The Book. Chapter two

Posted on September 19, 2025 by Kiersten Brown

When reading this next chapter, the first paragraph really caught my eye. We saw a picture of the girdle book at the end of last class and it stuck with me. “Girdle Books, a popular form among pilgrims in the Middle Ages, continued to be made: with an oversized soft leather cover whose flaps could be looped under one’s belt for easy consultation on the go.” (pg.43) This is interesting to think about or imagine. I would have just put my book in a bag, carried it, or even had a kindle in replacement nowaday. The image of the girdle book stuck with me, this little sack that carried the book around seems unnecessary to me. But I guess everything we have now could be classified the same way, accessories more than necessity. Aesthetics more than need. That’s what our world is made up of, items and things that we can consume or own. This has existed forever, and it has progressively gotten worse: I am not immune to this. I love little knick knacks and collecting things I do not need. I am not sure what that says about me, but it makes me feel better that even in the Middle Ages they were doing this aesthetic with books too. The Girdle itself is like many unnecessary things I own, and it’s interesting to think of how this made books more portable than before. In my mind books had always traveled and moved with you, but I guess when I really think about it this isn’t true, they used to live in libraries of the rich. The Girdle is just another example of this aesthetic obession of the book, and with everything else we now consume, that might not be necessary.

Further in the chapter the rise and importance of Codex books also caught my eye. “As codex books became private items, rather than shared objects experienced publicly, copyists simply couldn’t keep up with demand.” (pg. 43) I keep forgetting the fact that books were something that were shared publicly and read aloud. The image of seeing people on the street reading a novel out loud is foreign to me, that would never happen now. But this is how it all started, and as the codex was created books became private, expensive, and a sign of education and status. Rather than stories being shared in pubs or public places they were being read privately in the home. This is how reading has always been for me, rather than when I was little and my parents read to me, so the fact that this was not normal is intriguing. Reading was related to wealth and status rather than community, so when I really think about it that is true still. Reading is a privilege not everyone has access to. Reading is political, as most things are, and reading is something that is meant to be shared and discussed, but usually it is not. I am really enjoying the new perspective this book is giving me on the history of books but also the history of reading as a political, wealth, or status statement of the past.

New Immitates the Old

Posted on September 19, 2025 by Trinity Buck

One of the biggest themes we have discussed in class is that the “new” will always imitate the “old” aesthetically and stylistically to make the consumer more comfortable and familiar with the product. A great example of this occurs on page 92 of “The Book” by Amaranth Borsuk: “The first Italian printers based their types on this humanist hand, producing ‘roman’ letterforms named for their purported connection to ancient Rome. (Borsuk, 92)” It is fascinating that the “Roman” font comes from the Roman humanist hand. It’s endearing that the Italians decided to base their font on the human hand, thus giving it a human quality, and making it more familiar to its readers. This is just one of the many examples of this occurring. Another example of this is the fact that Kindles perfectly replicate a book’s form by having a cover and the exact pages inside. A Kindle could have taken any shape and had more exciting features, but it decided to exactly replicate a book. This is because the inventors of the Kindle wanted it to be recognizable and relatable to book lovers. Im excited to learn more about this phenomenon and dive deeper into this book.

Singing the Blues

Posted on September 18, 2025 by Jessica Johnson

On Tuesday, I was very pleased to attend the symposium with Dr. Steve Mentz, a contributor to the term “Blue Humanities”. It is clear that he appreciates every scholar’s input into the conversation which is why he emphasizes the fact that the work he does is collaborative. Without others to explore to depths of the ocean through scholarly humanities research, the profundity of the work wouldn’t be as immense.

I never really considered how our physical engagement with the world can shape the way we think about the environment through a literary perspective. Especially when talking about water—which is around us and in us—we must take into consideration how we give to and receive what we have in the world. I would like to bring this into the topic of our class in general about how capitalism has commodified and fetishized books. If it wasn’t the printing press that did it, it was capitalism to increase the desire for books and mass produce them. Therefore, it has become increasingly startling to see the damage we have done to the environment despite our “good” intentions to read and intake information to learn more about humanity.

