Author Archives: Jacob Suarez

Final Project: Before and After Lorca-A Personal Change in Perspective

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Books have always played an essential role in my life both academically and personally. I remember reading during quiet time and how it slowly changed my feelings towards books, from a task to an enjoyable escape. And my favorite moments have always been the ones where I got lost in the world, in the words, presented to my eyes and accepted by my mind. This was a feeling that I, even now, and most likely for a long time, will continue to chase. I have recently reacquainted myself with this feeling. In the spring of 2023, I found myself completely enamored with the poetry and avant-garde style Jack Spicer used in his book After Lorca. A collection of poems and letters directly addressing Lorca and mimicking his style, while simultaneously adding to his already published work. It was like reading a conversation between a living and dead poet from the grave, and for a brief moment, a seance ensues. To me, it felt like a pinnacle of some point, as if some sort of impossible form of communication had finally been solved. Before reading Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, I understood Jack Spicer’s “translations” in After Lorca as acts of lyrical and creative homage as well as intentional misreading-a postmodern game with authorship. However, Borsuk’s “the book as idea”, provided the crucial framework to see them as acts of bibliographic remodeling: Spicer does not merely translate Lorca’s words; he deconstructs the original, using its fragments as physical material to bind a new one. A co-authored volume that performs its own haunted making and acts as an ephemeral conversation, the connection severed as soon as the last page is turned. In this personal essay I will be focusing on my own personal understanding and relationship with Lorca’s introduction and his ‘dead’ letters to Lorca. As I believe the scope of his poetry becomes far to dense and broad to discuss in a relatively shorter essay, let alone one that sides on the personal rather than academic. 

I. Before and After The Introduction

The introduction to Spicer’s is signed as Federico Garcia Lorca himself, somewhere just outside of Granada, Spain, in 1957. Now, Lorca was in fact assassinated somewhere outside Granada in 193,6 so given this context clue, we can already establish an element of ghostly conjuring coming to fruition here. Spicer is almost immediately telling us(the reader) that his book is a recombinant structure. The faux introduction is there to say to us something Lorca wants us to know but only if piecing together that it is in fact him behind the veil. This specific notion of hauntology is further stressed by Daniel Katz, “Spicer’s sense of poetry as dictation and the poet as a ‘receiver’ of a voice which is Other needs to be emphasized, as it goes a long way towards illuminating a notable, and indeed noted, oddity: that After Lorca, the book through which Spicer himself felt he had reached his poetic maturity, was in its conception a book of translations.”(201). In other words, this whole book was merely supposed to translated poetry. How did Spicer come to this conclusion and what can I gain from that insight. Or rather, what am I now to make of it with this new perception of mine. They are haunted words, written by a supposed dead poet, almost chastising Spicer on his endeavor. It was in one of Borsuk’s chapters that this book came to me and specifically this passage: “-because nothing compares to spending several hours holding artists’ books in your hands. They are first and foremost, meant to be activated by a reader, and thus describing them in brief simply does not do them justice.”(Borsuk 149). This book, Seance, transforms the conversation into something powerful; it manifests itself through the reader’s eyes. “Frankly, I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction to this volume.” What is now clear to me is that this artist’s book is a special work, more so to Spicer himself. He is letting us peer at his conscience while simultaneously leaving a work unguarded and abstract for hundreds of thousands to read. 

I remember picking this book up after writing a quick blurb for it during my internship with Poetry International. I thought I had a finite time with it as I borrowed the book from Professor Alcosser’s library, but to my surprise, she let me keep it. And ever since then, I read and re-read the short yet puzzling collection of “translated” poems and faux letters. It’s a mesmerizing experience and a rewarding challenge. I had thought that much of the goal was to decipher what was what. What part of Lorca’s translations are bastardized poems, and what parts were accurate translations? In other words, where did Lorca end and Jack begin? But now, after having met a completely different perspective and way of thinking of books themselves, in all their shapes and forms, I think finding an answer in that regard is pointless. But my role as a reader completely changed after taking this class: “But books are always a negotiation, a performance, an event:-” (Borsuk 147). My role as a reader changes when engaging this text, and it has also changed since taking this class. Now, I no longer simply look for when one artist begins and the other ends, but instead, when I hold the book in my hands, I ask myself, “What is this object in my hands doing and what is my role in its performance?” Katz weighs in on this notion by saying, “And for Spicer, the task of the translator consists not so much in bringing the dead poet ‘to life’ as in’ hauling the live translator, precisely, into death. Herein lies one of the true values of the act of translation for Spicer and also, perhaps, much of his fascination with

the myth of Orpheus*. In his penultimate letter to Lorca, ‘Jack’ claims that poetry freezes the instant the poet ‘ceases to be a dead man’. The relationship between poetry and death, but also poetry and prose, obsesses the book.”(5) I never really read much into this book beyond its pathos and the emotion that it holds. The words are lonely and finite, macabre, yet delicate, but I think what I can see and understand now is far beyond what I had previously perceived.  

The introduction is disdainful in tone, written by Lorca himself, and also acknowledges his own death, “The reader is given non indication which of poems belong to which category, and I have further complicated the problem ( with malice aforethought I must admit) by sending Mr. Spicer several poems written after my death which he has also translated and included here.”(Spicer 4). Having all to do with poetics, as a fiction student myself, the poetics, the idea had gotten lost on me, had become too abstract. And it really wasn’t until Borsuk that I really started to grasp, or at least think differently, regarding the introduction(but much of the volume itself). 

