scholarly journals Reflections on Technological Continuities: Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books

2015 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-33
Author(s):  
Ann Blair
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
Continued Use

In our time of increasing reliance on digital media the history of the book has a special role to play in studying the codex form and the persistence of old media alongside the growth of new ones. As a contribution to recent work on the continued use of manuscript in the handpress era, I focus on some examples of manuscripts copied from printed books in the Rylands Library and discuss the motivations for making them. Some of these manuscripts were luxury items signalling wealth and prestige, others were made for practical reasons – to own a copy of a book that was hard to buy, or a copy that could be customized in the process of copying. The act of copying itself was also considered to have devotional and/or pedagogical value.

scholarly journals The Designer’s Eye: Ancient Spanish Ballads, Poetry, and the Rise of Decorative Design

2009 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Nicholas Frankel
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Early Years ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Active Constituent ◽  
Perceptual Structure ◽  
Kelmscott Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Decorative Design

AbstractIn 1841 John Murray published a sumptuously ornamented edition of John Gibson Lockhart’sAncient Spanish Ballads.Murray’s new edition, printed using the very latest bookmaking technologies and pitched at a readership newly accustomed to paying exorbitant prices for book ornaments and illustrations, was radically different from the first edition of Lockhart’s ballads, which had appeared without accompanying ornament in 1823. Illustrated by the leading illustrators of the day and decorated throughout in multiple colors by the architect Owen Jones (who would go on to become famous as a Superintendent of the Great Exhibition and the author ofThe Grammar of Ornament), Murray’s edition represents a stunning departure in Victorian printing and a highpoint in mid-Victorian design generally. At the same time, it crystallizes a debate about the nature and application of artistic design that was beginning to emerge in the early years of Victoria’s reign and that would erupt with maximum vigor ten years later in the confrontation between John Ruskin and the South Kensington School. The tension between flat, stylized design and what Ruskin was later to term “truth to nature” is already palpable in the conflict between illustrations and ornaments to Murray’s book. However, it was the involvement of Owen Jones that especially distinguished the volume, as it gave Jones the opportunity to demonstrate in a practical way ideas about design, color, and style that he would theorize fifteen years later inThe Grammar of Ornament. Those ideas are especially resonant today, given recent work on the history of the book and the “bibliographic codes” of literature, since the effect of Jones’s work is to expose the textual condition of Lockhart’s poetry itself and to harness the eye as an active constituent in the act of reading. Fifty years before the work of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, Jones and Murray showed Victorian readers that a printed book might be a thing of real beauty and that poetry, no less than painting or architecture, is dependent on the perceptual structure of its textual vehicle.

Manuscript and Print, 1500–1700

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Burlinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Books ◽  
Early English

This chapter discusses the uses to which manuscripts and printed books were put in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the changing histories and critical traditions that have accounted for them, beginning with the place of Caxton, Pynson, and de Worde in the early English printing trade and the developing copyright law and discourse of authorship at the start of the eighteenth century. It then discusses the ways in which textual editors have accounted for the interaction between manuscript and print and the new authors and texts that have gained critical attention (with renewed scholarly attention to female authors and the social contexts of writing). It ends with a consideration of the ways in which print and manuscript coexisted and of the ways in which attention to annotations and the history of reading might be leading toward the history of books, rather than the history of the book.

scholarly journals Vilnius Printers’ Ornaments in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century as a Source of the History of the Books

Knygotyra ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 26-61
Author(s):  
Ina Kažuro
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Important Group ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
Printing House

This article focuses on the 18th century printers’ ornaments as an important group of sources of the history of the book. Until now, most studies in Lithuanian had focused on the decorations of books from the 16th– 17th centuries as well as contemporary publications. The present study through several perspectives analyzes the ornaments of the institutional printing houses of Vilnius from the second half of the 18th c. The importance of the chosen topic is substantiated not only with the scarcity of studies but also with the issues associated with the attribution of anonymous publications that had been disseminated during the hand-press period. The study’s sources were images of ornaments in the early printed books as well as European printers’ manuals and inventories of Vilnius printing houses from the period of 18th–early 19th c. The first part of the study has found that in the late 18th c., the Vilnius printers had used printers’ flowers (ornamental pieces of type) and six kinds of decorative blocks, which were carved in wood or metal (i.e., headpieces, tailpieces, vignettes, initials, factotums, and decorations of initial letters). Despite the clear function of these blocks, Vilnius printers freely experimented by placing them in unorthodox places within the books. In the second part of this study, based on a comparison of the printers’ ornaments, the ways of interaction between the Vilnius printing houses are disclosed and interpreted: ornament inheritance, division of labor, the renewal of publications in another printing house, and the falsification of publications. Also, the article discusses cases of ornaments migrating and being copied, which complicates the attribution of anonymous publications. Despite the exploratory nature of the study, it reveals new facts from the operations of 18th c. Vilnius printing houses and allows us to perceive some peculiarities of late GDL culture.

