Below is the text from a talk I gave at the Geographies of Desire conference, held at the University of Maryland on April 27-28. Almost everything that I said there is something that I’ve said here before, so faithful readers won’t find much that’s new. But I promised I’d stick it up here, so here it is! If you’re simply looking for the set of links to the resources I mentioned, you can find those on Pinboard. I haven’t included all of my slides here, but you can find those here. I haven’t included all my ad-libbing either, but you would have had to have been there for that.

“Where material book culture meets digital humanities”

Discussions about early modern books and digital tools have tended to focus on one of two responses. One of the first things that people focus on is the amazing access that digital tools have given us to early modern works. Instead of schlepping from library to library across the globe—a series of journeys that many scholars could not easily afford—we can access nearly all extant early modern printed English books, and many continental ones, from our desktops. Thanks to EEBO (Early English Books Online), ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), and Gallica (the digital collection of the Bibliothèque nationale), among others, digital facsimiles are available for us to consult and download entire works from the early modern printed world.

There are limitations, of course. One is the quality of the images. EEBO consists of digital facsimiles not of early books, but of microfilms of early books. As a result, it doesn’t always capture what we might want it to. Here we see an image from EEBO of the second quarto of Hamlet.

opening from a Folger Q2 Hamlet, as in EEBO

You can see one column of text on each page, along with a whole bunch of other junk. [slide] Here’s the same page opening from the Folger’s reproduction of that book:

same opening, same copy, in a high resolution image from the Folger

There’s still ink bleeding through from the other sides of these leaves, but it’s a bit easier to sort out what’s what.

Then there’s this, another image of not-quite visible ink mixed in on the page:

opening from a 1557 Primer, as in EEBO

But this is an instance of red ink not reproducing clearly.

same opening, in a high-resolution image from the Folger

And because the red isn’t visible, you miss in the EEBO copy what’s really a great mistake on this page, the moment where the phrase “of the five corporall joyes of our Ladie” is really a correction for the mistaken “joyes of our lorde.”

never mix up your lord and your lady

My favorite EEBO moment, however, is this one: the title page of a 1612 elegy mourning the death of Prince Henry.

the title page of STC 23576 as in EEBO

This is how the image appears in EEBO; but this is how the image appears in their reproduction of the second state of this edition.

title page of STC 23577 as in EEBO

Do you see what happened? It’s a mourning book, and it was printed on pages bordered in black and sometimes entirely in black, with a xylographic title page, that is, a title page in which white lettering appears on a black background. But when the microfilm was being processed, someone clearly didn’t believe what they were seeing and they assumed it was a mistake, that it should be black on white, and so they reversed the negative, producing a facsimile of a book that doesn’t exist.

There are resources that provide higher quality digital facsimiles of early modern books and that, unlike EEBO and ECCO, are free to use. The Folger has digitized many works in their entirety, including all copies of the pre-1642 Shakespeare quartos and a couple of first folios. The British Library has digitized some of their collection, cover-to-cover, as have many other libraries, including that of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, University of Oklahoma, and the Bavarian State Library. The English Broadside Ballad Archive now includes some high-resolution color facsimiles, and the Universal Short-Title Catalogue (covering all books printed in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries) includes links to digital copies from many European libraries.

Digital tools have, without a doubt, increased our access to facsimiles of early modern books. If I can sit in my study in Rockville and study Erasmus’s 1516 translation of the New Testament by looking at a copy currently held in Basel, that’s a win.

If one dominant way of thinking about digital tools and early modern books is in terms of access, another has been in terms of text. Access is about text of course—what we’re gaining access to is the ability to read texts. But there are also digital tools that don’t simply read texts, they distant read them. EEBO-TCP can make research a bit easier if you’re interested, say, in sassafras and want to find instances of it being discussed. In the right hands, you can do much more interesting types of computational analysis that can reveal things that would be difficult to see otherwise. Recent work by Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope, for instance, reveals that genre is marked not only in terms of plot, but also linguistically at the sentence level—histories and comedies and tragedies are genres that are grammatically inflected.  That seems like a win to me, too.

These tools that I’ve just described rely on the ways we have always read books, albeit with increases in distance or speed (you can read a book held at the Folger Shakespeare Library from your study in Gdansk; you can analyze the texts of the entire Shakespeare corpus in a matter of minutes rather than years). I want to take this moment to wonder what new possibilities we might imagine. How might we use digital tools to look at texts differently? How might we use digital tools to represent texts differently? Can we move away from reading text to studying the physical characteristics of text, characteristics that can reveal important information about the content of the text and the cultural and historical creation of the artifact?

