|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Antiques & collectables > Books, manuscripts, ephemera & printed matter
Managing Readers explores the fascinating interchange between text
and margin, authorship and readership in early modern England.
Printed marginalia did more than any other material feature of book
production in the period between 1540 and 1700 to shape the
experience of reading. William W. E. Slights considers overlooked
evidence of the ways that early modern readers were instructed to
process information, to contest opinions, and to make themselves
into fully responsive consumers of texts.
The recent revolution in the protocols of reading brought on by
computer technology has forced questions about the nature of
book-based knowledge in our global culture. Managing Readers traces
changes in the protocols of annotation and directed reading--from
medieval religious manuscripts and Renaissance handbooks for
explorers, rhetoricians, and politicians to the elegant clear-text
editions of the Enlightenment and the hypertexts of our own time.
Developing such concepts as textual authority, generic difference,
and reader-response, Slights demonstrates that printed marginalia
were used to confirm the authority of the text and to undermine it,
to supplement "dark" passages, and to colonize strategic
hermeneutic spaces. The book contains twenty-two illustrations of
pages from rare-book archives that make immediately clear how
distinctive the management of the reading experience was during the
first century-and-a-half of printing in England.
William W. E. Slights is Professor of English, University of
Saskatchewan. He is also author of "Ben Jonson and the Art of
Secrecy,"
Influential scholars from Britain and North America discuss future
directions in rapidly expanding field of manuscript study. The
study of manuscripts is one of the most active areas of current
research in medieval studies: manuscripts are the basic primary
material evidence for literary scholars, historians and
art-historians alike, and there has been an explosion of interest
over the past twenty years. Manuscript study has developed
enormously: codices are no longer treated as inert witnesses to a
culture whose character has already been determined by the modern
scholar, but are active participants in a process of exploration
and discovery. The articles collected here discuss the future of
this process and vital questions about manuscript study for
tomorrow's explorers. They deal with codicology and book
production, with textual criticism, with the material structure of
the medieval book, with the relation of manuscripts to literary
culture, to social history and to the medieval theatre, and with
the importance to manuscript study of the emerging technology of
computerised digitisation and hypertext display. The essays provide
an end-of-millennium perspective on the most vigorous developments
in a rapidly expanding field of study. Contributors: A.I. Doyle, C.
David Benson, Martha W. Driver, J.P. Gumbert, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton,
Linne R. Mooney, Eckehard Simon, Alison Stones, John Thompson.
DEREK PEARSALL is former Professor and Co-Director of the Centre
for Medieval Studies, York, and Professor of English at Harvard
University.
When does a book that is merely old become a rarity and an object
of desire? David McKitterick examines, for the first time, the
development of the idea of rare books, and why they matter.
Studying examples from across Europe, he explores how this idea
took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how
collectors, the book trade and libraries gradually came together to
identify canons that often remain the same today. In a world that
many people found to be over-supplied with books, the invention of
rare books was a process of selection. As books are one of the
principal means of memory, this process also created particular
kinds of remembering. Taking a European perspective, McKitterick
looks at these interests as they developed from being matters of
largely private concern and curiosity, to the larger public and
national responsibilities of the first half of the nineteenth
century.
Is hideous prose and ghastly poetry more fabulous than great
literature? Determined to find out, award-winning comedian Robin
Ince has spent most of the 21st century rummaging through charity
shops, jumble sales, and even the odd skip to compile the defining
collection of the world's worst inadvertently hilarious books. This
book will guide you through the hinterland of celebrity
autobiography, unearthing underappreciated classics such as those
by It Ain't Half Hot Mum's Don Estelle and the brother of a former
PM (MAJOR MAJOR). It offers a detailed study of romance sub-genres,
from the equine (DIAMOND STUD) to the gynaecological (SIGN OF THE
SPECULUM). And it will prove invaluable to anyone who wants to know
THE SECRETS OF PICKING UP SEXY GIRLS. Above all, the Book Club is a
manual - almost a life guide - training you up for membership of
the Grand Order of Curators of Books That Should Never Have Been.
Join the club.
An illustrated history of football trade cards, an epic saga of
1,000 brands and myriad collections. The A-Z traces the earliest
cards and stickers - British inventions, both - through a century
of sports cards from tobacco cards to Panini stickers, via
everything that came in between: footballers issued with chewing
gum and sweet cigarettes, lucky bag mementoes, football teams cut
from packets of tea, and many more. It chronicles the epoch of our
forefathers and the very first football cards, dating back to the
1880s, followed by the era of their children and the earliest
stickers - and so the rise of cigarette cards and paper soccer star
adhesives. These days, along with our Panini stickers and trading
cards, we appreciate these vintage treasures not only for their
beauty but also for their value. Fond recollections of childhood
passions past and present will warm hearts, while enchanting
galleries of rarely seen cards will captivate football fans and
collectors alike. Incorporating a guide to values, the A-Z is
priceless.
Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary
deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions
that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book
looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to
claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity. These writers
were, in other words, literary usurpers and appropriators who
trafficked in what Christopher L. Miller terms the "intercultural
hoax." In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest
Carter's The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy's Sarah are two
infamous examples. Miller's contribution is to study hoaxes beyond
our borders, employing a comparative framework and bringing French
and African identity hoaxes into dialogue with some of their
better-known American counterparts. In France, multiculturalism is
generally eschewed in favor of universalism, and there should thus
be no identities (in the American sense) to steal. However, as
Miller demonstrates, this too is a ruse: French universalism can
only go so far and do so much. There is plenty of otherness to
appropriate. This French and Francophone tradition of imposture has
never received the study it deserves. Taking a novel approach to
this understudied tradition, Impostors examines hoaxes in both
countries, finding similar practices of deception and questions of
harm.
Little is known about William Clarke, the author of this 1819
survey of libraries in Britain, though hints in the opening pages
suggest that he was acquainted with the activities of the Roxburghe
Club. His object is 'to assist ... the collector in his pursuit of
valuable editions of rare books'. A short survey of the major
libraries of Europe is followed by descriptions of the collections
which make up the British Museum's library, the great 'public'
libraries, including those of Oxford and Cambridge, and the
libraries of learned societies. Private libraries covered include
those of Sir Joseph Banks, William Beckford, and the duke of
Marlborough. The final portion of the work describes the content of
some great library sales (a fuller list of sales having been given
earlier in the book), from the seventeenth century to Clarke's own
time. This remains a useful source for bibliographers and those
interested in the provenance of books.
Originally published in 1948, this book contains the text of the
Sandars Lectures in Bibliography for the previous year. Carter
reflects upon the evolution and method of book collecting from the
middle of the nineteenth century until the 1940s, and meditates on
what it means to be a book collector, the changing definition of
that term, and recent developments in collecting styles. This book
will be of value to anyone with an interest in bibliophilism or the
history of book collecting.
Music, like books, has attracted collectors for centuries; but
whereas book-collecting has been well served by innumerable
scholarly monographs and studies, the history and techniques of
music-collecting have been largely ignored. In choosing British
music collectors as the subject of his Sandars lectures, Mr King
did much to redress this neglect; and here, in this 1963 volume,
these lectures form the first book on the subject in any language.
In the course of four lectures Mr King describes the interests and
activities of nearly two hundred collectors. He gives details of
the rare or interesting items owned by each, and in doing so says
something of the character and purpose of collecting in different
periods. His researches into the transmission and location of
manuscripts and rare printed items carry us through an absorbing
range of musical topics, and reveal a remarkable breadth of taste
and interest among amateur collectors.
Vices or virtues: drinking and smoking provided marketers with
products to be forged into visual feasts. In this lush compendium
of advertisements, we explore how depictions of these commodities
spanned from the elegant to the offbeat, revealing how
manufacturers prodded their customers throughout the 20th century
to imbibe and inhale. Each era's alcohol and tobacco trends are
exuberantly captured page after page, with brand images woven into
American popular culture so effectively that almost anyone could
identify such icons as the Marlboro Man or Spuds MacKenzie, figures
so familiar they could appear in ads without the product itself.
Other advertisers devised clever and subliminal approaches to
selling their wares, as the wildly successful Absolut campaign
confirmed. Even doctors contributed to a perverse version of
propaganda, testifying that smoking could calm your nerves and
soothe your throat, while hailing liquor as an elixir capable of
bringing social success. Whether you savor these visual delights,
or enjoy inhaling and wallowing in forbidden pleasures, you will
certainly be thrilled by this exploration of a decidedly
vibrant-and sometimes controversial-chapter of advertising history.
About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as
cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with
accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate
their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an
unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books
by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new
editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact,
friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to
impeccable production.
