bibles for historical occasions

When Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, he will be using the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used at his first inauguration in 1861. Much has been made of the symbolism of the moment, and of the many connections between the two men from Illinois, the one who freed the slaves and the one who will be our first African-American President.

The physical presence of Lincoln's Bible is key to making that connection explicit. It's not a physically imposing bible, as you can see from pictures. It's easily held, bound in burgundy velvet with gilt edges.


What I find the most interesting about it is that although it holds a great deal of significance to us, it did not for Lincoln. Lincoln's own family Bible was still en route to Washington with the rest of his belongings, so Supreme Court Clerk William Thomas Carroll purchased this Bible for the swearing-in ceremony. The Bible itself (an 1853 Oxford edition) was opened to a random page when the oath was administered. (There's a compilation of inaugural Bibles used and scriptures chosen put together by the Library of Congress.) But the importance of this object is brought home in Carroll's inscription at the end, certifying that this is the copy of the Bible that was used to swear in President Lincoln.

(A full set of images of Lincoln's Bible is on flickr.)

Lincoln's Bible is in contrast to the one that Joe Biden will be using when he is sworn in as Vice-President. He'll be using the same Bible that he's used every time he was sworn in as a senator, and that his son has used as Delaware's Attorney General, a Bible that has been in the family since 1893. As you can see from this photo (taken for the New York Times by Stephen Crowley), in which his wife Jill pretends to be staggering under its weight, this is no easily carried book.

According to news reports, Biden almost didn't have the Bible with him for the Senate swearing-in, but made it in time, complete with jokes about its size. (There's a nice story about this in Delaware Online.) Jokes aside, though, it is clearly something that is important to Biden and an integral part of how he sees taking office.

I've been struck with these stories about the Bibles being used for this Presidential Inauguration, and for others, because they aren't about what the Bible means. That isn't irrelevant, by any means. I happen to be fond of the story about John Quincy Adams, who took his oath of office upon a "Volume of Laws" because it was the Constitution he was swearing to protect. But what is driving so many of these stories is an emphasis on the physical book itself. Biden's Bible has been passed on through his family for generations. When Obama lays his hand on the Bible to become our 44th President, he is touching the same book that our 16th President did. The physical book makes connections through the generations.

I'll close with a couple of images of historical Bibles in the Folger's collections. Neither will ever be chosen to swear in a new President, and that's just as well--I don't think their resonances will play as smoothly.

The first is a copy of the 1568 Great Bible presented to Queen Elizabeth and probably used in her private chapel. It is bound in a crimson velvet with silver clasps and bosses engraved with Tudor roses and her coat of arms. It's a lovely book. (Full catalogue record here.)


The second is less beautiful but perhaps more haunting. It's a Salisbury Book of Hours that was given to Henry VIII by Anne of Cleves, also known as wife number four. At the back of the book she has written, "I besiche your grace h[umble?] when ye loke on this remember me. yo[u]r gracis assured anne the dowgher of cleues." (See the catalogue record.)


What did Henry think when he looked upon this? I can't imagine. But I do like knowing that she got to keep her head long after his had been laid to rest. Perhaps her Book of Hours helped her navigate her way past him.

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!

happy new year

My 2009 has already gotten off to a rocking start: I am delighted and honored that Wynken de Worde has gotten a 2008 Cliopatria Award for Best New Blog. I started this blog last summer by sharing it with just a few friends, and have been slowly expanding its audience since then with the help of Folger denizens and other early modern bloggers. I've been grateful to all of you who have been following what I've been thinking about, commenting and linking and sharing your thoughts about books and early modern culture. In this age (yet again!) of information overload, I'm honored that you include my posts in your wanderings. And I'm looking forward to more posts: there's more to say about the Folger's digital collection, the use of woodcuts, how books act as social transactions, and even about Frances Wolfreston!

So happy new year wishes to all of you. May your 2009 be full of books and reading, information and beauty, solitary pleasures and social joys, the past and the future--and may your path never cross with bookworms or computer viruses!

Folger digital image collections, part 1

So, speaking of techonology, the Library has recently opened up a very cool new tool: you can now search the Folger's digital image collection from the luxury of your own computer! It's fun for playing and fun for research--although, really, is there a difference?

Our whole collection isn't digitized, of course. But there are some real gems in there. All the images that I use in this blog, for instance, are in the digital collection. Things end up in our digital collection via a couple of different routes. Sometimes a researcher requests specific images for use in a project: our photography department, headed by Julie Ainsworth, takes photos, and those get placed in the collection. Sometimes Library staff requests images for our publications, including our website and online exhibitions. Works also get digitized for use in the classroom, for instance for use in the undergraduate seminars and the Folger Institute's paleography classes.

There are also some larger initiatives to digitize parts of the collection. Most recently, and spectacularly, the Library digitized all pre-1640 Shakespeare quartos in our collection (with the exception of the few that weren't in condition to be photographed). I should repeat that: all pre-1640 quartos. Not one copy of each imprint, but all. How excellent is that? Really, extraordinarily excellent. And I'm not just saying that.