The multi-spectral imaging done by the Lazarus team of the Archimedes Palimpsest gives a hint of how digital tools might let us see things that would otherwise go unseen. The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 13th-century Byzantine prayerbook written over a 10th-century manuscript containing writings of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, as well as multiple other works from various periods. Using multi-spectral imaging, along with other tools, the team was able to recover visual access to much of the earliest writings in the book. Google took the project’s dataset and made a “Google book” of the earliest state of the codex resulting in a digital reproduction of a book that exists, but is not visible to us just by looking at it.

One recent paper about the use of densitometers to study levels of dirt on the pages of medieval manuscripts suggests that we can learn about book usage through analyzing how and where dirt is distributed across a book. It might seem obvious that pages that are used more often will be dirtier, and that is in part what the author found, but the use of the densitometer revealed that it’s more complicated than we can always assess with the naked eye. The paper’s author, Kathryn Rudy, points out, for example, that she had assumed that two different patterns of dirt on an opening came from two different users, but the densitometer’s analysis suggested that the patterns were similar enough that they were likely to have been made by the same person—perhaps they held the book in different ways suitable for different prayers. The analysis also pointed out that even books that retain visible marks might have been cleaned by modern owners to such a degree that the dirt is no longer viable as an analytical tool, something that might help us think about the changes books undergo during modern ownership.

Studying the distribution of dirt is just the beginning of how we might begin to use technology to help us understand books in new ways. A colleague in Antwerp reports that German books held in Belgium smell different than German books held in Germany. The cause lies in how the paper was treated: paper needs to be treated with sizing agents so that it handles ink properly (instead of absorbing ink, ink sits on the surface of the paper and dries there, producing crisp and legible marks). His speculation is that books in Germany were sized in a multi-stage sequence, with the last step taking place after the book had been printed, perhaps as part of the binding process. Books that remained in Germany after they were printed went through this final process; books that were shipped outside of Germany seem to have missed that final stage, resulting in a noticeably different smell because of their different chemical properties. If this is the case, the smell of early German books can help scholars understand not only the physical acts of making paper and books, but can help us trace the circulation of early printed works. Using computers to analyze the smells of books and software to map those smells could help researchers learn how books were made and sold and used.

We could also use new technologies to explore other the other senses we use when handling books. The feel of paper (or parchment) is another element of books that has more to offer than nostalgic fetishizing: the thickness, color, and pliability of paper can tell us about the costs of production, in part, but also give insight into the experience of using the book and its intended audience. How might the characteristics of feel be represented in digital media? Could a 3D printer replicate samples of different paper qualities? Could we project back from a paper’s physical characteristics today to how it might have appeared and felt when it was made?

The three-dimensional aspects of paper extend beyond what can be felt by human touch. The process of making books in the letterpress period—and the process of writing on leaves of paper and parchment in all periods—is a process of putting pressure on the paper, leaving behind an indentation on one side of the leaf and an extrusion on the other side of the leaf. In most cases, the indentations are visible because the instrument causing them (type, woodblock, stylus) left behind ink markings. In other cases, there are indentations without ink, sometimes caused when two sheets of paper are accidentally run through the press, sometimes left behind when the bearing type used to even out the blank spaces in a page leaves behind blind impressions.

Folger STC 7043.2, leaf F1v under raking light (click to see this image compared to one under normal light)

There are also the indentations left behind during the papermaking process from the wires and frames used in the forms. Once we start thinking in these terms, we can find more topographical variations on leaves of paper: wormholes, dog-eared corners, holes left from stitches sewing gatherings and the binding together, plate marks from engravings. What might we learn from visualizing books not as texts to be read but as topographical maps?

Another option would be to use digital tools to visualize the context of books, to encounter them not in isolated codices, but in libraries. This 360° panoramic view inside the Strahov Monastery’s Library in Prague lets you see not only the entire room, but to zoom in to see the titles of the books on the shelves. This is primarily a pretty picture, but imagine if this technology was married to something that let you look at catalog records of the books that you’re seeing, or to switch from catalog records to a view of a book on a shelf.

screenshot of a zoomed out view of Strahov Library

titles on books at the far end of the library

If we could use digital tools to estrange ourselves from our books, to defamiliarize what we think we know, we might learn something new about how they were made and how they are used. People keep pointing out to me that we are in the incunabula age of digital texts. We are. And that’s what makes it so exciting.