This leads me into the discussion of the original purposes of these materials. They were not made or provided so we could produce books. Just like how most of the water on earth is not made for human use. The majority of water on earth is salt water, and the majority of fresh water is ice. Unfortunately, we once again are treating water as something that can utilize even through new media by using terms such as “surfing the web” and “data flow”. The one thing I loved from this conversation and is my key take-away is that industrialization challenges nature and tries to establish permanence. But the edge of the sea is never the same from minute to minute (as I try to roughly paraphrase what Mentz said) and there will always be that house that crumbles from erosion.

Water as Omnipresence and Its Influence on Othello and Coastal Sea-Wolves

Posted on September 18, 2025 by Jacob Suarez

To Preface:

I am so glad to have attended the capacious discussion that was held in the Digital Humanities Center(It wholeheartedly inspired this exploration and curiosity between water in literature and evolution of the wild through water; It’s my own mini-exploration of a sliver of the Blue Humanities).

Introduction

From briefly talking about his book on Shipwrecks in Shakespearean literature, and how the “shipwreck is a visitation of supernatural power,” along with the shipwreck being a sort of condemnation of human hubris (Mentz). And water as this force of nature, both “omnipresent” as Dr. Mentz put it, in all facets of our lives. It also is a direct link to evolutionary traits within wild-life we traditionally wouldn’t associate with the sea, It really inspired me to talk about two different aspects in which water directly influences, changes, and is omnipresent among both man and animal. It is through the brief mentions of “Freud’s Oceanic-Feeling”, a space of mediation and self-reflection, along with the mention of the book The Abyss Stares Back, and mostly, focusing on its title, that it further alludes to this notion of water as a fluid space where one can deconstruct and reconfigure the self; Ernest Heminway’s The Old Man and the Sea is a good example.

Dr. Mentz also mentioned how water goes through us and comes out of us, which I wanted to further explore the ability of water to not only influence us as humans, but also the wildlife that lives and directly works in tandem and literally adapts to water: Namely, Coastal Sea Wolves. My other exploratory example would be found in the second act of William Shakespeare’s 1602 play, Othello. Namely, during the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea during a raging storm, and how this not only affects the narrative and its characters but also reflects them as well.

Water as an Inhibitor in Othello

In Act One of Othello, despite the predominant narrative of Iago’s sinister plan unfolding through the manipulation of Roderigo and Brabantio, the impending war between the Ottomans and Venetians on Cyprus is equally important. The mention of the explicit geographical vicinity in which the war is to take place is important. As they are surrounded by water whether on land(Cyprus) or on boat. It is also the sea that carries the Ottomans towards the outpost on Cyprus, and it is the only way in which this imminent threat can arrive. At the very beginning of Act Two, Scene One, we read about two soldiers observing the treacherous seas,

MONTANO. What from the cape can you discern at sea?

FIRST GENTLEMAN. Nothing at all. It is a high wrought flood;

I cannot twixt the heaven and the main

Descry a sail.(1-4)

In the next line, Montano follows up by equating the waves to mountains and how the wooden/manmade boats could withstand such a force. There’s a duality to this. On one hand, they are hoping the Ottomans are wiped out, but on the other, that their General is safe. The description of the waves, as well as the helplessness and the momentary loss of agency of our main characters, simply being demoted to passengers of a ship on thunderous waters, shows the sheer power the sea has. The characters are uncertain, anxious, and scared. It is this stripping of man’s perception of control(winning a war and gaining/defending land) that is swiftly attacked by the unstoppable force of nature. Once more, man is at the whim of nature.

And further into Act Two, Scene One we get the most direct change of the plot thus far explicitly attributed to the storm:

THIRD GENTLEMAN. News lads! Our wars are done.