To find out more about accessing the digital image collection, either via the Folger's website or by installing Luna Insight software, see our information page. Once you're in the collection, you can browse, you can search for specific authors or works, or you can search by keywords. It can take a bit of playing to find things (the keyword searches are matched to the catalogue entries, and not necessarily to what is in the image). But I love what I find, even when I'm looking for something else. And when you do find something you want to work with, you can even download it!

(You'll see that you have the option of accessing Insight via your browser or by installing client software. It's definitely worthwhile installing the software--there is lots of stuff that you can do with the software that you can't from the browser, like accessing only the Shakespeare Quarto project. There are more options for downloading, too, like exporting a raw html page. More on those toys next time.)

So what's the image above? It's something I found while browsing the collection and it seemed apropros for this post. It's a detail from a 1700 edition of Johann Comenius's Orbis sensualium pictus, a book best described by the continuation of its title in English: Comenius's Visible world. Or, a picture and nomenclature of all the chief things that are in the world; and of mens employments therein . . . for the use of young Latine scholars. This particular picture is a detail showing a scholar at work in his study. What are the numbers in the picture? They're keyed to the English and Latin vocabulary words that are illustrated! I'll show more from this book in a future post. But for now, you can find information about the book in our online catalogue. And you can find the picture itself by doing a data field search for it in Luna Insight with the image root file number 7988; you can see the full page in image root file 1386.

The beauty of the digital image collection and the public's access to it are the results of the hard work of some key Folger staff: Julie Ainsworth, Head of Photography; and Jim Kuhn, Head of Collection Information Services. Kudos and thanks to both of them, and the many others, who made this happen.

And to all of you, happy playing!

more on book technologies, or, "the book is like a hammer"

Just after my last post, a few more items related to books and technologies came across my radar. (Okay, most of those items were in the Sunday New York Times, but I do spend a lot of my Sundays reading the newspaper.) Some quick mention of them here, then.

First up was an opinion piece by James Gleick about digital books and traditional publishing. There's been a lot of gloom and doom about the end of the book. Most of it is ridiculous: books are not dying, they are not about to disappear. But there are some things that are definitely shifting: book sales are down (though I'd say that has less to do with competition from digital texts and more from poor publishing and bookselling practices, in which there has become less and less room for individual taste and outliers) and textbook costs are ridiculously high. What I like about Gleick's piece is his recognition that books are two things: physical objects and texts.

As a physical object, the technology of books is brilliant. The Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge Device joke from an earlier post gets at exactly how amazingly books do their job. As Gleick puts it,

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer.

He's not interested in fetishizing the book as an object, but in recognizing its utilitarian value:

Now, at this point one expects to hear a certain type of sentimental plea for the old-fashioned book — how you like the feel of the thing resting in your hand, the smell of the pages, the faint cracking of the spine when you open a new book — and one may envision an aesthete who bakes his own bread and also professes to prefer the sound of vinyl. That’s not my argument. I do love the heft of a book in my hand, but I spend most of my waking hours looking at — which mainly means reading from — a computer screen. I’m just saying that the book is technology that works.

But Gleick also points out that there are some texts that are better delivered through a different technology. Encyclopedias are at the top of his list, and phone books. The Oxford English Dictionary is perhaps the best example of a book that delivers its text now extraordinarily well digitally--the OED would not be as flexible and wide-ranging of a tool as it now is if it only existed in its multi-volume, occasionally published paper form.

I'm not going to go into the agreement that Google has struck with the Authors Guild, which is where Gleick goes. But Gleick makes some good points that just as the technologies for delivering text and information change, it does not necessarily mean that the technology that is the book disappears. Indeed, perhaps it means that the purpose of that technology--to deliver text--can take on a new life and reach a new audience. Books want to be read. I have a hard time being against new ways of making more texts reach more people.

So if Gleick focuses on the technological purpose of books as text and information delivery systems, elsewhere in the Times, the Style writers suggest the value of books as objects to be objectified. In their gift-giving guide (perfect gifts for less than $250!!), books crop up twice as great holiday presents.

First is the recommendation that "Old best sellers are affordable first editions. Assorted titles from $50." It's helpfully illustrated with a photo of Rabbit is Rich, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, and Mona Lisa Overdrive (no information is provided on whether we should infer we should stick with dead, or nearly dead, white men, or if other best-selling authors will do).

Second, and much more weird, are "Classics that are a snap to read. Book covers painted on wood, $150, by Leanne Sharpton" with pictures of The Call of the Wild, The Master and Margarita, Tess of the d'Ubervilles, and Oliver Twist. I'm not sure what to make of them, or of the juxtaposition between the $50 first editions and the $150 wood blocks. Read one, I guess, and display the other. Although I suspect the editors have in mind displaying both.

Personally, if I'm going to be buying a book as an object, I'm going to go with a purse. Caitlin at Rebound Designs turns old, unwanted books into purses. It's the ultimate pocketbook! I have one that features square dancers, but there are a wide variety from which to choose, and she'll even do custom orders. Plus, if you want, she'll give you the guts of the book along with the purse made from its covers. Now that's technology!