Daniel Katz comprehensively dissects this part, both highlighting the strange emulation and also perhaps the reasoning behind the tone of a spectral Lorca:

“That the dead are ‘notoriously hard to satisfy’ points not only to the debt that

the translator may be said to owe to the ‘original’ which he parasites and

exploits – it also recalls the manner in which the dead most classically express

this dissatisfaction, to wit, as truculent ghosts. But the question left open is

whether this act of translation is the transgression for which appeasement must

be made, or the act of appeasement itself, extending as it does the ‘life’ of the

dead poet’s text. In his work on Pound, Daniel Tiffany has stressed how trans-

lation may be seen as a sacrifice on the part of the translator, who would deliver

himself over to the service of the alien ‘voice’. In this way, translation appears

as ‘a process whereby the original author or text is brought to life, resurrected,

through a depletion of the translator’s vitality, or, more seriously, through a

reification, a deadening, of his native language. There is a terrible risk, of

course, in feeding the dead from the store of one’s own vitality’.6 Yet if the ‘orig-

inal’ text may be seen as a ‘succubus’ or ‘parasite’ feeding off the vitality of the

living translator, the reverse is equally true, for the translator is a consummate

‘grave-robber’, as Chamberlain has referred to Spicer in this context, stealing

an alien ‘voice’ through which to speak what is, after all, his own tongue. Thus

the importance of the Introduction by ‘Lorca’: in this book, not only will Lorca

‘speak’ through the ‘voice’ of Spicer, but the blatant forgery of the Introduction

reminds us that Spicer is also always speaking through the ‘mask’ of ‘Lorca’.”(204)

What strikes me now is the provenance of this section. Spicer was a heartbroken poet; he died in the poverty ward of the San Francisco General Hospital in 1965. His last words were, “my vocabulary did this to me.” I remembered this exact line during class, and the quote about words being left unguarded. Its a huge risk, and as Spicer puts it himself, in terms of a poet, there’s an audience for the poet but very rarely one for their poetry. I think this serves well for understanding something, and in this case, a text. Did I, as a reader, do harm, neglect, or harm this text and its voice by not understanding as I am capable of now? Before the words and their arrangement seemed like a game, one where I would pull the tail of an author and find it to be either Spicer or, quite honestly, Lorca himself. The mask was definitely stronger before as well. When reading that introduction on my first read, I was utterly convinced it was Lorca, and I simply chalked up the part about acknowledging his own death to poetic freedom. But learning from my midterm project I began to think beyond the words and more about the text’s provenance. Both Spicer and Lorca were queer men, one dutifully martyred. His beliefs and morals stood firm during the Spanish Civil War, and this led to his assassination somewhere on the outskirts of Granada, Spain. His body was never recovered, yet it is said to most likely be buried in a mass grave. This also gives further context to this line in the introduction, “Even the most faithful student of my work will be hard put to decide what is and what is not García Lorca as, indeed, he would if he were look into my present resting place. The analogy is impolite, but I fear the impoliteness is deserved.”(5) The relationship posed by Spicer in this volume is dense to say the least but at its very core has to do with Spicer, a lonesome poet, one who has said that loneliness is necessary for pure poetry, is finding a tether, a connection to a great poet who has now become a ghost; a conjured specter. It has all to do with Lorca but all the more with poetry itself. But now I ask myself, why this route? Why choose the dead over the living?  Katz makes another point, specifically through the lens of translation, “As translation becomes the search for ‘correspondences’, on the level of both he signifier and the signified (as the example of ‘seaweed’ rendering ‘lemon’ indicates), it can be effected only through the sort of ‘correspondence’ or exchange of voicings Spicer punningly has in mind in these letters, as he makes clear in closing this one: ‘Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write to each other. Love, Jack’. Translation is literally letter-writing, as Spicer sees each of his renderings as at once a response addressed to Lorca, prompted by his work and also as a correspondence, re-placing that work in another time, language and context. Spicer sees himself as sending Lorca’s work back to him as well as extending Lorca mediumistically.”(205) In terms of the artist’s book, and as the book as ephemeral, Spicer precisely correlates both ideas, creating something akin to a seance. The deconstruction of Lorca’s work becomes the focus of Spicer’s poetry, and the conversation between the two is finite as the reader not only serves at a witness but as an activator.

II. The Dead Letters 

Spicer’s letters to Lorca are haunting. Both heartbreaking and entrancing, Spicer laments in almost letters, of his function as a writer and the purpose of his and Lorca’s ghostly ‘meetings’. The very first line of the first letter reads, “Dear Lorca, these letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent.” Spicer immediately confronts the aspect of time in his first letter. He continues further with, “The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately—an historical patchwork (whether made up of Elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet’s home town, or obscure bits of magic published by Pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry. See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents— poetry discloses.”(Spicer 9). This passage reminds me a lot of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel in what it conveys. This notion of an infinite number of similar stories being told yet never the same is a central theme in Spicer’s exploration of time and poetry. When thinking about the ephemerality of this specific text’s ideas, “Much as we love books, archiving them in libraries for future generations and exhibiting them behind glass as art objects, they are a vulnerable medium. Not only are their physical forms(including the tablet, scroll, codex, and variations) susceptible to decay, their power to spread ideas makes them vulnerable to censorship, defacement, and destruction, particularly motivated by the ideological and political difference. Some artists’ books embrace this impermanence, inviting us to meditate on our fears that books might go up in smoke.”(Borsuk 179). We can see this concept working throughout Spicer’s letters. In his final one to Lorca he laments and yearns for the relationship to last and not cease but he caves and professes that it was all a “game” birthed out of the necessity for poetry but a game nonetheless. Yet, the poems are still there, the connection was made and the meaning will last as long as we give it one. I will provide the final letter in totality as its a wonderful piece of writing:

