5750 Methods of Historical Research: October 2016

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Readers Interacting with print

Book Traces:
http://www.booktraces.org/

Extra-illustrated (or Grangerized) books at the Huntington Library
http://www.huntington.org/WebAssets/Templates/content.aspx?id=14386

video of turning the "pages" of a grangerized book
https://vimeo.com/65673921

Example a signature album and a scrapbook from of University of St. Andrew library:
https://standrewsrarebooks.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/ms37102_1and2.jpg

Henry Tiffin Commonplace Book from the Peabody Essex Museum:
http://www.pem.org/library/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Shipof90Guns1760-Web.jpg

Lewis Carroll's commonplace book from University of TX Austin
http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/galleries/2012/08/16/beautiful-commonplace-books-by-lewis-carroll-nancy-cunard-and-more-photos/jcr:content/gallery/slide_6/image.img.1280.1024.jpg/44836894.cached.jpg

19th century Scrapbook from Library Company of Philadelphia
http://www.librarycompany.org/visualculture/images/events/p-9682-1-p42-43.jpg

Monday, October 17, 2016

Links and research guides (plus thoughts on stereotype printing)

Follow up materials from our discussion of image-making processes:

Bibliography of sources for research on print making and print makers: http://archive.clarkart.edu/library/bibliographies/LibraryGuideARTH506.htm
The most important reference guide here is The Artists of the World : Bio-bibliographical Index

Another list of useful resources for identifying prints and print makers, from the V&A:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/study-guide-prints-and-printmakers/

On stereotype printing

Several of us had a discussion last week about how to tell if a 19th or early 20th century book was printed with movable type or with stereotype plates. After investigating several authorities, I tend to side with Philip Gaskell in A New Introduction to Bibliography: "Stereotype plates, normally mounted and imposed as separate pages, were printed exactly like ordinary typeset pages, and it is usually hard to tell whether a particular book has been printed from type of plates" (204). The take away here: it's hard to tell.

That said, as we were discussing, if an early 20th century book has two different printers, one named on the title page, and one named on the final leaf of the book, this may suggest that you are looking at either 1. a later "edition" of the book (meaning the type has been reset) or 2. a later "impression" of the book (the copy was printed at a different time than the original impression of the book, but the type was not reset). If the book you are analyzing does not say it is a second, third etc. edition, but does have two distinct printers, it *may* be made from stereotype plates. This, however, is speculation since there does not appear to be any scholarship on this question. I will distribute some material from Gaskell in class on Thursday that might help us with this issue, and will send you an article by Michael Winship "Printing with Plates in the Nineteenth Century United States" when I receive it from ILL.

Guide for conducting research in literary studies:

A useful compilation of research guides, organizer by literary period, with links to web resources:
http://libguides.du.edu/c.php?g=90360&p=583464
If you scroll down in any of the individual pages, you will find links to online search engines for archival materials and manuscripts, among other useful information.

Links and research guides (plus thoughts on stereotype printing)

Follow up materials from our discussion of image-making processes:

Bibliography of information on print making and printmakers: http://archive.clarkart.edu/library/bibliographies/LibraryGuideARTH506.htm
The most important reference guide here is The Artists of the World : Bio-bibliographical Index

Another list of useful resources for identifying prints and printmakers, from the V&A:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/study-guide-prints-and-printmakers/

On stereotype printing

Several of us had a discussion last week about how to tell if a nineteenth or early 20th century book was printed with movable type or with stereotype plates. After investigating several authorities, I tend to side with Philip Gaskell in A New Introduction to Bibliography: "Stereotype plates, normally mounted and imposed as separate pages, were printed exactly like ordinary typeset pages, and it is usually hard to tell whether a particular book has been printed from type of plates" (204). The take away here: it's hard to tell.