The desperate tempest hath so banged the Turks

That their designment halts. A noble ship of Venice

Hath seen a grievous wreck and sufferance

On most part of their fleet. (20-25)

The war, which would have completely changed and altered the plot, is no more, and it is here that this miraculous storm has completely shifted the narrative. Not only does it get rid of what would have been a highly contestable war, but it also allows Iago’s sinister plan to truly come to fruition. And this is something that scholar Dennis Austin Britton picks up on in his journal article titled: RE-“TURNING””OTHELLO”: TRANSFORMATIVE AND RESTORATIVE ROMANCE: “The conspicuously-added shipwreck, however, is not only a miraculous solution to the Turkish fleet; it provides the occasion to transform identities. So often in the literature of the period, and always in Shakespearean drama, shipwreck dislocates individuals, either requiring or allowing for the creation of new social identities-“.(38-39)

This notion of a narrative literally allowing for the characters and the story itself to be able to transform is directly because of the storm. If it weren’t for the storm wrecking all of the Ottomans’ ships, the actual story of Othello sinking into madness via Iago would have never taken place. The water, and namely the sea, in this play is not mentioned again, nor does it play such a role in the narrative as it did at the beginning of Act two, but like Professor Mentz states, it is omnipresent. The characters are still on Cyprus which is still surrounded by water on all sides. The sea even had a hand in directly changing the narrative of the story. Water, even if for a moment, became a god-like character in this narrative and the characters of the play were all at its mercy and reflected the brutality of man and as Michael Flachmann put it in his article titled THE MORAL GEOGRAPHY OF OTHELLO: “-the tempest on sea and in Othello’s mind, the isolation of an island universe the reversion to brutish behavior…Shakespeare’s play takes us on a geographic and psychological journey into the wilderness of the human heart.”(par. 7) A striking reflection of Man and Sea.

The Vancouver Coastal Sea Wolf

Wolves have always been an animal I’ve traditionally seen limited to land, stalking prey in forests, howling at the moon, things only done on land. That being said, I recently came across an article talking about how a certain subspecies of gray wolf has evolved to fit their peculiar way of life: “Coastal wolves’ biology and ecology includes a unique diet heavily influenced by marine resources, distinct behaviours such as swimming in the open ocean between landmasses, and morphological differences to their interior conspecifics, such as darker pelage, smaller size, and distinct cranial and dental morphology. Coastal wolves are fast, powerful swimmers who often paddle miles between islands in search of food.”(Raincoast par.3)

While the evolutionary traits, adaptations, and resilience of the Gray Wolf are incredibly intriguing and a testament to the animal it is also incredibly important to know why: ‘”The Vancouver Island wolf was believed to be extirpated, or at least significantly reduced following decades of sanctioned eradication,’ Windle explains. In other words, they were nearly hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th century. But starting in the 1960s, they reestablished themselves by swimming to Vancouver Island from mainland British Columbia across short channels like the Johnstone Strait or perhaps even island-hopping across the Salish Sea.” (Yogerst par. 10) Not only through hunting have the Gray Wolf population gone down(which is still legal on Vancouver Island) but also through deforestation and human expansion. Joe Yogerst continues this thought in paragraph 23 of his article titled The Secret World of Canada’s Coastal Wolves, “However, Allen says that’s not the only threat. Wolf hunting and trapping are still legal in Vancouver Island, where each hunter is allowed to take three animals per year. Habitat destruction through logging remains a concern, although less so in the past, because timber extraction is being curtailed in some old-growth forests.”

Humans directly impact and force animals to relocate and limit their space due to our consumerism and expansion as a species as well. Yet the water has once again come to the rescue and has allowed this animal, that we didn’t traditionally think as marine or marine-adjacent, top thrive. The Coastal Wolves have, over time, adapted to their new environments and figured out how to adapt to our(humans) expansion, and the sea in contrast to my last example has offered a sort of refuge for them in an ever-changing world where wildlife and naturalization is an afterthought at most.

Conclusion

The Blue Humanities discussion with Dr. Leong, Mentz, and Pressman really inspired me to explore, to some extent, the aspect of water and its direct impact on literary narratives and our wildlife. I was really intrigued by many of Dr. Mentz’s statements, and I really just had these two brewing ideas that I thought would be neat to explore through a slight eco-critical lens. But my main takeaway was really how important and interwoven water is in our lives. I’ve said it many times but the word Dr. Mentz used really stuck with me- water as ‘omnipresent’. Which is incredibly true but something I never was truly conscious or aware of. Similar to the whole thesis of our BOOKS! class I’m really starting to think through a deconstructing point of view. Realizing that many of the notions that I had of certain things like books and wolves can be and totally are different. They aren’t just confined to the definitions taught to us and retained in our minds but can adapt, evolve, and take on a whole new form.