“Dear Lorca, This is the last letter. The connection between us, which had been fading away with the summer, is now finally broken. I turn in anger and dissatisfaction to the things of my life and you return, a disembodied but contagious spirit, to the printed page. It is over, this intimate communion with the ghost of Garcia Lorca, and I wonder now how it was ever able to happen. It was a game, I shout to myself. A game. There are no angels, ghosts, or even shadows. It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats’ spooks or Blake’s sexless seraphim. Yet it was there. The poems are there, the memory not of a vision but a kind of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes and whispered to me, not really more important than my other friends, but now achieving a different level of reality by being missing. Today, alone by myself, it is like having lost a pair of eyes and a lover. What is real, I suppose, will endure. Poe’s mechanical chessplayer was not the less a miracle for having a man inside it, and when the man departed, the games it had played were not less beautiful. The analogy is false, of course, but it holds a promise and a warning for each of us. It is October now. Summer is over. Almost every trace of the months that produced these poems has been obliterated. Only explanations are possible, only regrets. Saying goodbye to a ghost is more final than saying goodbye to a lover. Even the dead return, but a ghost, once loved, departing will never reappear. 

                                                                                                               Love, Jack” (Spicer 64).

Maybe loneliness is necessary for pure poetry, but then again, maybe not, what am I to know about any of that? I write prose. To me this text conjured itself in my mind because of this class and the themes of deconstruction of the book as we know it. I had never read a ‘book’ like this. But after knowing the provenance of this volume, the author’s duty to his work, and the book’s function as a text, I think I gained a better understanding of it than I had before our ‘Books!’ class. What seemed to be a passionate yet incomprehensible poetry book turned into an example of this very class’s main idea: the book is an ever-changing medium, fit to take on the form best suited for its time and influenced both by it and by the ones who read it. Much like the feeling this book gave me on a first read, I hope to capture the thoughts and ideas that this class gave me again.

                                                                                                           Jacob 

Works Cited 

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018. 

Katz, Daniel. “‘JACK SPICER’S AFTER LORCA: TRANSLATION AS DECOMPOSITION.’” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 201–06. JSTOR, 

Spicer, Jack, and Peter Gizzi. After Lorca. New York Review Books, 2021. 

Remediated Thinking-Final Thoughts

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As a graduate student, this class has really opened my eyes to things I’ve never really even thought about. Despite working so closely with literature and books, I never once took a step back to see how books take on different forms and mediums. I now have a greater understanding and a broader perspective on what a book is, not just what I thought it was or what I was told it is. But to me, the thing that really struck me was the remediated fears. Questions that come up at the dawn of a new revolutionary age have already been asked and will continue to be asked.

I remember my first day when we were all asked what brought us to this class, and I remember answering that it was because I was scared of AI and where that direction in the future seemed to be taking us, which frightened me. From what I’ve seen and continue to see is how this new tool is almost like a Pandora’s box, and we really have no idea where it can go and how we use it, but learning that this fear was, in fact, not a new one at all, was almost shocking. And the fact that the book itself was also a sort of disruptor was even more shocking. That quote from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris really struck me: “Ceci tuera cela.” “This will kill that,” and now I feel like I, too, stood there like Claude Frollo, realizing the death of something and the birth of something new. But that was before this class. Because we examined and questioned everything about the book as an object, interface, all different kinds of media, I feel more comfortable and optimistic, as this has happened before, and it led to a renaissance, industrialization, and political change, etc…In other words, the written word is integral to us, in whatever form it is delivered to us.

I now have a completely different understanding of a poetry book I read before and after this class. But during a chapter in Borsuk’s book, I was reminded of it and really excited to use it in my final project. I’m happy to have taken this class and that it had this impact on me. I don’t think I’ll ever see a book the same without deconstructing it.

Final Project Proposal: The Book as Seance

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For my final project, which will take the form of a scholarly essay, I would like to examine the relationship that poets have with text, specifically by viewing The Book as a Seance, the writer as a medium, and translation as a form of incorporeality. I will be primarily focusing on the poetics of Jack Spicer and his serialized poems that ‘translate’ the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, yet at the same time continue and add on to many of his famous poems, which creates a conversation between a living poet and a dead one(at the time). This conjuring and subsequent seance create a space where time means nothing and words mean everything, with translation almost transcending the text. Through this poetic lens, I will demonstrate how Spicer pushes the book past its physical medium and uses it as a conjuring tool, acting as a literary medium and transforming the Book as an object into a Seance. Focusing on translation, I will examine how Jack Spicer’s book transcends it from a physical medium to a site of linguistic and poetic transmediation.

Current Thesis: Jack Spicer’s translations of Federico Garcia Lorca reconceptualize Spicer’s poetic book as a seance where the poet becomes a medium conjuring a dialogue with the dead. This process transforms translation from a linguistic act to create a continuous living conversation. Ultimately, it demonstrates how the book can transcend its physical form to become a site of poetic transmediation

Annotated Bibliography

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.

Borsuk’s book is a foundational text in our class and will serve as the main reference for my examination of the book as a seance.