Mike Widener (Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law Library) wrote a great post about his practice of adding dealers’ descriptions to catalog records of rare books; Jeremy Dibbell included it in his link roundup; John Overholt tweeted about it; and then the conversation began. I’ve storyfied it and embedded it below (you can also go straight to Storify to see it). I wanted to capture the conversation, but we all also wanted to hear a wider range of responses and have a longer conversation about the value and potential pitfalls of this practice. It’ll end up on the EXLIBRIS-L listserv as well, so I’ll include a link to all that when it happens (thanks, John!) but in the meantime, read and comment:

This week's #fridayreads and that of the foreseeable future is Infinite Jest. First time reading; loving it.

5 August 2011 6:58 am via Osfoora HDReplyRetweetFavorite

@wynkenhimself

Sarah Werner

As those of you who follow me on twitter might recall, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for some time now (since the beginning of last August, to be precise).

My #fridayreads is and will continue to be Infinite Jest. I'm still loving it, but I know if I interrupt it, I'll never pick it up again!

12 August 2011 11:55 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@wynkenhimself

Sarah Werner

For all of my nervousness that I might not finish it,¹ I’ve made good steady progress and—much more importantly—I’ve really enjoyed the book. I love DFW’s writing and the characters and the loopy plot. I find that I think about them all when I’m not reading the book; they live in the back of my head and I carry them around with me as I go about my life. That’s the most I could ever ask for in a book. And few books come close to delivering that.²

Never you fear: my #fridayreads is still Infinite Jest. I'm on page 154, or 13% of the way through, according to Kindle.

2 September 2011 4:19 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@wynkenhimself

Sarah Werner

I’ve also been loving the process of reading Infinite Jest and the ways in which it has made me reshape my reading habits. In part this is about the way DFW writes and the way the book is constructed. But it’s also about reading it on my iPad and the ways in which that technology shapes reading practices.

Hey, my #fridayreads is still Infinite Jest! up to page 282 and the whole feeling of it has shifted. still enjoying it too!

7 October 2011 2:59 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@wynkenhimself

Sarah Werner

Not long after I first tweeted that I was reading Infinite Jest for the first time, my friend Amanda pointed me to Infinite Summer, the group project (with accompanying website) to read the entirety of IJ over the summer of 2009. I poked around the website a bit and came across “How to Read Infinite Jest”. Some of the advice was spot-on:

Read the endnotes: Please. They are not boring bibliographic details, but rather an integral part of the text. And the bouncing back-and-forth is a feature, not a bug.

But other pieces of advice just made me anxious:

Use bookmarks: Yes “bookmarks”, plural: one for the main text and one for the endnotes. Doing so will save you hours of searching, and the aggravation of losing your place several times an hour.

Keep notes: As if lugging around a book the size of a 2 br. 1¼ bath apartment isn’t enough, you may want to carry a notebook as well. You won’t always have the requisite Oxford English Dictionary within arm’s reach, you know.

I wanted to read a novel, I didn’t want to study for an exam. I know that different people read for pleasure in different ways. But the idea of using a slew of bookmarks, of keeping notes, of relying on a reader’s guide to get me through the book sounded like I would spend more time worrying about keeping track of everything than enjoying what I was reading.

By this point, I’d already read through the first chunk of the novel and had given myself over to not knowing what was going on. The opening section is amazing and compelling but also baffling. There’s a character who seems to be on some sort of school interview and seems to be some sort of sports star and is surrounded by characters whose exact relationship to him aren’t clear and who are fearful of leaving him alone with the recruiters. It’s beautifully written and I just gave myself over to it, even as I wasn’t sure what was going on. And the beginning of the novel is one vignette like that after another. There are amazing characters and incredible scenarios, but there’s not a clear sense of plot or of connection between the vignettes. I let myself roll through it and enjoy it without worrying about whether or not I was following every nuance of plot.

My #fridayreads is Infinite Jest; just made it through that momentous note 110. Totally fabulous!

14 October 2011 3:05 pm via Silver BirdReplyRetweetFavorite

@wynkenhimself

Sarah Werner

So that was the mood I started off in as a reader. I gave myself over to Infinite Jest and put myself in David Foster Wallace’s hands. That is not the way I’m always able to read. In fact, I haven’t been able to read that way in a long time. The last time I wrote about reading ebooks,³ I mentioned that I was reading a lot of thrillers because they weren’t too demanding of me. That I had shied away from books that asked for a commitment since my father died. The change in my reading habits was one of the biggest ways his death marked me. I’d been a voracious reader from the time I was little. In my adult years, a lot of my appetite focused on nineteenth-century novels, rather than contemporary ones. Those are some big novels you can sink your teeth into, and I sank into them.⁴ It’s been discombobulating not to be that sort of reader these last five years.

And yes my #fridayreads is still Infinite Jest. I'm 1/3 of the way through. I'm still enjoying it. And I will be reading it forever. Yay?

