e-updating

I don't know where all the time has gone! One minute it was the start of the semester, and now it's Thanksgiving. I'm particularly sad that I dropped the ball after my last post on e-books. I'd really meant to pick up the conversation but, unsurprisingly now that I look back at it, it was hard to pull my thoughts together.

One of the things that has struck me the most is the weird way in which conversations about e-books tend to rocket between two polar positions: "I love books and e-books are an abomination!" and "I love my e-book and print is dead!" Both seem ridiculous to me in their totalizing insistence--surely the rise of electronic books aren't going to fully eclipse books. Did radio wipe out television? Did cinema destroy theater? I don't even think that the codex eliminated the value of tablets and scrolls. So to imagine that the future is bookless seems silly.

Robert Darnton's recent conversation with Diane Rehm on her radio show exemplified this push-pull polarization. Despite his best efforts to make subtle these distinctions and to work with the sort of nuance that makes his scholarship so interesting, many of the host and caller comments kept coming back to this fear of the death of the book, as if it is impossible to love reading and to love books and to also embrace the possibilities of digitization. (If you haven't yet read Darnton's new book, you can access many of its constituent parts in their earlier versions via the handy list at Early Modern Online Bibliography. I should pause, too, to say that there are lost of good conversations happening at that blog about these concerns.)

For some other subtle thoughts about how book historians might respond to e-books and digitization, I highly recommend a bunch of Whitney's posts at diapsalmata: the first builds on my last post and encourages a material approach to the work of digitizing, subsequent posts think about why the future isn't here yet and the relationship between the digital and the archive.

Whitney's most recent post raises these questions again in light of the new Shakespeare Quartos Archive, something that I'll be looking at and blogging on soon. In the meantime, though, you might be wondering what a photograph of Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue is doing illustrating this post. Here's the answer: I am the proud new owner of all three volumes. Why would I shell out the big bucks for something that is now freely available online? Because even though it has been turned into an electronic database, the printed catalogue provides information that isn't carried over to the online one, and it can be used in ways that I sometimes find harder to navigate online. I wouldn't want to get rid of the ESTC by any stretch of the imagination. It's a great thing that it is now available to all and sundry. But it doesn't mean that we're throwing away our printed ones, either.

On that note, happy Thanksgiving to my American readers and happy reading to you all!

to e-book or not to e-book

There's been a slew of stories over the last few months about electronic books, primarily of the Kindle variety, but some of them touch on general issues pertaining to the availability, use, and desirability of e-books. I've been trying to compose a post in response to them, but I keep getting overwhelmed. What to say in response to a prep school that replaces its library with a cappuccino machine and 18 e-readers? *head-desk* (The School Library Journal has a more articulate response.) What about the summer's too-perfect-to-be-true news that Amazon deleted copies of Orwell's works from the Kindles without informing owners? Make that another big #amazonfail moment after their first, horrendous mistake last spring when changes in their ranking system made thousands of gay and lesbian titles disappear from searches. Ooops. In further e-stories, there's the non-release as e-books of two of the Fall's big titles: Teddy Kennedy's posthumous True Compass and Sarah Palin's Going Rogue. What will those Cushing Academy students do when researching papers about the Obama election? I guess rely on Wikipedia. (For insight into why the memoirs aren't Kindled, see Daniel Gross's Moneybox column for Slate, in which he explains why the economics of publishing doesn't make sense for them as e-reads.) Oh, and speaking of students and e-readers, what do Princeton students have to say about using Kindles as part of a pilot program to replace textbooks with Kindles? According to one student quoted in the Daily Princetonian, "this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool." Finally, last week there was the New York Times piece worrying that books might be the next to be "Napsterized." (Remember Napster? Some of you young 'uns might not recall the world before digital music files, but let me tell you, it put the fear of Someone into the music industry when people started sharing their music online.) Joshua Kim's response on Inside Higher Ed brings those Napster concerns into a conversation with universities and libraries.

About a year ago, I posted about my perplexed response to a newspaper column that touted the joy of Kindle as being "almost like a book"--why read something that's almost as good as a book when you could read a book? I still stand by that point, but not because I'm a luddite. In that particular piece, I was reacting against a perception that e-reading had to be good because it was new. But I also don't think it has to be bad because it's new. My husband got a Kindle last spring and it's been great. For him, the joy of the machine is that it holds so much. Given his preference for texts that come in big, heavy books--military history, science fiction, jurisprudence--the fact that he can take his Kindle on trips means that he needn't break his back or run out of reading material. I still don't use it, and not only because he's the alpha gadgeteer in our household. My way of reading for work and research is to cover the page in notes, so paper copies work best for me. And most of my pleasure reading I do in a way that isolates me as much as possible from the world: glasses off, dark room, book light. We all have our own ways of reading and different technologies that meet those needs.

But much of what I'm seeing written in the popular press about e-book readers isn't, I don't think, taking into account the full picture. Some of the stories I mentioned above hint at the problem of Amazon's essential monopoly over the current e-field. I know Sony has an e-reader, but given Amazon's vertical integration, they hold an incredible portion of the e-market in their tight e-fist. (E-sorry. It's hard to stop the e-jokes.) If there was some competition in that market, the problems of pricing and availability and Big Brother would be different.

More to this blog's point, what does the current state of e-readers and discussion have to do with book history and book historians? So much of what we're considering today with Kindles focuses on books that were written to be distributed in print and then are transferred into an e-format. (Daniel Gross's book Dumb Money actually did this transference the other direction: he wrote it as an e-book for Free Press and it sold well enough that it's now available in print--see the Washington Post profile of him for more on that.) But what happens when we get to the day that works are created for and intended to be experienced as e-books? How will that change the experience of using books? And how will we ensure the survival of those books? As anyone who has been working with computers over the last few decades knows, technology becomes obsolete and earlier formats don't always carry over into new ones.

Similarly, how might the availability of new digital formats affect the process of creating works? According to Scott Karambis, for some creative artists, the availability of the digital world has changed how and what they write: author Justin Cronin relied on the ease of researching online to push his knowledge into new arenas when composing his newest novel, insisting that it made him become a different sort of writer. Karambis's blog post focuses more on the effect of technology on the process of creation and less on the impact of digital creations themselves (the blog is geared towards other folks in marketing, rather than, say, writers or book historians). Rachel Toor, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is more focused on the economic impact of e-books. Even though she loves reading e-books on her Kindle, she has decidedly more mixed feelings about being an e-writer. Might e-publishing save university publishers by bringing down costs and therefore recovering the economic viability of those scholarly monographs with small audiences? And the speed of electronic publishing is wonderful for timely subjects and for the responsiveness it generates for readers. But will people stumble across e-books the way they do physical books on bookshelves? Will writers be able to live off the advances from their e-books the way that some are able to today?

Toor and Cronin don't ask this in their reflections on writing and new technology, but I will: will we still have e-books to read if they aren't backed up on paper? Will we still be able to lend books to each other if they're tied to our e-readers? Will we still be able to talk back to our books, modify them, resist them?

I often, when teaching early modern book history, say to my students, "It's all about money!" And it often is. But it's also about creativity and interactivity and longevity. And we're still taking baby steps towards what it all might mean.

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.)