Benjamin, Walter. “‘THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR.’” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 172–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrwt2.32.

Benjamin’s chapter on translation focuses on how essential it is for the translatability of a work to be most accurate in essence rather than straight diction in order to echo the original’s. This serves as a foundation for my assertion of translation as incorporeality.

Chamberlain, Lori. “Ghostwriting the Text: Translation and the Poetics of Jack Spicer.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 26, no. 4, 1985, pp. 426–42. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1208115.

Examines the complex methodology and language used to make sense of the ‘bastardized’ poems of Jack Spicer, hidden within and throughout Lorca’s translated poems.

CLARKSON, ROSS. “Jack Spicer’s Ghosts and the Immemorial Community.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 34, no. 4, 2001, pp. 199–211. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44029930.

Clarkson explores the relationship Jack Spicer has with the dead poet Federico Garcia Lorca and how his book After Lorca is a product, or rather, ‘instance of community’.

Eshleman, Clayton. “The Lorca Working.” Boundary 2, vol. 6, no. 1, 1977, pp. 31–50. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/302470. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025.

This essay is a rather straightforward examination of Jack Spicer’s After Lorca and examines how the serialized poems took on book form, as well as analyzes and differentiates Spicer’s poems and Lorca’s.

Finkelstein, Norman M. “Jack Spicer’s Ghosts and the Gnosis of History.” Boundary 2, vol. 9, no. 2, 1981, pp. 81–100. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/303037.

In this essay, Finkelstein places Spicer in a historical perspective and analyzes how his poetry is a synthesis of modern/objectivist & romantic poetry, along with the notion of having created a new dialectical paradigm for understanding contemporary poetry.

Katz, Daniel. “‘JACK SPICER’S AFTER LORCA: TRANSLATION AS DECOMPOSITION.’” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 201–06. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrwt2.37.

Katz uses the contemporary lens of ‘translation as decomposition’ as well as poetry as ephemeral, specifically honing in on the language and diction found within Spicer’s book ‘After Lorca’.

Spanos, W. V. “Jack Spicer’s Poetry of Absence: An Introduction.” Boundary 2, vol. 6, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1–2. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/302467.

Spanos provides insight into the climate of poetry during a transitional period in the 1970’s providing a brief but critical examination of Spicer’s use of language in his poetry.

Forms of the Book and The Mind of the Reader

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Over time, in our class discussions, I’ve come to realize that the nature of the book isn’t so much linear as it is cyclical. The history of the book works similarly, operating cyclically, and affecting society, thereby causing remediation that we may sometimes mistake for “new”. However, in reality, many of the digital fears we have now, for example, AI today, were also shared by people in the past. “In the years leading up to the new millennium, fears of the digital were articulated as threats to the book.”(Pressman 26). Professor Pressman mentions how the book wasn’t always the thing threatened for obsolescence but in fact the catalyst of fear and change:

“In a pivotal scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), set in fifteenth-century Paris during the emergence of the printing press, Victor Hugo poses the archdeacon Claude Frollo, the narrative embodiment of the Catholic Church, alongside a book and a view of Notre Dame: ‘The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book to the church,—‘Alas,’ he said, ‘this will kill that.’ ’1
The statement ‘this will kill that’ expresses a belief that new media (here, the book) will
destroy older, established forms of knowledge production and distribution (here, the church).”(27)

This fear of the new destroying the old is not new, especially when it comes to The Book. The church, back then, had an incredible amount of power and influence in the world. It feels as though the expansion of information and the book itself were seen as potential catalysts for the church’s downfall in terms of stripping its power that it had on people. For now, the information and potential influence weren’t limited through the mouth of the church or kings who were likely loyal to the church as well.

Today, books now come in various formats, to the point where you can buy a version of a book that’s being read to you. AI now has the capabilities of writing fiction if prompted to, and mimicking the way we write. We have now, more than ever, become a society that relies on technology for many things, and that is not limited to literature as well. But it is the forms that the book takes that can illuminate perhaps what we, as a society, are now utilizing, prioritizing, and finding comfort in. But a paradox forms in that it is this exact shift that creates reactions to preserve and continue to nurture the book into the Digital Age.

Evolutionary Media: In the Digital Age

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As someone who knew what they loved(books) from a very young age, my relationship with its concept and physicality has gone through many changes. None so drastic as what I feel today. When I was younger, I was read bedtime stories when I would be tired, and I would have story-times in class where we’d all sit on the carpet and listen to the teacher read. If I was feeling brave, I would look at a monster book I vividly remember having and quite boldly purchasing at a school book fair one year. As I grew older, the texts got a bit thicker, smaller even. I would read for fun while simultaneously read for school. I remember having large hardcover school textbooks on core subjects like History, Science, and English. Then the author’s became important around late middle school and definitely high school. Canonical writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck flooded my brain with their words and characters. And it was sometime in my late high school years that I listened to my first audiobook.

Just like how Professor Pressman states in her article, “In order to read Between Page and Screen, you must take, quite literally, a material turn. You must shift away from the traditional posture of holding a book and reading the text printed upon its pages.”, I too had to reorient myself to how I interacted with reading. Now I was listening to someone else’s voice reading the book. Sure, it was similar to the orality of being read to when little, but now there is no focal point. The voice is in my speakers or headphones, not in front of me. My hands weren’t preoccupied and anticipating to turn the page or use my pointer finger as a guide. I had a harder time focusing yet it made all the more sense to just simply use an audiobook. Or at least that’s how it felt when I gifted someone a physical book and they replied to me saying, “I only listen to audiobooks now.”