18 November 2011 2:52 pm via Silver BirdReplyRetweetFavorite

@wynkenhimself

Sarah Werner

Infinite Jest asked that I give myself to it and I did. If I hadn’t been able to, I don’t think I would have been able to continue with it.

I read the book this way because I can and because this is how I respond to DFW’s writing. But I read the book this way, too, because this is how the iPad asks me to read it. One of the great things about reading big, huge books on it is that you’re not necessarily aware that they are big, huge books. This is what I said about The Passage and this is what I say about Infinite Jest. It’d be awfully hard to hold a 1000-page novel for any length of time, even harder when you’re the sort of reader, as I am, who likes to read at night, in bed, with the lights off and her glasses off. I’ll prop my slight iPad on my chest, but a heavy book? I’d rather not.

I haven't mentioned it in a while, but my #fridayreads is still Infinite Jest. I'm half-way through. Another 6 months and I'll be done!

3 February 2012 11:37 am via Silver BirdReplyRetweetFavorite

@wynkenhimself

Sarah Werner

Another great thing about the iPad Kindle app is that it turns endnotes into hyperlinks. And being able to navigate the notes, as we all know, is key. Here’s what I mean. This is a screenshot of a page in Infinite Jest.⁵ It  happens to be the location I’ve bookmarked because this is as far as I’ve gotten right this very moment:^6,7,8

my current location in Infinite Jest; image is embiggenable

See that blue “322″ in the lower quarter of the screen? That’s note 322. Click on it, and you’re taken to this screen:

note 322

There you go! The text of note 322, easy-peasy. Click on “back to text” and you’ll go back to exactly where you were:

exactly where you were, right?

And then you can pick up reading the main text just as if nothing had happened, except that you’re actually in a different location because there are no pages here, just codes. The app’s preference for bringing me back to the next word right after the note means that I trained myself to read a few lines beyond the linked note so that I wouldn’t be so lost when I got back to a screen that started in the middle of a sentence.

In any case, these hyperlinks make the book easy to read. No need for multiple bookmarks—the book takes you right where you need to go! But it also means that you really do need to give yourself over to the book and to follow its lead, because when you’re in the middle of a note, there’s no clues to bring you back to where you were. Here’s another screenshot of another passage in the book with a hyperlinked note in the middle of it:

another screen, another note

This screenshot shows more what the experience of reading the book is like: there’s no black bar at the top, there’s no location slider at the bottom. It’s just a screen of text. (To get the location indicator to show up, you need to tap in the middle of the screen; tap, it brings up the location for a moment, and then it fades away again.) Tap on the note and you’re brought to the note screen:

starting to read note 321

There you are, with the note marked “321.” right at the top. So far, so clear. And what happens when you continue reading note 321? After a few screens, you find yourself here:

still reading note 321

But imagine that the note continues and continues and continues, as some of them are wont to do. Where are you? Are you reading text or note? How do you know?

text or note?

note or text?

They look exactly the same, don’t they? So how do you know? Especially if the note’s been going on and on, and there’s dialogue, and plot, and words and words and words.

At some point when I was reading a long note—I think, given the tweet I sent out, it must have been note 110—I actually became so confused by how long it was going on that I wondered if there’d been some sort of coding error and I was actually in the main text. And then when the notes to the notes started appearing⁹ I became even more disoriented and even though the location indicator showed that I was all the way in the back of the “book”, since there was no “book” for me to flip pages through, that didn’t really convince me that I wasn’t in the main text. And since I hadn’t bookmarked the page I had been reading, the page with the link to the note I was now wandering through, there wasn’t any way for me to go back to where I was. I could only go forward, reading and reading until I got to the safety of “return to text.”

After that point, every time I saw a numbered note, I wondered if it was going to be a short one or if it was going to take me down some rabbit hole. But I made a conscious decision not to care. I refused to bookmark the page I was currently reading. I gave in to the book, went where it led me, and trusted I would make my way back to where I was and that DFW would give me the help and pleasure I needed to keep going. I ceded all my authority to Infinite Jest.

But my #fridayreads true love is still Infinite Jest. I'm on page 719! Only 260 pages to go!

16 March 2012 11:24 am via Silver BirdReplyRetweetFavorite

@wynkenhimself

Sarah Werner

I’m normally a pretty bossy reader. Resistant, even.¹⁰ Even a book that I love I talk back to. It’s part of how I understand what it means to read. It’s how I make sense of what I do. It’s the interpretive community I belong to.¹¹ So for me to give myself over to Infinite Jest, to put myself in David Foster Wallace’s hands, that’s a shift. I don’t know that I’ll read other books that way. I suspect I wouldn’t want this to become my new default in reading. But I am loving the experience of it. And I don’t think I would have had the same experience if I weren’t reading it on my iPad.