Dr. Mentz’s Conversation on Blue Humanities

Posted on September 17, 2025 by Aron Abellera

Yesterday in the Digital Humanity Center, I was fortunate enough to listen and learn from Dr. Steve Mentz, Professor Pressman, and Professor Leong in their conversation on Blue Humanities. It was immediately clear that Dr. Mentz was a very distinguished guest to have in the Digital Humanity Center. His expertise and the way he articulated himself made it very clear that his love for Blue Humanities is something that has developed over the last couple of decades. I read the preface or introduction to his book An Introduction to the Blue Humanities and something that I really appreciated about him as a person is how much credit he shared in the coining of the term “Blue Humanities” and to whom he gives thanks for his own inspiration, especially to his late colleague and friend, ocean historian pioneer, John Gillis.

Dr. Pressman gave a great scholarly introduction to Dr. Mentz. I honestly had very little knowledge of what Blue Humanities was besides my short reading before the presentation. Though, it was immediately clear that Dr. Pressman’s scholarly work on mermaids came to fruition through Dr. Mentz’s own works. I was particularly interested in a question that Dr. Leong posed to Dr. Mentz which was something along the lines how do people with physical barriers to bodies of water interact with the concept of Blue Humanities. Dr. Mentz was drawn back to the question during the presentation as it was something that he was acutely aware of but had not a specific answer. I appreciated his candor. Like Dr. Leong, I was wondering how does Blue Humanities affect people who may be in a land locked state where bodies of open water are less accessible than the west or east coast. I think even more apparent though is what occurs when people are physically unable to experience water via physical sensation of swimming, or having that immersion in water. Dr. Mentz landed along the lines of every local body of water possessing a culture and an understanding around it. Likewise, water is literally the essence of our daily lives in the way we utilize it and drink it.

It was really fascinating to listen and learn what Blue Humanities entailed. The scholarly perspective led me to eagerly listen and engage with how water is woven as a classical motif in literature due to the historical phenomenon and obsession of the ship-wreck.

Maybe a bit off-topic but I am drawn to one of my favorite quotes or aphorisms from Bruce Lee. He says, “Be like water make its way through its cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find around or through it. Be water, my friend.” My mind also just now draws connection to David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, “This is Water”. It felt so easy to listen to the conversation yesterday because it flowed naturally and that speaks to what the thought process of Blue Humanities invites.

Why So Blue?

Posted on September 17, 2025 by Samuel Peters

Everything is conceived through a lens. Whether a stance on sharks, a critique of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” or even a take on the ideal trajectory of casting a fishing rod, everything is thought about through one’s perspective. During the discussion with Professor Steve Mentz concerning Blue Humanities, one question popped into my head: Why so blue, Dr. Mentz?

Talking about oceans may be easy enough, though immersing yourself in the language alters perspectives. We already see some oceanic language appear regularly in our everyday life. For example, as Mentz suggested, humans “surf” the web, or data “flows.” Opening our eyes to the diction reveals details we may often overlook. In this effect, these small changes to wording subliminally hint at our passions or interests. This could be seen in replacing “field of thought” with “current of thought.” These were just a couple of examples discussed during the conversation, though Mentz’s vocabulary seemed filled with ocean innuendos.

Mentz also discussed Freud’s ideas on the dissolution of the individual human experience, which was frankly a bit confusing for me. In my take, there could be a hundred ways in which people talk about navigating the web, each differing slightly from their perspective, though if humans converged their vocabulary, it could make everyone a bit more similar. This is happening with the amount of blue vocabulary that’s commonplace across societies. It also speaks on the people who choose to use oceanic diction, suggesting they have more in common than they’d believe.

These nods to blue humanities in our everyday language suggest the vast influence of the topic in our daily lives. “Surfing” the web may be common, though understanding why it’s even said is important. Citing the discussion, it turns out that undersea cables assisting in global communication are commonplace in the ocean. So when that phrase is said, it can be taken in a literal sense. Through this perspective, surfing the web implies how humans may physically surf over infrastructure supporting the World Wide Web, possibly ignorant of this fact-unlike Dr. Mentz.

