godlie and devoute praiers: as it apeareth in the table. A brief history of primers in encapsulated in that title. There's the reference to "Sarum use", specifying this book of hours as following the Salisbury rite, the form that dominated England Catholic liturgy. Most notable is the identification that this includes a translation of the Latin prayers into English, an increasingly popular approach to the prayers after the Reformation, and one that was strictly regulated. That this is in both Latin and English links it to a specific historical moment. It wasn't until after Henry VIII's split with the Catholic Church that books of hours in English (usually referred to as "primers") began to be published in England--and Henry, after 1545, promulgated his Royal Primer. With Mary's reign, the Sarum rite again became the sanctioned form of the primer, though the popularity of English translations continued. The imprint of this book hints at the Sarum primer's popularity: "Imprinted at London, by Jhon Kyngston, and Henry Sutton. 1557. Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum." You could assume correctly from the "cum privilegio" that printing primers was a lucrative business that was awarded to a specific printer. You could correctly assume, too, that we would see a rise of English Sarum primers printed during Mary's reign.

That's a brief outline of some of what we can learn from the title page--a sort of cultural/political/religious history that can be gathered from studying this book. But we can do something fun, too, with the mise-en-page of this book:


This opening is mostly fairly typical: there's the English translation in the large columns closest to the gutter in a nice blackletter font, and the Latin text in the outer columns in a smaller font. The decorated initials are printed woodcuts (that is, not hand-rubricated or illuminated). And the running titles and other directive texts are printed in red ink to guide the reader. All of these details can lead you into a study of how this book was designed to be used.

But there's something else we can learn from this book, too. Here's a close-up showing the text in more detail, including my favorite moment:


Did you notice it? Take a look again.

What is the title given to this prayer, which begins "Rejoyce O virgine Christes mother deare"? Is it "Of the five corporall joyes of our Ladie."? But why is "Ladie" printed in black? Look underneath--it was first printed "of our lorde." Ooops. Well, anyone can make a mistake, right? At least they corrected it. And that's what I love about this page. Here's the thing--printers did not typically print red and black ink at the same time. Think about it--it would be pretty hard to dab black ink only on the black bits and red ink on the red bits. You wouldn't be able to do it with your standard ink balls.

Instead, you'd follow a much more complicated series of steps. First, you'd set the type for the whole form (that is, not just one single page, but all the pages on that side of the sheet). Then you'd determine which words were to be printed in red, take those letters out and replace them with blanks. You'd ink the whole thing with black, using those ink balls that have been keeping nice and moist by soaking in urine, and run it through the press once with black ink. After you'd run through the entire run's worth of copies of that form, it would be time to do the red ink. You'd cut a new frisket (the protective sheet that covers over what you don't want to get inked) that would have holes for the red text but keep the black text covered. You'd replace the blanks with the red text, which has been raised slightly above the black text so that when you pull the press, only the raised type will print. And then you would run the entire set of sheets through the press again. If you've done it all right, the red text will print in the holes that were left behind after the black ink run. As you can see from this book, sometimes the red and black ink printed a bit more askew. (You can find a tidier example of two-color printing at this earlier blog post.)

So here's where I really love this: the printers, after making this mistake, recognize it, and want, understandably, to fix it--which means running the entire thing through the press for a third time! Oh, the labor of it all!

That's what I'm going to think of at the start of the fall: sometimes learning and teaching doesn't happen on the first try, or even the second. But that's no reason to stop working! This is also a good reminder of how much of what we do is serendipitous--looking up this book in the catalogue, there was no sign of this cool printing tidbit. It was only because Caitlin looked through every single page in this book with her eyes wide open that she found it. What a nice reward for her curiosity! And that feels like another excellent piece of advice for all of us: don't forget to be curious along the way and to be open to discovering something new.

Happy learning!