Here’s where I am in IJ right now. It’s where I left off reading last night, so it really does look exactly as it does when I’m reading it. I’m in the middle of a note. I don’t know which one, I don’t know how close I am to the end. But I’m really, really close. I’m not sure I’m going to know when I’m at the end except for when it stops, given that I can’t see the location bar as I’m reading and even if I did, I don’t know the starting location of the notes and so don’t know how close I am to the end of the main text. I do know that I’m going to finish this book and that I’m going to miss it when it’s done. I might go back to the beginning again to see how different it is now that I know who everyone is and what is happening. I might not. I don’t think it matters. What matters is that this book taught be to read in a new way and I’m grateful for that.

thank you, David Foster Wallace

1. I got a bunch of responses to that tweet from people who said they never made it through the book, which confirmed my sense that this was a real danger.
2. Okay, some do: Jane Eyre does for me, and, unexpectedly, The Passage, which I didn’t particularly like as I was reading it, even as I couldn’t put it down, but which continues to stay with me in its vision of vampirism and the apocalypse and the power of blood. Because really, when you think about it, blood is amazing amazing stuff. No wonder we mythologize it. Also, for staying power, The Phantom Tollbooth, and not only for its brilliant Subtraction Stew, but the synaesthesia of tasty letters; Paradise Lost, which is the whole reason I ended up in early modern studies; and moments of the Torah. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac? I will never stop wrestling with that.
3. I notice that I was spelling ebooks with a hyphen and now I’m not.
4. I lived in London for a couple of years when I was finishing grad school and the Victorianness of that city (or at least my geography of that city, which took me on circuits from Highgate to the Strand and Russell Court) made those works the ideal choice, along with the fact that I had a 45-minute commute twice a day and no television license and so plenty of time to read, as well as the lovely fact that I could buy cheap editions of a nearly endless supply of those books.
5. I say “page” but of course this isn’t a page, it’s a screen. Whatever.
6. Ok, the astute of you will notice that the screenshot was taken at 10:09 am and it’s clearly not 10:09 am when you’re reading this, and I just said that I read in bed at night which, all things considered, is probably not at 10:09 am. It’s true. I took this screenshot the morning after I’d bookmarked it, and that’s actually a couple of days before I finished this post, so who knows where I am in the book right now at this very moment.
7. Also, if you’re really clever, you’ll think to yourself, “Didn’t she say that she reads with her glasses off? And didn’t she say in that other post that she enlarges the font to some ginormous size?” And then you’ll know that this doesn’t look exactly like what it looks like when I’m reading, because when I’m reading the font is indeed much much larger and I like to have the text be grey on a black background because otherwise it’s just too bright in a darkened room. But that’s an awfully hard screenshot to read on a blog post, so I rejiggered the whole thing for your benefit.
8. You’re welcome.
9. The notes for the notes are indicated with superscript letters rather than numbers.
10. Thank you, Judith Fetterley, from the bottom of my heart.
11. I suppose I should say thank you to Stanley Fish, too, even though he’s been such a pain in the ahem in many ways in recent years.

Hi all—I’ve been so busy writing elsewhere that I haven’t kept up here. *sorry* But some links to some of that book history goodness in case you missed out:

At The Collation I wrote a whole lot of posts, but there are two recent ones that are exactly the sort of thing I would have written about here if I wasn’t trying to shore up content over there. The first is “Learning from mistakes,” about how much I love finding printer’s errors in early books and what we can learn from their mistakes. Check out the comments, please, to help me understand what’s going on in the 1641 pamphlet that I end the post with and why Wing drives me nuts! The second post, just up a few hours ago, is “Correcting mistakes,” and it picks up from the previous post to consider how early modern printers tried to fix their errors and how readers didn’t always heed their corrections. Don’t tell those Collation people (especially that cranky editor SW) but I think there’s going to be a third in the series looking more closely at how readers respond to errors in books.

I also put together a course site for my Folger seminar on “Books and Early Modern Culture.” The syllabus is there, including the assignment descriptions. Only class members can access the readings themselves, but there’s also a page listing a whole lot of open-access resources for studying early modern book history. I even put together a list of all the books my students have studied over the years, and wrote about that collection at The Collation as well as a post about the experience of two students working with different copies of the same book.

