Category: Assignment

Assignment #5 — A Book’s Owners

You know how when renovating a room, you have to scrape all of the wallpaper off the walls and it is easy and super tedious, but you know it’s going to be worth it in the end? That’s kind of how this assignment went for me. This week we were asked to once again use […]

You know how when renovating a room, you have to scrape all of the wallpaper off the walls and it is easy and super tedious, but you know it’s going to be worth it in the end? That’s kind of how this assignment went for me. This week we were asked to once again use technology I had previously never dealt with before, and considering last week’s results, I was cautious to say the least. Surpisingly enough, I did not have as many troubles this time around. While data scraping is definitely not how I would like to spend an afternoon, much like peeling wallpaper off it was more tedious than anything.
Once I finally got all of the data, painstakingly putting it through Google Sheet after Google Sheet, I was ready to take on Kumu. Once again, I was surpised how user-friendly it was. (Maybe Zotero and I are just not meant to be.) Although there are some discrepancies with my map, such as the random gray circles that did not want to get color coded, overall it turned out pretty well.

I used the Bristol Baptist Academy’s records of 1860:

Assignment 5: Social Network Mapping with Kumu

“Let’s work with web scraping and social networking,” they said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re technologically inept,” they said. But I had to go and be a special snowflake by picking my own set of data—basically making a perfectly reasonable project take ten hours more than it should have. This week, we worked on unearthing […]

“Let’s work with web scraping and social networking,” they said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re technologically inept,” they said. But I had to go and be a special snowflake by picking my own set of data—basically making a perfectly reasonable project take ten hours more than it should have.

This week, we worked on unearthing library records for dissenting academies via the Dissenting Academies Online Project. I chose to work within the calendar year 1830, focusing my search on Homerton Academy. With tools such as Kumu, Scraper, and xPath Finder (the latter two being Chrome extensions), I scraped data from the DAO database and used it to map connections between books and borrowers during that year, as seen below.

Regardless of the time I spent working on this project (due to the fact that I had to constantly seek help in fixing my own errors, because I’m a Creative Writing major and computers are hard) the end product was surprisingly cool. I didn’t even have to ask for help on Part III, which kind of made me question reality for a few minutes but it’s all cool now.

So there you have it – a comprehensive, slightly jiggly map of connections between the borrowers and the books of Homerton Academy in 1830.

Map of Publication

The Child’s Instructor I found a few publications on a text called “The Child’s Instructor” by John Ely. It was published at various locations between the years of 1758-1847. The map below provides an excellent visual as to the distance of which the book was published. Mainly, in the northern states is where it was found … Continue reading Map of Publication →

The Child’s Instructor

I found a few publications on a text called “The Child’s Instructor” by John Ely. It was published at various locations between the years of 1758-1847. The map below provides an excellent visual as to the distance of which the book was published. Mainly, in the northern states is where it was found as you can see below.

Assignment 4: Want to know where it was published?

Ironically, seeing as I have very little experience with Christianity in any of its forms—personal, academic, or anything in between—I seem to have been gravitating toward religious texts in this course. This is probably due to the time period in which we’ve been working, but hey—it works, and I’m learning. This week, we pored over […]

Ironically, seeing as I have very little experience with Christianity in any of its forms—personal, academic, or anything in between—I seem to have been gravitating toward religious texts in this course. This is probably due to the time period in which we’ve been working, but hey—it works, and I’m learning.

This week, we pored over the English Short Title Catalogue (which WordPress is trying to tell me is spelled wrong because I’m in the United States) in search of books published a) prior to 1800, and b) in at least three different places. I accidentally stumbled upon John Bunyan’s “Come and welcome to Jesus Christ” while searching for the very few records of books I’ve worked with personally.

The process of getting and refining all the information was messy, to say the least, but barring the six straight hours spent troubleshooting installation (and no, I’m not exaggerating), I’ll admit that it went smoother than expected in the end. It’s not a map that boasts fifty different cities of publication, but—thanks to OpenRefine, Zotero, Google Maps, and a lot of help from Dr. Benjamin Pauley (thank you, thank you, thank you)—it’s a functioning map, and an accurate one at that.

Behold, a map that answers the burning question that I’m sure has been plaguing you since birth: where was John Bunyan’s “Come and welcome to Jesus Christ” published?

