typesetting clemens' copy
It is interesting that Sam Clemens, who himself set "acres" of type at the case, should turn around and invent one of the most troublesome challenges for future compositors. Sam had a very quick ear for variants, affectations and habits of conversation and he is now is noted for his renditions of vernacular speech. In these renditions any word could be spelled differently compelling the compositor to an unaccustomed, attentive selection of each letter.
To this day compositors must master the clever attentive state of mind that is needed to set Clemens renditions of vernacular speech. Subsequently Mark Twain became known as the literary inventor of the discipline of vernacular speech notation. Read the
Explanatory that he provides at the very beginning of Huckleberry Finn.
"EXPLANATORY
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
THE AUTHOR."
tech support
Here at
Iowa Book Works we run one of the few 24/7 Ethiopic binding tech support desks. So we really have enjoyed the anniversary of the first year of the popular Utube codex format support
skit.
Surfers are still discovering this for the first time and so they marvel at its implications all over again. The implications are many including the concluding one that the Help should not be in the same format as the reading device.
wooden board e-book
The evolution of the wooden board codex binding era culminated with the gymnastic, elegant anatomy of mid 16th century. This evolution had begun more than eight centuries earlier and had absorbed transitions from papyrus, to parchment, to paper. The wooden board binding technology had also absorbed the transition from manuscript to print.
My point being that no one appears to recognize that the purpose of the contemporary hand-held devices or e-books is not to read them. Everyone is trying to read the things and trying to access books on them.
The purpose of the devices is to learn their navigation, or in the idiom of the wooden board anatomy, to learn their book action. Yesterday I had the most interesting Kindle conversation with a librarian from Senegal although we did not share a common text language.
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