Now, you have easy access and purchase power to let’s say a text that you would find in a bookstore, right on your phone. And the phone would mimic turning the page, highlighting function etc…Furthermore, hypertexts like Marino’s story now force the reader to engage with the text but specifically through marginalia and the journey doesn’t have to be linear if you don’t want it to be. Texts, along with technology, our changing our literary landscape in drastic ways. And lastly as aforementioned Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen is a digital text that can only be read or rather translated through the eyes of technology. You engage with the text, almost working alongside it, by pointing the book towards the lens and watching the text come to life and float in front of your screen. It is a fascinating thing to not only experience but to be aware that we are in the midst of a great shift in the way we interact with media and literature; books are evolving, literature is augmenting itself, and we are guiding this change in the Digital Age.

Thomas Mouffet’s Insectorum Theatrum

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Insectorum Theatrum: Bibliography

  1. Physical Bibliography

The Insectorum Sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum, also known as The Insectorum Vitae, is a historic entomology book by Thomas Mouffet in 1634. It is a compilation of works by Edward Wotton, Conrad Gessner, Thomas Penny, and Mouffet himself. The book is bound in calf-skin. There is a distinct odor to the book as well as various pages with a yellowish hue. This particular first edition third issue variant is one of three imprints. The binding itself is dark brown with various marks of abrasions and natural wear. There is leftover dye staining on the cover near the lower end of the spine. Along its spine, at the crux of the crease there is visible protruding damage; I have noted it is reminiscent of splinters. The vellum of the binding has marks of wear and tear, while the leaves, held horizontally on the inside, opposite the spine, shimmer just ever so slightly. The book is rough to the touch, coarse, and grainy.  

The outer pages, from the bottom of the book, are of different shades. I note a tinge of green on the lower half, and on the upper, a rustic, sun and oxygen-exposed look. The upper half of the outside of the pages is a darker shade, almost black on one half. The crease on the spine of the cover is cracked all the way down and through. There are eight vertical lines of both gold and fading gold decorum along the spine, as well as the title in gold with a square burgundy background. Both the headband and tailband have minor tearing. The face side binding is protruding at the top because of the aforementioned tear along the spine on the front cover side. When analyzing the text horizontally, the belly of the text, or the pages, has a wavy appearance due to water damage. Small amounts of marginalia are noted on the inside cover as well as throughout the text. The marginalia found within the pages of the leaves is printed, whereas the marginalia found on the inside cover and on the inside of the back cover are handwritten. Inside cover has an ex libris plate noting San Diego State’s ownership of this specific copy. The edges of most pages are dark. The joint of the spine has created a sort of shelter on the inside/hinge, where debris has accumulated over time. Most pages have minor, unknown dark-stained spots. The binding and text are original, with no signs of repairs or major alterations. The half-title page/woodcut title vignette has multiple high-quality illustrations of various insects and arachnids. There is a tear in said page, on the right side towards the middle; the torn piece is hidden, making it look like a hole.  I have noted that towards the end, on the last four pages, one of the woodcuts includes two seahorses.

The text is written in Latin using a print-like text face, Roman(Antiqua) font. There is a red stain on the third leaf with a tinge of red bleeding through on multiple pages thereafter. There are multiple high-quality woodcuts of various arachnids and insects on various pages, while the last four are completely dedicated to these woodcuts. All pages are intact, but errors in paging are: numbers 286-295, which are omitted. The leaves are in decent condition, with minor staining and minimal damage. No faded text nor tears at the ends of the pages. The pages themselves are made of parchment paper. The edges of the text block are plain, and there are illuminated initials at the beginnings of multiple text blocks(non-colored). Black and white woodcut illustrations are integrated throughout the text in remarkable accuracy. There are a few Greek quotes with Latin translations at times. There are two pages in which different colors of ink are used to make small marks, reminiscent of a checklist. The color is a soft red, resembling the color orange.   

  1.  Analysis of Origins and Arachnids

 After many years of delays, The Insectorum Theatrum was published by Theodore de Mayerne and printed by Thomas Cotes in London while being sold by bookseller William Hope. Now, while Thomas Mouffet is the first name printed as an author, in reality, Moffet compiled the works of others, namely his late friend’s Thomas Penny’s work and “According to his introduction he put the work in order, gave it literary style, cut out ‘more than a thousand tautologies and trivialities’ and added over a hundred and fifty illustrations.” Not only were significant changes made at the behest of Moffet, but according to Swann, much of Penny’s work was diluted or, worse, destroyed.  (Swann 169). Historical context adds a complex layer of both content and authorship and illustrates many of the conceptual ideas we have come across this semester. The purpose of this analysis is to examine how a questionable ‘scientific’ man analyzed and edited a text, one that has been stitched together and altered, ‘frankensteined’, coming to a fascinating fruition.  

While doing my research, I came across an article titled, “Thomas Mouffet’s Theatrum Insectorum, 1634” detailing the history of this book’s journey to being published and it was the author’s, Philip Swann’s, first paragraph that completely caught my eye: “’From him (Mouffet) one might expect everything to be brilliant and perfected, as he had contributions from such great helpers, such great names as Wotton, Gesner, de 1’Ecluse, Penny, Knivett, Bruer and others. In fact he composed his whole Theatrum with such confusion and lack of order that he appears as a very poor compiler of the material he obtained from others and is no credit at all to such great men. But not only was he almost ignorant of the subject, he also expresses it quite barbarously’, wrote Martin lister to John Ray in 1667.’”(169) As mentioned, this book is a compilation of various works and sketches by many early entomologists, and it is the first English book dedicated to entomology itself. With such a subject, one would think that this text would have the utmost precision and careful journey to publishing. Yet, due to the death of Penny and the amount of various works from multiple authors, the Insectorum Theatrum is a rather convoluted text with a very interesting infancy. 