Assignment 3: Using TimelineJS to Retrace the Life of a Book

I’m not sure, but I think I might have picked the one book in our Special Collections library with the absolute least notable owners in the entire world. I don’t mean to say that any of them led boring lives, don’t get me wrong. I mean that despite the abundance of names in the provenance […]

I’m not sure, but I think I might have picked the one book in our Special Collections library with the absolute least notable owners in the entire world.

I don’t mean to say that any of them led boring lives, don’t get me wrong. I mean that despite the abundance of names in the provenance available to me, exactly zero of them turned up in genealogical databases, and exactly zero of them had a hand in any other publications I could find. It didn’t help that none of them had the decency to include their location (or at least, a legible one).

But I digress. Even though none of the owners seemed to leave a lasting footprint in history, it was fun to figure out who might have come first and what they did with it. It’s a fairly outdated concept, so it doesn’t see much use today, but judging from the number of names in it I suspect that it saw a great deal of use from religious figures or followers. I’m fairly certain that I’m the first person to have sifted through it so deeply in a long while.

So, here: the product of my puzzling. Behold the vast amount of dead-end (but still cool) provenance. I view it as a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people.

Assignment #2 – A Book’s Beginnings

It’s week two of our SLOB class, and another trip to the archives was called for. This time, we were on a mission; having covered a brief introduction to bibliography, everyone in the class was asked to identify certain traits of a book’s beginnings and figure out the format in which it was made. With […]

It’s week two of our SLOB class, and another trip to the archives was called for. This time, we were on a mission; having covered a brief introduction to bibliography, everyone in the class was asked to identify certain traits of a book’s beginnings and figure out the format in which it was made. With that goal in mind, my partner Mary Haynes and I each grabbed a book and went to work.

I decided to use the oldest book in the Montevallo archives, which we identified last week: The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, 3rd ed. with sculptures. Published 1702.

 

Binding

This book was rebound by C.F. Rothweiler Bookbinding in Zion, Illinois, but the original binding can be seen attached to the new binding. Also, when rebound they cut out the title from the original binding and glued it onto the new spine.

Original Title Binding

Because they simply covered the old binding, there was no effect on the page margins. Although it is unfortunate that the original binding fell apart, because it happened I was able to clearly see the 5 stitch bindings. Another interesting thing about the binding was how it was falling apart. Upon further inspection is appeared to have split in three even sections, but there was evidence of smaller spitting happening as well. Mary Haynes and I came to the conclusion that this book was probably bound in smaller sections that were put into three bigger sections, and then finally bound together as a whole.

Original and New Binding

Paper

Right off the bat knew that the paper is laid, not wove. We can tell because of the visible chainlines, mostly horizontal but on pages with images the vertical wires can be seen as well. All of the pages are opened and are trimmed. I could not find a watermark despite looking for quite a while.

Horizontal Chainlines

Vertical Chainlines

Signatures?

This is where, in my opinion, things got interesting. There were signatures at the bottom of the pages in groups of four. They were denoted by letters of the alphabet, starting with A, and continued until they had to start over with Aa. The interesting part about it was that the signatures were four on, four off. As you can see in the pictures, the pages followed an A1, A2, A3, A4 pattern but then followed by 4 pages without a signature.

Example of Signature

 

Format

Based on the evidence we found (and a little origami on my part), I’ve come to the conclusion that this book was created using an octavo format. The biggest indicator of this was the signatures and their sets of four. Assuming they used them as a way to make sure the pages were in order when folding, it is safe to also assume that each new set of signatures means a new set of pages. If this is the case, that means there would be 8 leaves and 16 pages, hence, octavo.

 

Illustrations?

There were full page illustrations, generally with a black page on the opposing side. Because of that, I assume that the illustrations were printed separately and then bound together with the rest of the pages, but I did not see any glaring evidence of that so I may be wrong. Unfortunately, it slipped my mind to snap a picture of a whole illustration, but in this picture you can see part of one next to title page.

Illustration on Right

Extras

What caught my attention the most from examining the book was the way the typesetting worked. The first thing I noticed was actually a misprint in one of the signature series, as you can see in the pictures below.

Misprint Signatures

After that I started looking for mistakes, but then stumbled upon something much more telling of the handmade nature of the book. Apparently when a page used too much of a single letter and the printer would run out, they would substitute other letters to make it work, usually with W’s and V’s as you can also see in the pictures.

Ran Out of W’s

Out of everything I found, I think my favorite was something that apparently was a product of the time this book was written. You see, Mary Haynes and I kept finding all of these works with seemingly random f’s where one would assume s’s would go. Having no idea what this could mean, we asked the archivist and discovered that back then, the f indicated a long s as opposed to a short s sound.

