For Thursday, we’d like you to spend some time examining an old book from your university’s collection\u2014preferably a book from the “hand-press era” (i.e., before about 1820)\u2014with an eye towards perceiving the kinds of details that can give us some insight into the book’s manufacture. You might revisit the oldest book in the collection that you identified last week, or turn to a different one that catches your\u00a0fancy.<\/p>\n
Reading some\u00a0Gaskell and watching some\u00a0YouTube videos won’t make you\u00a0into an expert bibliographer, but it should\u00a0give you\u00a0a beginning\u00a0sense of\u00a0the kinds of things you’re looking for traces of when you look at a book\u00a0and the\u00a0beginnings of a technical vocabulary for talking about those traces. The point of this exercise isn’t so much to master bibliographical terminology as it is to concentrate on using your senses to examine the book carefully as a material object. (You’ll lean primarily on your sense of sight, but will also\u00a0certainly use your sense of touch, possibly your sense of\u00a0smell, and\u2014in an attenuated way\u2014your sense of hearing. Please\u00a0don’t try tasting\u00a0the books. Seriously.)<\/p>\n
You should spend a fair amount of time examining and handling the book (make sure to wash your hands before and after!), making notes on what you\u00a0observe. If your library’s policies permit it (and it sounds like everybody found this to be the case), consider taking photographs of the book to insert into your blog post. Your blog post should attempt to introduce your readers to the book you’ve found, drawing particular attention to any details\u2014however small\u2014that allow you to make inferences about how the book was made.<\/p>\n
Here are some questions to consider as you examine\u00a0your book. (But don’t let these limit you\u2014you may find something interesting not covered here.)<\/p>\n
What can you say about the <\/span>binding<\/span><\/i>?<\/span><\/p>\n Is the book bound at all? <\/span><\/p>\n If not:<\/span><\/p>\n Does it show evidence of having been <\/span>disbound<\/span><\/i> (can you see bits of leather, etc. stuck to the folded edge)?<\/span><\/p>\n Do you see evidence of <\/span>stab stitching<\/span><\/i> (i.e., holes stabbed through the face of the pages near the fold?)<\/span><\/p>\n Do you see evidence of prior <\/span>sewing<\/span><\/i> (i.e., thread sewn through holes in the fold itself)?<\/span><\/p>\n If so:<\/span><\/p>\n Describe the binding (materials, condition).<\/span><\/p>\n Does it appear to be the original binding, or has it been rebound (say, in a library binding)? If it’s been re-bound, how close to the text block are the pages trimmed (i.e., how tight are the margins)?<\/span><\/p>\n What can you tell about the <\/span>paper<\/span><\/i> that this book was printed on: <\/span><\/p>\n Is the paper laid or wove?<\/span><\/p>\n If the paper is laid, do you see chainlines? What direction are they running (vertically or horizontally)?<\/span><\/p>\n Are all the pages opened, or are there some pages that you can’t see because the folds have never been opened?<\/p>\n Are the pages trimmed or untrimmed? <\/span><\/p>\n If untrimmed, where do you think you see deckle edges? Where do you see evidence of opened bolts?<\/span><\/p>\n Do you see evidence of watermarks? If so, where? (Keep in mind that you will have to look at multiple pages before you can be sure there are or are not any watermarks).<\/span><\/p>\n Does the book have signatures (not<\/em> inscriptions of people’s names, but the letter\/number combinations at the bottom of selected pages)? If so, how is it signed?<\/p>\n Taking all the evidence together\u2014paper evidence (chainlines\/wirelines, deckle edges, watermarks, if present), signing patterns, sewing, anything else you can think of\u2014what\u00a0do you think is this book’s format (e.g., duodecimo, octavo, etc.) Refer to the\u00a0imposition diagrams in Gaskell as you think about this one.<\/p>\n Based on your sense of the book’s format, calculate the number of sheets of paper that went into the manufacture of each copy of this book.<\/p>\n Are there any full-page illustrations in\u00a0the book? Can you see how they were bound into the book?<\/p>\n Is there anything else that caught your eye about this book that these questions haven’t touched on, but that you think is\u00a0interesting to note? (Feel free to put this in your own words if you’re not sure of what the technical terms might be.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For Thursday, we’d like you to spend some time examining an old book from your university’s collection\u2014preferably a book from the “hand-press era” (i.e., before about 1820)\u2014with an eye towards perceiving the kinds of details that can give us some insight into the book’s manufacture. You might revisit the oldest book in the collection that … Continue reading “Assignment #2: Blog Post for Thursday, January 26”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prompts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8UIEH-2X","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slob.coplacdigital.org\/course\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}