All of these points reveal Mentz to be a man truly engrossed in his work. Through his speech, knowledge, and perspective, he physically embodies bodies of water. The why is clear—he loves and lives out blue humanities, though a deeper why remains: why specifically blue, as opposed to green, digital, or others? For that question, I’ll play it easy and assume he was secretly raised by a pack of dolphins.

San Diego State University Library, 4th Floor. (Extra Credit Blog)

Posted on September 16, 2025 by Nina Galindo

After our visit to special collections last week and our class conversation about book call numbers and library exploration, I decided that for this blog post, and out of my own interest I would visit our library again.

I have been to our campus library many times, either to find a place to study or to find books, usually at the beginning of the semester when book lists are assigned I will look for access to books through the local libraries of San Diego/Chula Vista/National City or here at our school library. The book stacks are somewhat familiar to me, I know how to look at each books’ spine to find the right call number and locate each book, but to know that call number I always visit the library’s website first.

Displaying IMG_3613.png — Located on the Fourth Floor with the call number; PR28131. R64 2001 found online after searching for “Romeo and Juliet,” on the Library website and filtering for books.

On each floor the library has a map of the floor and stacks, the fourth floor has its books with a PG-PZ call number behind the elevators.

Usually when I search the library for a book I try to find the book quickly and then leave, but what I recently noticed at my local library, South Chula Vista Library, 389 Orange Ave, Chula Vista, CA 91911, is that when looking for a specific book on a shelf it will also be surrounded by not only other books by the same author, but the same by books by a similar genre or, if the book is by a prominent author, then surrounded by essays and other books about that author and their books. Today at the SDSU library I intentionally wanted to look around the book I was searching for, I picked Romeo and Juliet intentionally, assuming that because of it’s popularity that there must be much about it and about Shakespeare on the shelves. When I found the book in stack PR 2807 to PR 2920 I was overwhelmed, there Romeo and Juliet wasn’t just a book, but a topic.

There were multiple copies of Romeo and Juliet as well as collections of essays about it taking up a large part of the shelf, and next to it there were the other works of Shakespeare, Othello, The taming of The Shrew, and The Tempest.

Not only that shelf had works of and about Shakespeare, but seventeen others in that space did as well, Eighteen Shelves!!

Displaying IMG_3624.jpeg — Works of and about Shakespeare between stack of call numbers between PR 2474 to 2920 until stack of call numbers PR 3012 to PR 3353

I used to wonder how before today’s internet students might have gotten research projects done without the easier access that we have today. I imagined that it might have been stressful having to scour the library, hoping to find a relevant book on a topic, but now I realize that it must have been at least a little simpler than I had imagined. If I were to do a research project on one of Shakespeare’s works I’d be able to visit the stacks on the 4th floor and know that I wouldn’t only find the book, but and entire world around it, full of different essays, research books, and perspectives to help my understanding, appreciation, and reading of any book. Going to the library is not just a visit, but an exploration.

The Evolution of The Book

Posted on September 14, 2025 by Dakota Goodman

In chapter one of Amaranth Borsuk’s “The Book”, she details the extensive history of the book as it spans across cultures and people. There is no clear origin to writing since so many cultures have adapted different ways on how to keep records and expressing language. As a result, there are many different variations of the same technology, where the main differences lie in the resources that were available in those regions. While I was reading, I was fascinated by the trial and error that went into these new technologies such as the papyrus scroll in Egypt. Borsuk notes that in order to make scrolls, the papyrus needed to be laid in a specific fashion in order to prevent warping and cracking. As scrolls morphed into bound volumes, there was even trial and error in ink placement and binding. If inked pages were bound side back to back, the ink bled and it became illegible. While it may seem trivial to us now, figuring out how to bind pages together or place ink, was a crucial aspect in the creation of the book. We have become so distant from the newness of a book that we do not seem to realize the rich history behind it. Within Borsuk’s chapter, she is clear to express that the book is a form of technology. It has gone through countless revisions in order to reach the product that we have now. And as a form of technology, it has altered the way that we see the world.