That said, as we were discussing, if an early 20th century book has two different printers, one named on the title page, and one named on the final leaf of the book, this may suggest that you are looking at either 1. a later "edition" of the book (meaning the type has been reset) or 2. a later "impression" of the book (the copy was printed at a different time than the original impression of the book, but the type was not reset). If the book you are analyzing does not say it is a second, third etc. edition, but does have two distinct printers, it *may* be made from stereotype plates. This, however, is speculation since there does not appear to be any scholarship on this question. I will distribute some material from Gaskell in class on Thursday that might help us with this issue, and will send you an article by Michael Winship "Printing with Plates in the Nineteenth Century United States" when I receive it from ILL.

Guide for conducting research in literary studies:

A useful compilation of research guides, organizer by literary period, with links to web resources:
http://libguides.du.edu/c.php?g=90360&p=583464
If you scroll down in any of the individual pages, you will find links to online search engines for archival materials and manuscripts, among other useful information.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Milk & Honey- Rupi Kaur

Rupi Kaur's book of poetry, Milk & Honey, was published by Andrew McMeel Publishing in 2015. She dedicates her book, to "the arms that hold [her]."
For starters, this book is so aesthetically pleasing. There are four sections, the hurting, the breaking, the loving, and the healing. The sections headers are there own page, printed on a black piece of paper, with a very simple white font. She uses no capitalization. Each page has a small poem printed in a very simple font neatly on it. Many pages also have a hand sketched piece of art on the page, that might have to do with the poem, or might make the meaning of the poem to Rupi herself a bit more apparent.
This book of poetry is meant to be very raw and intimate. The way that the book is printed, definitely attributes to the intimacy. From Rupi's hand sketched pictures on the pages, to her note on the back of the book- "this is the journey of surviving through poetry, this is the blood sweat tears of twenty-one years, this is my heart, in your hands, this is the hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing", it is appealing to any reader who might have felt hurting, loving, breaking, and healing.
The book itself is 204 pages, but it is written in a way that it could be read in an entire setting, due to the fluidity of the type. Furthermore, I think this work can also succeed as a coffee table type book, because it is so aesthetically beautiful, and simple. It's easy to pick it up, flip to page 121, and read a three sentence poem about writing and hands, and then set it back down.

The Art of War

For this assignment I chose The Art of War by Sun Tzu to showcase how a text can convey meaning using a variety of different structural and typographical decisions.

In Chinese, the text is written out in a stream of short, segmented sections of text, most of which don't stretch longer than four lines. At first I thought this could equate to larger sections of text in English, but the size of each translated section remains roughly equivalent. Because the original text was first written on a collection of flattened out bamboo, it's difficult to discern what, if any, intentions the author had in structuring the information the way that he did - it could have just been a convention of writing under those conditions. Regardless, what we have in the modern, translated edition is a numbered list of short paragraphs, each covering a unique war-related topic. Though it's uncertain if the original text prefaced each paragraph with a number (I can't read Chinese), the decision to number them in the English translation creates an unavoidable spatial affect: it makes the text feel authoritative, as though this list is a continuation of the ten commandments handed down by Moses.

In addition to the formatting of the text, its linear qualities carry a similar affect. Each sentence is written as a statement of fact, without any delineations explaining or defending them. The reader is the pupil, and the text the master, and at no point is the reader allowed a space for argument.

These linear and spatial elements combine to give the impression that the author (or authors) intended to minimize the importance of radial reading. Essentially, this text is not intended to promote further study, nor does it prescribe to a literary complexity that would require supplementary information.

Heart of Darkness and Paradise Lost

(Joseph Conrad and John Milton)