II A).  –A Convoluted and Blurred History

Thomas Penny, who was Mouffet’s most important source, was born in Lancashire, England, studied at Cambridge, and later, after giving up his career in the church, dedicated himself to medicine and natural history. It is here that his interest turned from botany to entomology. During his travels and research, Penny came across Conrad Gessner, a Swiss entomologist. Shortly before Gesnner’s death, Penny obtained many of his insect sketches and manuscript notes. Penny then returned to England and became a physician, and during these years, he became close friends with Mouffet. During the last fifteen years of his life, Penny devoted himself to amassing the material partially preserved in the Theatrum. He received contributions from multiple experts, including the European scholars de l’Ecluse, Jean Bauhin, and Camerarius, who all sent illustrations and observations. Swann notes that Penny was the perfect man to compile all contributions, including his own, “’There is perhaps no other of the early botanists who has his command of terse and exact phrasing, who employs technicalities so precisely, or who can give so clear and vivid a classification of the chief points in any species.’5 It was unfortunate for Science that he died in 1588 leaving his unpublished work on insects in the hands of Mouffet.”(169). A rather scathing comment on Mouffet’s ability to see the works inception seems unwarranted but in hindsight, Mouffet wasn’t simply trying to finish his dear friend’s work, “Mouffet states in his preface that Penny ‘ had spent… much money for the plates engraving’; this would suggest that the latter had brought the work closer to completion than his editor claimed. The presence of the proofs together with an engraved title-page and the manuscript licence to print raises another problem. It has been suggested that there was an edition of the work at Frankfurt in 1598.’9 No copy of it is known, and its publication seems extremely doubtful. Topsell, however, in his Histoire of Serpents of 1608 prints a section on spiders by Doctor Bonham, which is basically a polished and somewhat contracted version of Mouffet’s text in English. Bonham must therefore have seen either the manuscript or an edition previous to that of 1634.”(Swann 170). It seems Mouffet was likely trying to take credit for his friend’s work and publish it as soon as possible, as I am sure he was aware that the book, if published, would have been the first English text dedicated to Entomology. In 1658, John Rowland published an English appended version of the contracted Topsell version and,  “The translation is competently but rather crudely done and compares unfavourably with Bonham’s contracted version found in the same volume.”(Swann 170). So the history and journey the book has had seems arduous, and the lack of faith in Mouffet is starting to seem warranted, but to be certain, we have to analyze how he himself framed and organized all the information, as well as the woodcuts.

II. B- Observations on Spiders

In my analysis of the specific chapters on Arachnids, I will be referring to Rowland’s version, which still retains Mouffet’s original prose and organization(for his sections). Chapter eleven starts with various claims about spiders and their habits, and ends with an interesting division of spiders, “Mouffet ends with a confused division of spiders into groups that may be summarised as follows:

“(Swann 170).   

The sentence is at the very least a confused and rudimentary diagram of groups of spiders. Chapter twelve doesn’t fare much better in its assertion of various types of spiders, Swann comments:

“Mouffet has extracted every possible reference to them in the greco-roman writers and tried, not very successfully, to put them together. He gives first a long account of the various kinds of Phalangium, most of his material coming from Aetius, Aelian, Aristotle or Nicander. Some of his descriptions probably originated with venomous insects and only one seems worthy of quotation; ‘it is round, and black, and shining, and globelike’, this would suggest a Latrodectus species. Thrown into the middle of this section is the story that there is a phalangium which ‘being cut, they say that two worms are found, which bound to women before conception in a crow’s skin, will keep them from conceiving: and this vertue of them will continue for a year, as Cecilius hath left it written in his Commentaries.’”(170)

Towards the end of the quote, the 17th century’s superstitious mind makes itself known. And continues to do so in almost hilarious fashion with the specific and ‘exotic’ concoctions for cures from bites: “’… a snail bruised raw, and drunk with asses milk.’ ‘Take wilde Cumin one acetabulum, bloud of a sea-tortoise four drams, rennet of a Hinde or Hare three drams, kids bloud four drams, make them with the best wine, and lay them up; the dose is the quantity of an olive, in half a Cyathus of wine.’ ‘Out of Nicander. Rosin of the turpentine, pine or pitch tree, drank or swallowed, is exceeding good, which Gesner and Bellonius say they learned by experience, to be true.’”(Swann 171). Swann then states that during his latter years, Penny suffered from asthma and took woodlice crushed in wine to try and stop it, yet it didn’t cure him, so Mouffet prescribed him to inhale fumes of sulphur, and that apparently cured him. So aside from just observing arachnids and insects, Mouffet decided to add apparent cures that work for both spider bites and asthma. And despite the subject, the methods and concoctions explicated are not only dated but completely erroneous.