F is Now S

 

Overall, this visit was super cool and involved a lot of discovery. I had no idea that the structure of a book could be so fascinating, and I have a feeling I will never look at book bindings the same again. (Nor will my friends, because I’m a sharer when it comes to things like this.)

Assignment 2: Portrait of a Book

I was pretty close to picking the same book to describe as I did for my first post (since it does, after all, have a few interesting notations at the beginning and end from previous owners), but I ended up selecting another one because I was set on finding one in the original binding. I […]

I was pretty close to picking the same book to describe as I did for my first post (since it does, after all, have a few interesting notations at the beginning and end from previous owners), but I ended up selecting another one because I was set on finding one in the original binding. I ended up choosing a book written in 1766 by multiple authors: The Spectator, in eight volumes (see Image 3 in the gallery), which is a series of essays written by Sir Richard Steele, Joseph Addison (Esq.), Eustace Budgell, Mr. Tickell, Mr. Hughes, Dr. Parnell, Alexander Pope (Esq.), Laurence Eusden, Richard Ince, Henry Martyn, John Byrom, Gilbert Budgell, Rev. Richard Parker, Mr. Henley, and Henry Grove. So, basically, a bunch of random names.

The outside of the book is fairly nondescript save for the spine (see Images 1 and 2 in the gallery). It’s clear where metal tools were taken to the leather; not only are they accented with gold leaf (and red leather dye around the title, as you can see in the gallery) but I could feel the indentations when I ran my finger over them. The actual front and rear of the book feature no distinguishing mark other than redrot (and, to be fair, so does the spine). The endband at the top of the spine has half-broken free of the book, enough so I can see the stitches around it.

With Dakota’s help, because I have problems with processing and conceptualization, we figured out that the book was probably in duodecimo format (12°) by looking at the chart on page 85 of the Gaskell reading. I noticed that the book is printed on laid paper and has very visible horizontal chain lines, and the length of the cut pages is about 17-17.5 cm (roughly 18~cm uncut estimate). The signatures (which go from A-A3 with three blanks, B-B3 with three blanks, etc, all the way until Ee – but skipping J, V, and W) reveal that this particular book has six leaves to a gathering, leading us to the conclusion that the book is likely in duodecimo format. I’m not excellent at math (like, at all), but I think that at 12 leaves/24 pages a sheet of paper, this book probably took 15ish sheets of paper to manufacture.

Speaking of the signatures, that’s pretty much the only notable thing there is on the direction line. There are no catch words. However, on the first page of every gathering (A, B, C, D, etc.), there’s a small cross symbol to the right of the signature (see Image 4 in the gallery). I assume this means that all of the pages came from the same press, since the symbol is consistent throughout.

There are only a couple watermarks. On the first blank page I found one reading “1794” (see Image 5 in the gallery – the watermark is faint, but for reference it’s alongside the shadow of my finger). I couldn’t find another watermark on any of the interior pages (probably due to the fact that it’s duodecimo – if I’m right – which means any watermarks probably got cut off) but I did find one on the rear board (see Image 6). If it’s too faint to tell in the picture, it’s a segment of a fleur-de-lis.

There were also a few scribbles here and there, the most notable of which possibly being an owner (see Image 4 in the gallery). I can make out the date as June 25, 1796, and the name seems close to John Whits Smith, but I can’t really distinguish it so your guess is better than mine. There’s also a few pencil marks on a blank page prior to the title page (not pictured because they were too faint in the image) but they indicate that the book was at some point purchased for 3.50 (currency not known).

As for binding, the cover is coming apart slightly, so I could see six places where the paper was sewn to the boards with what appears to be twine, but it’s not much. I couldn’t find anything indicating its state of binding had changed, so I assume I handled it with the same binding in which it had been published.

Finally, cancellations. I have no idea if these count, but I noticed that two pages had been torn out – one right before the title page, and one before the final blank page. They’re right on that teetering point where I’m not sure if they had anything on them to begin with, so I hesitate to call these actual cancellations; I’m guessing someone just needed a piece of paper in a pinch, and decided to utilize some of the blank ones. I did notice that this book had fewer blank pages than some of the other old ones I’ve looked at lately.

If all else fails, I can always blame John Whits Smith-what’s-his-face for those missing pages. I wonder what they were used for.