Arnold Werner, 1938-2007 (self-portrait)

When I was a kid, my father wrote a weekly column for the student newspaper at Michigan State University, where he taught. “The Doctor’s Bag” ran in the State News for six years, from 1969 through 1975. It was eventually syndicated and ran in 50 campus newspapers, with a circulation of around 600,000. What this means, in part, is that when I was little people used to ask me if my dad was “The Doctor’s Bag.” (That’s how they used to phrase it: Is your dad “The Doctor’s Bag?”) I had no idea what the column was; I just knew he wrote it. At some point, I gathered that it was a medical advice column answering students’ questions about all things health related. It wasn’t until I was an adult and Dad sent me copies of the entire run of the column that I sat down and read them.

I can hardly begin to describe how much I love those columns. I love them for what they reveal about college life in America in the early 70s. The questions students asked! They’re what you imagine—a lot of questions about sex and drinking and drugs. But there’s more to them, too, like the struggle of living in a dorm that has more people than your home town. The overwhelming impression you get, reading them all through, is how much they didn’t know, and the pent-up longing to ask someone who will take them seriously and give them real answers. I suppose if I’d read them as a kid I would have been horrified that my dad talked about this stuff, but you know, he was a psychiatrist, so it’s hardly like I didn’t expect him to talk about everything under the sun. As an adult, I’m impressed with how deftly he answers their questions.¹

column printed in the 1975 SUNY Albany student paper

letter from 1970 printed in the Stony Brook Statesman

I love them, too, for the window into my father’s personality. They are both funny and earnest, just like he was. They lecture sometimes and joke at other times.

letter from 1972 Doctor's Bag

And they’re amazing for the controversies they raised. Honestly, reading the columns now, it’s hard to appreciate what the scandal is. But people wrote letters in complaining about them. The head of Albany’s Student Health Services complained:

In June 1970, a couple of Michigan legislators attacked his columns on the House and Senate floors for being “almost indescribable filth” and were outraged that they were being published at a public university. Think of the taxpayers! In 1973 the editor of a student paper was suspended for having printed both disrespectful pictures of Santa Claus and for running my dad’s column. Apparently a mother of a student once sent a letter to my dad chiding him to “think of your own mother before you put these letters in;” little did she realize that Dad did think of his mother and often mailed his column to my grandparents. (They were only disapproving when he appeared in the National Enquirer.)

Today is the 5th anniversary of my father’s death. I miss him. I’ve written before, glancingly, about him in a post on the intangibles of books. I have some of his childhood books, complete with his name carefully inscribed on the inside cover, and I cherish those books, even when I have no desire to read them. Those books are a connection to him. And when someone you love is gone, you need to find connections.

inscription on inside cover

The last years of his life were not good ones. He had cerebral palsy, and while it didn’t really interfere with the bulk of his life—he was an avid biker, faithfully doing the DALMAC ride from Lansing to Mackinaw, even once as 4 days of 100-mile trips—it made his old age miserable. Well, I say old age, but I really mean his 60s, which is not very old. He was only 68 when he did, both much too young and after too much pain and suffering.

excerpt from Parade magazine, 1974

I am glad his death has receded enough that I can remember the joy of his life rather than the pain of its end. And I am glad that there are traces of some of that life still online. The digitization of college newspapers means that some of my dad’s columns are available for all to see, along with this Parade magazine piece about the youth of 1974, and, weirdly, a 1996 Weekly World News piece on “how to blow your stack without looking like a butthead!” I’m glad, too, that you can find some of the results that came out of a workshop on cerebral palsy and aging that we held in his honor. There’s a piece from Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology and, if that’s too long, a slide set on the subject.²

There’s much of his life that isn’t out there—his photography, his hobby of rebuilding old cars, his bicycling, his woodworking. And his other psychiatric work, the stuff that got published in academic journals, is locked up in their hands (though your library might have a copy of the psychiatric glossary he edited for the APA in 1980). His columns, too, are probably still owned by the syndication company (someday I’ll retrieve his papers from the lawyers and see what his contract stipulated). The bits and pieces of the online traces of my dad add up to someone who is kind of him, but who isn’t all of him. And there was so much of him when he was alive.

It wasn’t until he died that I began to appreciate the staggering challenges of all the stuff we leave behind. There are his newspaper columns, thousands of photographs and negatives, the records of his life. Dad was a pack rat, which makes the task more challenging. And he was enough of a public figure that it’s hard to resist the feeling that someone somewhere might find this material interesting. Not for what it says about him, but for what it says about the times he lived through. Those Doctor’s Bag columns are full of nuggets. At some point, I’ll do something about that. If I was a researcher in the history of medicine, or the culture of mid-twentieth-century America, I’d find useful material in there. And there’s more, too. Maybe someone would want to know this story: My dad volunteered for the Vietnam War after he’d completed med school, but the army wouldn’t take him because of the cerebral palsy—he limped and certainly couldn’t run. And what happened a few years later? They tried to draft him, but he said no: you didn’t want me then, you can’t have me now. I have all that documentation, because that’s the kind of thing he saved. What do I do with that? Is that just family history, or does that mean something to someone else?