The following chapters include fables to show the spider’s good fortune, and Mouffet’s long-winded prose which sounds muhc more like the syntax of a 16th century poem or story rather than an academic piece of writing, “”The skin of it is so soft, smooth, polished and neat, that she precedes the softest skin’d Mayds, and the daintiest and most beautiful strumpets, and is so clear that you may almost see your face in her as in a glasse; she hath fingers that the most gallant virgins desire to have theirs like to them, long slender, round, of exact feeling, that their is no man, nor any creature that can compare with her.’”(Swann 171). It is clear that this was a text of its time and that many of the topics discussed weren’t so much scientific as they were simply the beliefs of these men. A last example of this downright dated way of thinking comes in chapter fifteen, where Swann notes, “Having set the above down in reasonable fashion Mouffet now returns for the last two pages to cramming in every possible quotation from the greco-roman writers. The object this time is to demonstrate that spiders were created for man’s use as well as his education, and there follow numerous medical preparations employing either the unfortunate spider or her web: ‘Some catch a spider with their left hand, and bruise her in Oyl of Roses, and drop some of it into the ear of the same side the tooth akes, and Pliny saith it is a cure.’”(Swann 172). Mouffet continues this thought and chastises his fellow physicians for seeking new drugs and ‘medica exotica’ when a spider concoction could do all that and more, apparently. 

In all honesty, I never expected a historical book on Entomology to be so dated in theory. While one could simply observe and report, Mouffet had to ingrain his thoughts and ideas into a text that frankly wasn’t his to begin with. Even more so, many reported him to be a lousy editor and not even interested in Entomology at all. I think for me, I never expected for a text of this scientific significance to have this background, and it’s incredibly important to realize that these texts are much more than what we see. “The natural world for Mouffet was finite and created by God as a static entity. His interest in animals is largely confined to his desire to demonstrate their didactic and utilitarian purpose.” (Swann 172). Regardless of its scientific inaccuracies, if there’s anything I learned in this class, it’s that these texts are a time capsule, a raw and authentic look at how and why people thought the way they thought, “But the work still has great value and interest; for if we have lost the work of Gesner and Penny we still have a very vivid insight into the way a sixteenth century man of Science saw spiders.”(Swann 172). This was genuinely a story I never thought I would read from such a ‘straightforward’ text, but I was completely taken aback as soon as I read the history behind its author(s).

Works Cited

Swann, P. H. (1973). Thomas Mouffet’s Theatrum Insectorum 1634. britishspiders.org.uk. https://britishspiders.org.uk/system/files/library/020806.pdf

Link to Google Docs version to see the diagram omitted after paragraph 7: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LE27hyRmZ7hR2S8Q5oXRy2qC7rEpN7USkTYYNZ0tC-k/edit?usp=sharing

Intermedia: The Fusion and Mimicry of The Book

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Throughout this class, I have learned and re-learned so many new things about The Book as a medium. It is more than just a single medium; if anything, it is an ever-changing form that reflects culture and society: “By bringing its interface into focus, they draw our attention to a deeper history of mutation and play with book form. Dick Higgins coined the term ‘intermedia’ to describe such works, a word that sounds to contemporary ears like a description of an augmented reality or touchscreen reading experience.”(Borsuk 257). These books are snapshots, time-capsules oozing with marginalia that speaks volumes of certain moments: culture, social and political climate etc…And what isn’t stressed enough is the remediation aspect of this medium. One doesn’t influence the other, it is a nature and process that is cyclical in form and content. It is at once dictated by the ones using but also birthed in the need that arises from mutation and evolution. Borsuk further quotes Higgins and his coined term: “Intermedia works, by his definition, involve ‘a conceptual fusion’ of the elements that constitute them. For him, the artist’s book is intermedial because its ‘design and format reflect its content-they intermerge, interpenetrate. … The experience of reading it, viewing it, framing it-that is what the artist stresses in making it.'”(257).

The importance of this notion is the fact that in recent years, audiobooks and podcasts have seen a surge in popularity as a new, fast, and easy way to digest information in whatever manner we crave, Borsuk writes, “Some scholars consider this period of textual fixity and enclosure the Guttenberg parenthesis, rather than the Guttenberg era, suggesting that we a re returning to a culture that values orality and ephemerality, no longer needing ideas bound between covers or owned in quite the same way.” (258). This new shift is once again posing us a question about what the book is. And the fact that we have so many scholars with different definitions not only speaks to its complexity but its malleability: “The term’s slipperiness, far from a liability, proves its greatest asset. It is a malleable structure through which we encounter ideas.” (Borsuk 258). It is almost paradoxical in the sense that the book as a medium, is so prevalent yet it is un-pinable as a singular definition, “-the book changes us as we change it, letter by letter, page by page.” (Borsuk 258).

The Expansivity of The Book

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The expansiveness of The Book as an idea, as an interface, as art, as an all-encompassing medium to which is molded for us, by us, to serve our needs. I found so many things intriguing in this reading, namely the expansiveness of the book as an Interface and how the page seems to be, not only a filtration system for human thinking but a shapeshifting medium at that. At the very basis, I like how Bonnie Mak grounded the page in its existence as being more than just mattering due to meaning or significance, “To matter is not only to be of importance, to signify, to mean, but also to claim a certain physical space, to have a particular presence, to be uniquely embodied.” (3) Similarly in Megg’s History of Graphic Design, there was sections of extensive research about how art expanded, evolved, and therefore become a direct influence to political and idealogical movements.