Snapshots and Short Notes examines the photographic postcards
exchanged during the first half of the twentieth century as
illustrated, first-hand accounts of American life. Almost
immediately after the introduction of the generic postcard at the
turn of the century, innovations in small, accessible cameras added
black and white photographs to the cards. The resulting combination
of image and text emerged as a communication device tantamount to
social media today. Postcard messages and photographs tell the
stories of ordinary lives during a time of far-reaching
technological, demographic, and social changes: a family's new
combine harvester that could cut 40 acres a day; a young woman
trying to find work in a man's world; the sight of an airplane in
flight. However, postcards also chronicled and shared hardship and
tragedy - the glaring reality of homesteading on the High Plains,
natural disasters, preparations for war, and the struggles for
racial and gender equality. With a meticulous eye for detail,
painstaking research, and astute commentary, Wilson surveys more
than 160 photographic postcards, reproduced in full color, that
provide insights into every aspect of life in a time not far
removed from our own.
This book reappraises the work of early-seventeenth-century
collectors of English Renaissance poetry in manuscript. The verse
miscellanies, or poetry anthologies, of these collectors have long
attracted the attention of literary editors looking for texts by
individual, major authors, and they have more recently interested
historians for their poems on affairs of state, called verse
libels. By contrast, this book investigates the relationships that
the compilers of miscellanies established between such presumably
literary and political texts. It focuses on two of the most
popular, and least printable, literary genres that they collected:
libels, and anti-courtly love poetry, a literary mode that the
collectors of John Donne's poems played a major role in
establishing. They made Donne the most popular poet in manuscripts
of the period, and they demonstrated a special affinity for his
most erotic or obscene poems, such as 'To his Mistress going to
bed' and 'The Anagram'.
Donne collectors also exhibited the similarities between these
Ovidian love elegies and the sexually explicit or
counter-Petrarchan verse of other authors, thereby organizing a
literary genre opposed to the conventions of courtly love lyrics.
Furthermore, collectors politicized this genre by relating examples
of it to libels. In so doing, manuscript verse collectors
demonstrated a type of literary and political activity distinct
from that of authors, stationers, and readers. Based on a thorough
investigation of manuscript verse miscellanies, the book appeals to
scholars and students of early modern English literature and
history, Donne studies, manuscript studies, and the history of the
book.
The Byzantines used imagery to communicate a wide range of issues.
In the context of Iconoclasm - the debate about the legitimacy of
religious art conducted between c. AD 730 and 843 - Byzantine
authors themselves claimed that visual images could express certain
ideas better than words. Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century
Byzantium deals with how such visual communication worked and
examines the types of messages that pictures could convey in the
aftermath of Iconoclasm. Its focus is on a deluxe manuscript
commissioned around 880, a copy of the fourth-century sermons of
the Cappadocian church father Gregory of Nazianzus which presented
to the Emperor Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty, by one
of the greatest scholars Byzantium ever produced, the patriarch
Photios. The manuscript was lavishly decorated with gilded
initials, elaborate headpieces and a full-page miniature before
each of Gregory's sermons. Forty-six of these, including over 200
distinct scenes, survive. Fewer than half however were directly
inspired by the homily that they accompany. Instead most function
as commentaries on the ninth-century court and carefully
deconstructed both provide us with information not available from
preserved written sources and perhaps more important show us how
visual images communicate differently from words.
The cardinal role of Anglo-Saxon libraries in the transmission of
classical and patristic literature to the later middle ages has
long been recognized, for these libraries sustained the researches
of those English scholars whose writings determined the curriculum
of medieval schools: Aldhelm, Bede, and Alcuin, to name only the
best known. Yet this is the first full-length account of the nature
and holdings of Anglo-Saxon libraries from the sixth century to the
eleventh.
The early chapters discuss libraries in antiquity, notably at
Alexandria and republican and imperial Rome, and also the Christian
libraries of late antiquity which supplied books to Anglo-Saxon
England. Because Anglo-Saxon libraries themselves have almost
completely vanished, three classes of evidence need to be combined
in order to form a detailed impression of their holdings: surviving
inventories, surviving manuscripts, and citations of classical and
patristic works by Anglo-Saxon authors themselves.
After setting out the problems entailed in using such evidence,
the book provides appendices containing editions of all surviving
Anglo-Saxon inventories, lists of all Anglo-Saxon manuscripts
exported to continental libraries during the eighth century and
then all manuscripts re-imported into England in the tenth, as well
as a catalogue of all citations of classical and patristic
literature by Anglo-Saxon authors.
A comprehensive index, arranged alphabetically by author, combines
these various classes of evidence so that the reader can see at a
glance what books were known where and by whom in Anglo-Saxon
England. The book thus provides, within a single volume, a vast
amount of information on the books andlearning of the schools which
determined the course of medieval literary culture.
|
|