I don’t know what the answers to those questions are. Maybe I’ll just hang onto everything until it’s my kids’ turn to deal with it. Is that what happened to all those old books we have in libraries? The immediate family couldn’t bear to get rid of them and so they hung onto them until finally they because old enough to be wanted beyond the family? Maybe. At some point, I suppose, these things either won’t mean anything to anyone, and they can be tossed, or they will be become interesting through sheer survival through the ages. Maybe it doesn’t matter which.

I’m grateful that he wrote these columns and that I can still read them. I’m grateful that he had enough pride in them to save them and to pass them on to his daughters. I’m grateful that he loved us as much as he did, and that when it was time for him to die, that we were there by his side. He taught me how to write, how to use a camera, develop negatives, and print film. We argued about my curfew, butted heads because we were both stubborn, and watched Battleship Potemkin together. I loved him dearly. And I miss him a little bit less when I come across the traces of his life that have been scattered across the world.

2nd row, 2nd from the right

1. These are crappy images: screenshots of pdfs of microfilmed papers. Sorry.
2. This is a bit of an aside, but the cerebral palsy is a bit of a touchy subject for me: most research has focused on kids with CP, but you know what happens to a lot of those kids? They grow up, and then you’ve got adults with CP. As my dad grew older, his mobility decreased and the pain increased. There was no clear research to give him answers as to why this was happening, and the big CP foundation was not particularly interested in his overtures. He was just alone in his pain with no clear sense that any lessons were going to be drawn from it. So if you’re a CP researcher, or someone who has CP, or someone who knows someone who has CP, think about this and support researching into aging and CP.

It’s been much longer since I’ve written a proper post here than I meant for it to be. In my defense, I’ve been pretty busy over at The Collation, running the show and writing my own contributions. There’s lots of good stuff over there, including a whole world of manuscript exploration that I don’t do here; check out Heather Wolfe’s and Nadia Seiler’s interesting posts if you like that sort of thing (and if you don’t think you do, browse anyway and you’ll learn that you do!). And if you’re looking for advice on using Folger digital resources, like searching Luna and the power of permanent URLs and Mike Poston’s new tool, Impos[i]tor, the tooltips series is for you.

In any case, this post isn’t meant to be an advertisement, but to do a pretty picture penance: sharing some great book images, even if I don’t have the time to talk in any detail about them.¹ So . . .

Voila! This is a lovely blue and red penwork initial letter from an edition of Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum libri IV, printed in Basel in 1482. (Here’s your catalog record; all photos, through cell-phone crapola, can be clicked and embiggened.)

Here’s another initial, where you can see how delicate the penwork is. I love how the details drape down the column of text:

Not all the initials in the text are so fancy. Here’s a nice, albeit plain, red one:

But that’s not the most interesting detail in this photo. Look again. And then look at this one:

And this one:

You know what I’m talking about, right? They’re the impressions left behind by the finding tabs that were once there! If you look again at the three photos, you can see how they line up, each new section marked slightly below the previous one, so that the tabs stick out, all easy to find and to use to jump to the beginning of a section. Here’s a detail from the first tab:

And here’s the verso of that leaf:

You all know how I like it when I see details of physical features of books that are normally hidden:

Because the front board is loose, you can see some of the knots of the sewing structure holding the binding and the book together.

And what else do I love? Details that show something about the printing process:

At first glance, that looks simply like ink bleeding through from the other side of the leaf. But did you notice any bleedthrough on any of the other pages? That’s some heavy-duty paper. No, that isn’t bleedthrough, it’s offset! In the words of John Carter, offset is

The accidental transfer of ink from a printed page or illustration to an adjacent page. This may be caused either from the sheets having been folded, or the book bound, before the ink was properly dry, or from the book being subsequently exposed to damp. Offset from engraved or other plates on to text, and from text on to plates, is commoner, and also much more disfiguring, than offset from text on to text. Text offset occasionally provides valuable bibliographical evidence, since it usually derives from the very earliest stage in the assembly of the printed sheets into a book. And some of the neatest deductions have been made from the offset, not from one page to another of an individual copy, but from the offset on a page of one book from printed sheets belonging to another which happened to be stacked with it at the printer’s.

So there you go, a whole bunch of my favorite things, all in one book!