(Want to read about printing with red ink in more detail? Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, as always, is your not-to-be-beat source about early printing; for the section on two-color printing, see pages 328-30. This lovely primer can be found in our catalogue here; a set of zoomable images from it are here.)

learning to be wise

It's that time of year again: another semester and more learning and teaching to be done! In honor, once again, of all of us involved in those activities, here's a look another book that will help us "learn to be wise."

Last fall, the book with which I started off the semester was a copy of Lily's Grammar, the standard Latin textbook of the period. I'm not sure if that book will exactly help you to be wise, although it was certainly used to help you master your early modern Latin. This time, the book I'm focusing on is Johann Comenius's Orbis sensualium pictus, or, A World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures. Comenius's book, first published in 1658 in Latin and German, is often described as the first children's picture book. His intent was to teach children not only how to read, but how to be wise. That wasn't an unusual aim for the time. What was new was his method: using pictures of worldly activities and objects to engage his young readers.

Last time I mentioned Comenius, I used his illustration of a scholar at his study to start off my post. Above is the illustration for writing: a table laid out with the implements for and examples of different kinds of writing. On the right side are the various instruments, keyed by numbers in the text to the details in the illustration:

The Ancients writ in Tables done over with Wax with a brasen Poitrel, 1. with the sharp end 2. whereof Letters were engraven, and rubbed out again with the broad end 3.

Afterwards they writ Letters with a small Reed. 4.

As you can see from the picture below, the book uses shifts between blackletter, roman, and italic fonts to differentiate between those things illustrated and between the different languages. (My italics are a small attempt to transcribe the shift between blackletter and roman.)


The text continues on the next page to describe how "we" write today:

We use a Goos-quill, 5. the Stem 6. of which we make with a Pen-kife; 7. then we dip the neb in an Ink-horn, 8. which is stopped with a Stopple, 9. and we put our Pens into a Pennar. 10.

We dry a writing with Blotting-paper, or Calis-sand, out of a Sand-box, 11.

And we indeed, write from the left hand, towards the right; 12. the Hebrews from the right-hand towards the left; 13. the Chinois, and other Indians, from the top downwards. 14.

One of the fun things about this book for me is the descriptions of activities related to book history--there are pages not only for the scholar and for writing, but for paper, printing, the book-seller's shop, the book-binder, and even for a book. I don't have images for all of those, but on Google Books you can find the 1887 edition of Orbis pictus, which reuses the 1658 illustrations.

Comenius's impact on children's education and book history is huge. His method for engaging children through pictures and narratives about the world around us not only made his book tremendously popular, it has shaped nearly all such books since. His method is wholly familiar to us today--it's how we routinely teach our kids to read. In fact, what Orbis pictus reminds me most strongly of is Richard Scarry's stories about Busytown. And let me tell you, as someone whose children love my old copies of Richard Scarry, wow is that a book that appeals to little kids! (You can see a few images from Busy, Busy Town and What Do People Do All Day? on Amazon.)

Comenius's Orbis pictus starts off with a dialogue between The Master and a Boy which lays out concisely the purpose not only of his book, but of all subsequent children's books:

M. Come Boy learn to be wise.

P. What doth this mean, To be wise.

M. To understand rightly, to do rightly, and to speak out rightly, all that are necessary.

Comenius's book is organized not only around A World of Things Obvious to the Senses--or what people do all day--but in an order that makes sense of that world rightly. The book moves from God then the World through all the worldly activities and objects until we reach Gods Providence and the last Judgment.

Naming the world around us to children always means embedding that world in our moral structure, from where we begin and end our narrative to how we describe the activities that take place in the world. It's one of the qualities that can make children's books so rewarding to study. Richard Scarry's steady popularity makes it possible to trace the ways in which children's books like these reflect our societal worldview--see this great Flickr set for some images comparing the 1963 and 1991 editions of The Best Word Book Ever. Given that my kids read my childhood Richard Scarry, we still name the handsome pilot and pretty stewardess. But I've never noticed the screaming lady--something to look forward to the next time my little one drags it out!