The idea of art being a proponent of ideological and social change isn’t new, but the literal influence of the page as space and a literal reflection of a harmonious future is. The De Stijl movement in particular stuck out, “Schoenmakers defined the horizontal and the vertical as the two fundamental opposites shaping our world, and called red, yellow, and blue the three principal colors. Mondrian began to paint purely abstract paintings composed of horizontal and vertical lines. He believed the cubists had not accepted the logical consequences of their discoveries; this was the evolution of abstraction toward its ultimate goal, the expression of pure reality.” (931-932) Art and Modern Art itself has really pushed the boundaries of its own medium (Comtemporary art/Abstract art) but I never really thought about its implications in terms of the evolution of the page as space and material. Abstract Art seems to be a space that can not only push the bounds of Art itself but also expand our thoughts and ideas upon which we frame or facilitate societal needs, demands, and exploration. Mak states, “Readers interpret text, space, and image, as they are inclined, but the meanings that they formulate are predicted upon the materiality of each carefully designed page.” (21)

The page has never been so multifaceted in my eyes, let alone The Book itself. I can now see the correlation between the page and so many other different ideas (Politics, the humanities, Science, etc.). It is an all-encompassing medium, both changing and willing to change for our (humanity’s) sake. The expansiveness of the book just keeps growing exponentially, much like Borges’s short story it feels infinite. For me, a quote that really highlighted just how grand a vision artists have in their art to not only influence art itself but people, was on page 937 of Megg’s History of Graphic Design: “Malevich and Mondrian used pure line, shape, and color to create a universe of harmoniously ordered, pure relationships. This was seen as a visionary prototype for a new world order. The unification of social and human values, technology, and visual form became a goal for those who strove for a new architecture and graphic design.”

Reconceptualizing the Book Beyond a Practical and Physical Medium

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In Borsuk’s third chapter, “The Book as Idea,” the book is reintroduced as not only an ever-changing object but also a malleable concept shaped and impacted by technology, history, and culture. The key concept takeaway for me was that this mutable and evolving idea of the book is a form that will always reflect our human needs, available resources and materials, as well as our social systems, “Defining the book involves consideration for its use as much as its form. Our changing idea of the book is co-constitutive of its changing structure.”(195) With this notion we, as readers and thinkers are encouraged to refrain from thinking of “The Book” through objective lenses. As we progress through not only the book but our class as well, the idea of deconstructing the book as object becomes more pertinent. The separation, duality, and experimentation between materiality vs ideation intensifies and positions the book as a living concept, one that reflects humanity’s relationship with material technology and commerce.

Borsuk further pushes the idea of the book as conceptual and is, in a sense, teaching us to think about the book not as an artifact of craft but more as a field of inquiry. In the sub-chapter titled “The Book as Ephemeral,” Borsuk states, “Not only are their physical forms(including the tablet, scroll, codex, and variations) susceptible to decay, their power to spread ideas makes them vulnerable to censorship, defacement, and destruction, particularly motivated by ideological and political difference. Some artists’ books embrace this impermanence, inviting us to meditate on our fears that books might go up in smoke.”(179) Firstly, the idea of the vulnerability of the book really emphasizes that “bookishness” fetishization but it also paradoxically highlights the physical books obsoletion in the sense of art. There are e-books and audiobooks now, mass produced paperbacks. New mediums driven my commerce but also to meet the demands and needs of the consumer. This is history repeating itself, a drastic shift, worried thinkers, we have been here before; it gives more weight to the fact that we should look at book history as circular rather than linearly, And it is a peripherality to think that a book is just a book and that is why I love how Borsuk ended this chapter:

“It can, itself, serve as a kind of furnishing, offering as it does, a storage and filing system between its pages, in which we might press flowers, copy recipes, keep photographs, or compile clippings-habits of Renaissance readers that continue today. The book props up its neighbors, too, as we learn pulling books off the shelf and watching the adjoining volumes topple. It can take us down as well, since it’s portability makes it a handy projectile when the moment arises. Defining the book involves consideration for its use as much as its form. Our changing idea of the book is co-constitutive of its changing structure.”(195)

Ruminations on the Study of Books

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A bibliography. We’ve all done one, most of us, even more than a few times. What I have realized is how this word has been used loosely and collectively to describe the study of books; Terry Belanger says, “To the book collector, the word bibliography properly means the study of books; a bibliographer is one who studies them. But the word is shopworn. Bibliography has many common definitions, and because collectors, scholars, and librarians too often use the word indiscriminately, it lacks precision.” This precision is exactly what I think will help me create not only a critically competent bibliography but a strong thesis and creative project. The analytical bibliography looks intriguing as it encapsulates all the core practices of what the whole study of books should be, specifically for the bibliography.

I have learned, both in our discussions and in our labs, that the book is more than a readable piece of content; it is both a container of specific history and an ever-changing medium that reflects the time in which it was produced. And things, from errors to marginalia, are just as important to a book’s story. This medium, especially during the Incunabula, was a process that not only required more intimate attention but also necessitated expertise and experience. Many people during this time had jobs due to this extremely laborious process. From bookplates to illuminated pages with intricate designs, the skill needed, the errors made, and the crucial marginalia found within these texts, these books became priceless artifacts that even reflected the families that owned them.

This is something I have never thought about incorporating into a bibliography before: the history of the book and its contents, both printed and handwritten. Usually, I don’t, but the only time I make one is at the end of an essay, and it’s a subset of a bibliography, a works cited page. With all that being said, I really think this class has helped me not only change my academic way of thinking about what a book is and what goes into an investigation of a specific book, but also what it is in general. The book is a medium and an everlasting and ever-changing form of communication integral to not only humanity’s progress but its preservation as well.