1. Ok, so this isn’t really penance, given how much fun it is for me to do this, but I couldn’t resist the alliteration.

Taking inspiration from Mark Sample’s compilation of Digital Humanities sessions at the 2012 Modern Language Association convention, I’ve compiled a list of book history sessions. My method of madness was to skim the session titles and descriptions and note those that seemed to focus on bibliography, print culture, or textual scholarship. I came up with 70 sessions, including my own roundtable. That seemed like too many to be of interest to many of you, so rather than fill your feed, I put together a separate page listing them all. Check out the offerings and let me know if I’ve missed any. You can browse the entire program and, if you’re an MLA member, create your own personalized schedule of sessions you want to visit (it’s a pretty nice set-up, and yet another way in which the MLA does us proud as our scholarly organization).

As a side note, there are not as many jokey and punning titles as there used to be, once upon a time, which I suppose is a good thing. I like a good pun, but enough’s enough. There were, however, entirely too many titles that gave you no idea what a panel was about, not even a general period or theoretical approach. The best title session, without a doubt, is session 29, “Alexander Pope!” Yup. You read that right. “Alexander Pope!” (It also looks like an interesting discussion and format, so kudos to its organizers. If I didn’t have a meeting scheduled for that time, I would definitely go.)

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, based on her 1842 treatise on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine; Ada Lovelace Day began in 2009 as a way of increasing the profile of women in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math (commonly referred to as STEM fields).

I’m not in a STEM field (though I’m the almuna of a college that prides itself on turning out huge numbers of women who are). But you know who we could see as being early STEM pioneers? Printers. Early modern printers were using a new technology that had a radical impact on their world.¹ And you know who we find in printing in early modern London? Women.

Here’s a fun thing to try: search the ESTC‘s publisher field for “widow.” There’s 352 results! Now trying searching for “Elizabeth”: 405 results! Jane? 112!

I do an exercise with my students on using the Stationers’ Register and during the course of tracing one book’s passage through the Register, we come across three different women who printed or published the book. It’s sort of an accident that that’s the book we work with it, but it’s a really effective exercise. My students are always shocked that there are women working as printers in this period. But why is it so shocking?

I suspect that it is, in part, because we have become so used to thinking about the early modern period as being repressive for women. Chaste, silent, and obedient. But that’s an assumption that blinds us to the lives of actual women in early modern England. Women might have been supposed to pass from father’s household to husband’s without ever being subjects in their own right. But if you look at the records, you find women owning property and conducting business. Not just one or two, but handfuls of women. I’m not going to claim that the opposite of “chaste, silent, obedient” is true—women were not by any means empowered or enfranchised—but our blind spots shouldn’t mean that we don’t reconsider our assumptions when we start to see what we’ve been missing. How many of the unnamed printers in imprints are women?

I don’t know very much about the history of women printers in this period, or about female labor, but there’s a book coming out next year that should help me get a better sense of the range of activities: Helen Smith’s “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. If you can’t wait that long, you can check out her article in TEXT on the subject.² And there are a couple of sites out there to start filling in some gaps: a blog post about the early American printer Dinah Nuthead and an exhibition from the University of Illinois library. The more traces of this history I find, the more I want to learn!

And it matters that we learn these things. It matters that we understand the past as a variegated and nuanced time in part because it enables us to see our own time that way. It matters that we remember Ada Lovelace and Rosalind Crick Franklin and Elizabeth Allde because it matters that they contributed to our knowledge of the world and that we can contribute too.

UPDATE: What a horrible thing to mistype Rosalind Franklin’s name in a post about women pioneers in STEM fields and to give her Francis Crick’s last name instead! I’ve fixed it now. Go read about her and then go read Kate Beaton’s comic in Hark, a vagrant.

1. Please don’t send me comments about how the printing press didn’t cause any revolutions. No one thing changes the world in isolation. But moveable type was fucking huge.
2. “‘Print[ing] your royal father off’: early modern female stationers and the gendering of the British book trades”, TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, 15 (2003), 163-86.

That’s right: the program for the MLA 2012 convention is now online! Right up there on the first day, Thursday, January 5th, is the roundtable I organized, “Old books and new tools.” A description of the session is up on my site; the listing in the program can be found here.

screensaver from the newest generation Kindle

Do you ever get the feeling that something’s just not quite right, but you’re not sure what it is¿

If you’re curious what the other screensavers are on the new Kindle, scroll through the twenty I snapped. They’ve clearly moved on from the book illustrations and author themes they had in earlier models to writing implements. I’m not sure what larger message I’d want to draw from this, but they’re mostly very pretty. I just wish those turned letters didn’t bother me so much. Is it artsy or just wrong? I’m all for artsiness and playfulness. But I can’t help suspect it’s just wrong, or at least, less about art and more about a fear that people will fail to recognize the “kindle” embedded in the picture.