reading more and less
"As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. "
Nicholas Carr
Febvre and Martin
The 50th anniversary of the publication of The Coming of the Book is here. Jim Wells, Curator of the mighty
Wing collection and a wily conversationist at the smokey tables of the Caxton Club realized that new disciplines and new enclaves were emerging.
"The original French edition does not appear to
have been reviewed by a single major American scholarly journal in the
fields of history of literature. It was not even reviewed by the Times
Literary Supplement. The only review of which this author is aware was
written by James Wells of the Newberry Library and published in Library
Quarterly. It was a long and perceptive review of over three pages and
conveyed fully the significance of the work. Wells concluded,
'L'Apparition du livre is a first-rate work in an area all too often
dominated by the second rate. One hopes that some enterprising publisher
will commission an English translation so that it may become more widely
known." It took!" Barry Neavill
"I further noted, "The accessibility in English of the core text of
histoire du livre was an important prerequisite for the emergence of
history of the book as a scholarly field in the United States. But
mainstream scholars in the English-speaking world, if they thought about
book history at all, continued to regard it as a marginal subject of
interest mainly to specialists until the publication of two major works
by American scholars in 1979 attracted widespread attention to the
field." These two works, of course, were Elizabeth Eisenstein's The
Printing Press as an Agent of Change and Robert Darnton's The Business
of Enlightenment." Barry Neavill, LIS, Wayne State
the water is rising
The University of Iowa has a tide line from the floods of 1993 with the river 28 feet above the norm. At the moment we are at 23 feet with at least two more predicted. Will we be swept away? Floods surge to the shores as well as down stream.
Its a feeling that I also have at the mid point in the Obermann seminar on Extreme Materialist Reading of the Medieval Book. This seminar intended to provoke "advanced study" is now over extending my understanding of its own resolution. At the moment I have ten "lessons" but they are acting just like questions.
an Obermann lesson, #8
The great age of a medieval manuscript is fabulous. However the manifestations of great age may have no linear connection except that attributed by the equally fabulous "arrow of time". For example, any antiquarian object has experienced cycles of veneration and neglect both sequential and simultaneous.
A combination of shorter lives and more durable goods would also color the sense of the age of a manuscript in its early existence. Today we expect our own writing during youthful learning to be manifest in different format and by different devices. A medieval scholar could have glossed a manuscript during his earliest learning and during his last months. The materialist reaction to manuscript, across a lifetime, would be distinctively different.
an Obermann lesson, #9
Applied explanations of technological determinism, purely genealogical lineage or similes of bionic evolution or any simple causal tracks are very suspect. So we should pause before invention of an ecology of the artifactual world. Such a life of material culture would be a "second life" entirely populated with simulations.
But it is fun. What if material culture has been transformed from a product of natural ecologies of jungles and mountains into a product from monoculture crop lands or transformed from origins of mystery to origins of automation? What if material culture was once rare but is now a nuisance? What if the artifactual world, like the world of dolphins, has a life of its own?
an Obermann lesson, #10
The bound format is an unnatural state for a medieval manuscript in the same way that a reliquarium is an unnatural state for a relic. The initial binding represented a separate decision and that decision may not have occurred in the period of the production of the manuscript. Likewise very few medieval manuscripts survive in their initial bindings. An improbable and unbroken chain of curatorial affirmations is required for the rare survivals of medieval bindings.
Bindings subsequent to the initial binding of a manuscript have always caused damage to evidence from the period of production including disruptive association of separate manuscript works and outright damage to physical pages and delicate images. The damage is notorious both to the object and to its study. It can consist of re-sewing, fold gluing, hammer rounding and backing, edge trimming and cropping, over pressing, inflexible back linings and, the final insult, a fashionable, ornamental new cover.
Undamaging, protective and sympathetic conservation re-binding structures have been developed for treatment of the most abused medieval manuscripts but they remain exceptional and are infrequently well understood or well crafted. Further development is needed, but the entire precept of the bound format may finally need conscious re-examination particularly in the modern context of digital reproduction.
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