I have been looking at these two works and I was wandering what might change my perception as a reader to such a work would printing techniques, page layout, or typography change or affect the way I read a book. I would say no before I taking this class because all what I thought of was the text and that it is hard to manipulate such a crucial part of the work. I thought that the historical context that the work was published in is important to understand the author’s point of view. However, I have never given the printing process or the circuit that the book goes through any serious thought, but after being introduced to the long process that a book undergoes before it arrives at the readers hands, I realized how ignorant I was about such process. Therefore, I thought of something that more of a graphical interpretation of the book which I assume would manipulate the reader’s perception of a work. There is a confusion I have to make! I haven’t read the examples of books that I am sharing with you today. Both of my examples were published after the death of the author. Lost paradise was a long epic poem that went on and on for about 10 books, as a result Gustave Doré, 1832-1883 did some graphical illustrations to it which might help the reader understand and quickly link the poem to real or imaginary live. However, I drawings on the other hand, might also deter the readers from experiencing linguistic abstraction which is supposed to be the “authors attention!”. The other example is Heart of Darkness which was published 1899. The graphical version of the novel is rendering of Conrad’s classic by David Zane Mairowitz; Catherine Anyango which was published in 2010. The great thing about the version is that it present you with images of the scenes which makes it easier for the readers to focus their critical minds on other aspects of the novel, but the problem with this version is that it a critical version that might orient the readers understanding of the work. However, such creative work opens our minds to other possibilities could be applied to reading different works. Finally think of one of the hardest works that you have read in your live and imagine that it was written in a different style or illustrated with pictures how would your experience change?

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/milton/john/paradise/

Pound's ABCs of Reading and Blake's Urizen

For considering McGann's point about typography and page space:
http://books.google.com/books?id=0GazhoHAYQgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=ABC+reading+pound&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dcwYVIv2NIWlyATCzoGYCg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=for%20those%20who%20read%20only%20&f=false

Blake, The First Book of Urizen:
http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=urizen&java=no

Nets by Jen Bervin

For this week, I chose to focus on Nets by Jen Bervin. This work is a collection of what is essentially erasure poetry in which Bervin has taken selected sonnets by Shakespeare and presented them with most of the text faded and selected words emboldened to create new meanings. The majority of the original (Shakespearean) text is left intact -- not actually erased, but very much altered. The sonnets are presented one to a page with a blank facing page -- each very isolated from the rest. They are titled with numbers that correspond to the numbering of Shakespeare's sonnets, and it is quite noticeable that all of his sonnets are not represented in Bervin's work. This connected for me with McGann's statement that Yeats "used the format and organization . . . to make his argument" (114). Bervin's work on the macro level is doing some of the same things that each sonnet is doing on a micro level. I also think that there is some radiality because Bervin does not gloss any terms or provide other notes or apparatus. This is it to say that Bervin's book is not announcing its connection loudly, but I'm not sure that Bervin is explicitly interpreting that connection. The spine, for example, gives the title Nets, but the title page reads "THE SONNETS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE". The text is also printed in a serif font, giving it a feeling of legitimacy and connectedness to the source text. I don't think that what Bervin is doing is quite as complicated as what Drucker is doing in the works cited in her article, but the visual representation is still very important here.

At the moment, I'm not able to locate my copy of this book, so I'm posting links to info about it here:

http://jenbervin.com/projects/nets#1

http://jenbervin.com/projects/nets

London Review of Books

The particular article of which I am determining the typographical meaning is “Sorrows of a Polygamist” by Mark Ford—half-book review, half-criticism in its own right of Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life from the 17 March 2016 edition of the London Review of Books (LRB). To be clear, this is more a discussion of the typographical function of the LRB, since most of its content is presented in a similar manner.

Alongside The New Yorker, the LRB is one of my favorite journals, perhaps the main reason being its sober emphasis on the text. Each issue appears in a format reminiscent of the size and “stitching” (read: stapling) of a folio, containing lengthy articles on subjects such as politics, history, social anthropology, and literature. These articles are presented in what appears to be a 12-pt. serif font with four columns of text per page, narrow margins, and advertisements dedicated almost exclusively to publishing houses or other literary endeavors. The LRB encourages what McGann terms “radial reading”—I often look up at least three or four words I don’t know per article, in addition to researching the book that’s actually being reviewed (which tailspins into author bios and literary movements). Clearly its intended audience harbors an attention span long enough to peruse a critical book review or commentary piece. In a time when information seems to be solely transmitted through “listicles” and slideshows with a pop-up advertisement every other page, I find the formatting and typography of the LRB very refreshing.