scholarly journals The early printed Books of Hours in the Grey Collection in Cape Town: evidence of an information revolution

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
F C Steyn
Keyword(s):  
Cape Town ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Information Revolution ◽  
National Library ◽  
Books Of Hours ◽  
Full Page ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
History Of

Printed books of hours, the best-seller of the late medieval trade in books, provide evidence of an information revolution equal to that occasioned by the Internet today. The Grey Collection of the National Library in Cape Town possesses eight books of hours, printed between 1498 and 1530, and they are almost completely unknown. Yet these valuable incunabula, all of them printed on vellum with hand-painted initials, and some of them with hand-painted miniatures, are of importance to anybody interested in books, the history of the book, the dissemination of information, the art of the late 15th to the early 16th centuries and early printing. They are also religious books, and of value to people interested in that discipline. The books are therefore eminently suitable as subjects for transdisciplinary research through which the subjects of history, sociology, art and religion can be drawn together. Two of these books, printed by Thielman Kerver in Paris, are discussed in detail in this article. The books are especially remarkable for their many illustrations that include pictures around the borders of each page as well as full-page illustrations. The pictures are neither metal cuts nor woodcuts, as were usual in that period, but relief prints. The most important part of the texts is a sequence of prayers to the Virgin Mary. Soon after these books were printed , in 1571, Pope Pius V prohibited the use of all existing books of hours.

“STAMPED ON HOT WAX”: GEORGE MEREDITH'S NARRATIVES OF INHERITANCE

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 525-543
Author(s):  
Melissa Shields Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
George Meredith ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Canonical Status ◽  
Psychological Novel

In “The Decay of Lying” (1889), Oscar Wilde's speaker calls Victorian novelist George Meredith “a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father” (Wilde 976). The comment underscores the idealism running through Meredith's strange and understudied novels. Wilde's speaker announces that Meredith “has made himself a romanticist” (976), a self-conscious reactionary against Victorian High Realism who is nonetheless situated deeply within it. Meredith's uneasy relationship with his own time has likely affected recent critical assessments of his work. Though his canonical status surpassed George Eliot's in the 1940s, and although there was a mini-explosion of Meredith scholarship in the 1970s, more recent work has focused on his sonnet sequence, Modern Love, and his psychological novel, The Egoist. However, with the rise of interest in the history of the book, gender and sexuality studies, and Victorian publishing, Meredith's novels are becoming the subject of renewed attention.

scholarly journals Andrew Pettegree. The Book in the Renaissance. Hew Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 421p. ISBN 978-0-300-11009-8. $40

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-55
Author(s):  
Norman D. Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
The Impact

It is ironic, as Pettegree points out in his “A Note on Sources” (353–56), that it has been the enormous growth of information about early printed books available through the Internet that has made this, by far the most significant publication yet on the social history of the book, possible. As outstanding and important as Lucian Febvre and Henry-Jean Martin’s groundbreaking The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1458–1800 (1976) and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) and her subsequent The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983) were, this masterpiece . . .

scholarly journals Of Manuscript Culture in Early Modern Dubrovnik

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lahorka Plejić Poje
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Middle Part ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Printing House

In the article’s introduction, the author points to the history of the book as one of the younger sub-disciplines and to its relevance for literary history. This fact is particularly important for old Dubrovnik where the first printing house was opened only in 1783. In the middle part of the article, certain aspects of manuscript culture in early modern Dubrovnik are studied. The author explains why until the 19th century a large part of the Ragusan literature was circulated in manuscripts and what the advantages of the manuscript compared to the printed book are. The author reminds that manuscripts carried out the function of printed books and indicates that printed books were frequently copied by hand.

scholarly journals Public Archaeology of Church Monuments

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Carly McEvoy
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Public Access ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Funerary Monuments ◽  
The Public ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selective Information ◽  
Church Setting

Church monuments within the parish church can provide a wealth of information to the public about the history of that community as well as broader social themes. However, traditionally, publicity available on monuments can be limited and churches operate disparate levels of public access and engagement. Where such access and information is available there is a tendency to focus on the most elaborate and anthropomorphic styles, such as effigies, with a concentration on who they represent. This article will consider why church monuments may be important to communities, and the impediments the public may face when engaging with church monuments, ranging from practical reasons such as accessibility, to the provision of misinformation, selective information, or the lack of any resources being provided. Finally, the article will consider how information about, and engagement with, funerary monuments within the parish church setting is consistent, well researched, and publicly available via digital and non-digital media.

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