In her final section of the chapter, “Reading and Writing’s Shifts”, Borsuk includes the evolution of language and academics. As the book slowly takes shape throughout the centuries, language, writing, and learning also changes. Borsuk writes, “As scholar Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, his study of the ways writing technologies restructure consciousness, the written word enabled Greek scholars to transcribe and codify effective rhetorical strategies… Writing, in fact, allowed rhetoric to flourish.” In this quote it is clear how fundamental and powerful the book was and still is. It has the power to alter the way that we see the world and how we respond to it. It has opened countless discussions that allow us to express ourselves and communicate with others. Furthermore, Borsuk goes on to include how the written word has improved vocabulary since people no longer needed to mentally store their vocabulary. The book has furthered human learning, communication, and perception in a way that its crucial to how we have reached today’s society.

Culture in Books and Books as Culture

Posted on September 14, 2025 by JJ Rezaei

Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book explains the various forms of physical mediums that writing has taken up over time. In it, there is an inherent questioning of the literal definition of a book (Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines it as “A portable volume consisting of a series of written, printed, or illustrated pages bound together for ease of reading”). Understanding the etymology of books brings its’ existence as a concrete concept into question in the same way that all of language is. For there to be an “objective” definition of what a book is would mean that there would need to be some sort of objective truth in the first place. Tracing the etymology of anything unveils that it is the result of hundreds, often thousands, of years of human experiences.

Because what a book physically is has changed so much over time (paper, papyrus, wood, or bamboo; written horizontally or vertically; read as we read it today or “like a laptop” (43)), the cultural experience of reading a book must have changed too. In the past, for example, being a scribe was a miserable experience, “they spent six hours a day hunched before the page in a cold scriptorium, incurring back-aches, headaches, eye strain, and cramps…” (48). Today, anyone who would create a hand-written book would do it as an artisanal craft and presumably out of passion. What would be required of a book-maker is completely different today versus thousands of years ago. What I want to emphasize is that this creates a completely different experience with the book thus changing the relationship and context surrounding books and the book reading experience.

Books seem to have a cultural resurgence among Gen Z as entertainment–I feel that books lost this for a few decades when TV and video games ruled as modes of storytelling. I wonder if the accessibility of books today has something to do with their modern association as a leisure activity. It is now easier than ever to read any book that you can imagine, dozens of different tablets exist for this activity. Additionally, hundreds of websites exist that post various modes of literature that would have previously been in book form. It is perhaps this unprecedented ease of access that causes phenomena like “booktok” which specializes in leisurely and captivating reading.

Week 4: Book History, Beyond the Text and More

Posted on September 14, 2025 by Mario Escamilla

Books have always been thought of as an object in which it only transforms because of the information that it carries inside of it, but that’s not the only case. Amaranth Borsuk presents a point that I believe is very hard to argue against and that is that books are ultimately decided based on what the needs are of the time period. Some of these things being the fact that new information was wanted as well as how they were going to obtain the materials to create these because at the beginning it was all done by hand and not machine. “Book historian Fredrick Kilgour refers to the book’s development as a series of “punctuated equilibria” driven by “the ever-increasing informational needs of society” a useful way of thinking about the book’s transformations”(Borsuk p.3). Stories, novels, books, comics, manga’s, e-books and such all have developed in their own way because of the type of technology they use for the codex. The style of the how the book is created makes each of these types of books stand out in their own category which is something that I never really paid attention to until now. I mention this because chapter one dives into the history of scrolls, clay tablets, palm leaf manuscripts and how those materials influenced how information would be put on them.

If anything, this chapter has made me think of how books have been influenced by us and our needs of how we as a society want it to be. An example of this is how e-books are being used every day by people. The demand and use for e-books through kindles and such will essentially shape the way we show information to our viewers and how it will affect them.

I still can’t wrap my head around the technological advancements of how we created the book from the codex. It’s starting to make me analyze books in a way of “Is there really any other way to make this even BETTER or have we truly created the best possible way to absorb information through this thing we call “book”. Ultimately, Borsuk already has me turning my brain upside down in how I should start looking at books since we read the history and context of how it all started from the various different cultures. It really goes to show that text is not only the biggest influencer on how a book will be created for the current society, but rather multiple factors that you wouldn’t even guess.

BOOKS!!

ECL 596. Fall 2025. Professor Jessica Pressman with Anna Culbertson