Tag Archives: week 6

Traces

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I think there are traces of everyone we meet and have a relationship with etched deeply into ourselves. I think about my past friend Arwen who liked to dip her sourdough bread into her tomato soup—a behavior I still do today, even if our friendship has long since ended. This is also true of physical items such as books, scrolls, etc as mentioned in our reading, “What is Bibliography?” From marks left on the pages indicating wire lines that ran across the wooden mould to a watermark, there are physical traces are present on the object itself showing the relationship between the maker(s) and the object. There are other marks that could lead to who once held the book, and their ideas on it written with in the margins. Just like Dr. Culbertson said, it’s a mystery and we are the detectives who are tasked with unearthing the objects history. I’m finding out this class is as much archeology as it is history and english. We could also think of ourselves as Indiana Jones, without the dangerous adventures (maybe), looking for something in unfamiliar territory.

These traces also lead us to ask why and what. Why was this method used? Why was this specific material used? What can we gleam from this information? What is the significance of using this method and material? What is the meaning of the universe and why are we here? (Okay maybe not that one.) (No I wasn’t trying to reach the word count.) (Why are you still reading within the parentheses?) These are questions that might not always have answers because they are lost in the void or to time, but it is important to hypothesize because it is important for us to try and understand, so we can figure out where we as a society want to go. In the short excerpts we read, a couple of them. (Derrick Spires, Lisa Maruca and Kate Ozment) mention using Bibliography as a way to identify as wells as resist oppression and also mend structures of oppression. All through sometimes microscopic traces left on books, scrolls, etc. I only wish we had more time, and resources (such as carbon dating, microscopes, etc.) available to us to aid in our journey this semester.

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.

Curiosities about Digital Bibliography

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When considering what a bibliography was, I assumed it would be a sort of contextual listing that could give context into the written contents of a book, similar to the bibliography seen at the end of essays. But, as The Bibliographical Society of America states on the About Page, “Bibliography is much more than your ‘works cited’ page.” A bibliography examines and assesses the physical aspects of a text and how those aspects relate and reflect the time the text was made. 

The art of bibliography is composed of numerous practices like enumerative, systematic, analytical, critical, descriptive, historical, and textual, as Terry Belanger mentions. All of which aim to decipher a book’s physicality and history. When reading how bibliography is approached and interacting with the examples on the website, I began to understand what sort of questions one must ask in order to really understand a book. Things like: What are the physical aspects of the paper used? Are there any splotches of ink from messy printing or etchings in the paper from whatever machine was used on the paper? What’s written on the page other than the story?

I thought it was interesting when interacting with the second sample of The Bibliographical Society of America’s About Page, which points out that “anonymous print production is a common occurrence, especially when the content is political.” When considering how political content was published anonymously, I thought about how today it’s almost virtually impossible to make any statement without a digital footprint being left behind. Though many posts may go under the radar as millions of people make daily posts, simultaneously, with enough care from one netizen, whoever made a certain post or appeared in some video can be traced, along with a good chunk of their personal history. This makes me wonder how modern bibliography is being approached today, especially because G. Thomas Tanselle, in Bibliography Defined,” mentions that “traditional bibliographical approaches are also now being applied to objects carrying electronic texts.” Reading how books can be explored outside of just their written content, though it’s most certainly considered, has gotten me excited to attempt creating my own bibliography with something from Special Collections. 

From Last Week to This – A Book’s Body and Its Life

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While exploring the further reading section of What is Bibliography, I stumbled on one excerpt in particular, the one from W. W. Greg’s Bibliography – A Retrospect (1945). What he writes instantly reminded me of the thought process I had last week when I was reading Chapter 2 of Borsuk’s The Book. There Borsuk compares the codex to a human body, with a spine, a head, and even a tail (The Book, 77). I think while Greg technically makes a different comparison, they still connect very well.

Greg describes bibliography as “the study of books as material objects irrespective of their contents.” For him, the goal is “to reconstruct for each particular book the history of its life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word.” I find it interesting that he talks about a book as if it had a biography. The words “birth” and “adventures” make it sound very much alive. They turn the book into something with its own story, separate from the words printed inside. Suddenly, the bent spine, the faded paper, or the scribbled notes in the margins all become traces of the book’s life.

Borsuk makes a similar point in a different way. Her comparison of the codex to a body also takes the book out of its role as a container. With a spine, a head, and a tail, the book looks like something with presence, something we hold and interact with like a living form. What makes this especially interesting to me is that it connects so directly to what I thought about last week. In my last blog, I reflected on how Borsuk’s metaphor made me realize that a book is not just information but something we meet, almost like a companion. The hinge of the cover, for example, pulling open the first page like an invitation, felt to me like the book was active, as if it greeted us. Reading Greg’s description, that thought immediately comes back to me. He gives the book not just a body but a life story. Putting the two together, the book becomes a being that has both a form and a past. It has a presence we can feel and a biography we can trace. This is why Greg’s passage stood out to me so much, as it reminded me of my own realization from last week.

In the end, both writers remind me that reading is more than just taking in words. Each book has its own presence, shaped by the people who produced it and the readers who left their marks on it. To open a book is not only to read its text. It is also to meet a life that has already been lived.

Understanding the Society Around the Book

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They’re always talking about “what you know you know,” “what you don’t know you don’t know,” and “what you know you don’t know.” Right now, I am staring down the barrel of a football-length cannon loaded with what I know I don’t know. It is vast. More and more, I am coming to the central idea in all of the texts and objects we are looking at in this course, that the history of the book is the history of nearly everything.

And if “the ultimate resort the object of bibliographical study is, I believe, to reconstruct for each particular book the history of its life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word,” as WW Greg said in “Bibliography, A Retrospect,” then it is clear that I must be more intimately familiar with the many ways books came into the world, and to be more familiar with that I must better understand rudimentary production processes, how to make board, paper, ink, when and where and how all these ingredients were created, in what corners of the world were different types more common, what were the socioeconomic factors of the society in which a book was produced, what were the ongoing political struggles, what type of government did that society have?

To address the biography of a book without understanding much of that would be like trying to see your own house from space using a magnifying glass. Nothing but a generalized guess. To solve Greg’s “central problem of bibliography,” or to “ascertain the exact circumstances and conditions in which [a] particular book was produced,” I am going to have to choose a book produced in a society whose history I know well, or else I would be starting all of that research from scratch, and to track its adventures, as Greg said earlier, it seems like I would need some history of its provenance or of the hands that held it, so an English or Spanish reader would likely create marginalia that I could understand or come close to understanding.

So in some ways, conducting a bibliography of a book, is to do a deep dive on all the facets of the society that surrounds the book, because without that understanding, there is nothing to latch on to. A page is just a page, a material is just a material, and there is no story to be told from either.

The How.

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When working on our biography of a book midterm projects, the biggest inquiry at hand is how. How are these books made, and how does that lead us to the bigger picture? For instance, “Bibliography examines the artifactual value of texts – including books, manuscripts, and digital texts – and how they reflect the people and cultures that created, acquired, and exchanged them.” This quote helps make the idea of a bibliography clearer, especially since the term isn’t as well-known as one might think. The biggest point that stands out to me is the “how”. That is the biggest question that lies before us when examining these artifacts. How are these books crafted? How were the pages bound? How were the pictures printed? How does the font reflect the culture of the time? These are how questions then lead to the bigger ideas, the so what, which is really what is important. We are close reading these books in a new way, which most of us have never done before. We are used to opening up a book and reading its contents, then reading closely from there. But here we are reading the spine, the cover, what the pages are made out of, how the pictures were printed, the marginalia, the signatures, the bookplate, and ext. This analysis then helps us see how people read the book during its heyday. Does it have a hook on it? What is the size? If it’s small, we can assume it’s a personal book, but if it’s large, then we can picture it being used in a public space such as a church.

There are so many questions at hand, especially so many how questions. I am very much looking forward to jumping into this project and close reading a book for myself to see into its past and glimpse into the culture that it reflects.

Bibliographical Book Study

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I had never known that an area of study surrounded bibliographical records. Bibliographical study analyzes all of the features of a book and text, including its watermarks and how it was printed to view a book as it’s own source of record to how it was made. The study prioritizes the book as an object, an object that has record, history, and material other than the main body of text. Bibliographical study considers how a book was manufactured and transmitted and uses the features of a book, not just it’s word, as a tool to learn about “cultural change, whether in mass civilization or minority culture.” (D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 1999).

Using the structure and construction of a book as a tool for learning about the exact culture and era that produced it, rather than just referring to it’s main text, is a sort of anthropological study, investigating changes in culture through the work it produces and what they add or take away from each new iteration of work. This is an intersection between multiple areas of study, requiring understanding of historical, anthropological, and literary perspectives. Bibliographical study reveals when and why certain aspects of the book began to matter to publishers and teaches how readers would read, share, keep, and interact with their books. Those two analyzed subjects, the publisher and the reader, are signifiers of how their society at large treated and thought of literature, reading, records, and books.

This has opened up a new perspective to me, the concept of Bibliographical study has made me realize that I have never close read the entirety of a book, doing so would have required considering each detail of it’s construction, covers, spine and pages. Knowing that body of a book should be studied and taken into consideration has made me reconsider one of the first ever notions I was taught as a reader, the idea to “not judge a book by it’s cover.” I will not only judge what may be the content of the book by it’s cover, but I will most certainly begging to question what that cover means about the book’s creation, about the readers it is trying to entice, and about what aspects of our culture has influenced how that cover, and the rest of the book is made.