This is how a page from a medieval #manuscript looks when its original text had been scraped off by someone, overwritten with a new text, and then later, a 19th-century scholar discovered the #palimpsest and tried to make the undertext's ink visible again by painting the page with chemical reagents.
I love book curses. Were they just an English thing or did all languages do it?
A fave:
“If anyone take away this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen.”
Outstanding talk today by @erik_kwakkel on the unique combination of intuition and rational analysis that allow the expert paleographer to identify the time and place when a #medieval#manuscript was produced.
@histodons@sharporg As an author you should more than encourage your publisher to submit copies of your book to SHARP (and elsewhere). Some publishers just do not send books. For example, in the last two years, not one book from the series "Library of the Written Word" (Brill) appeared in front of the jury members. So choose your publisher wisely. Submitting free copies to win a prize or an award is, in my opinion, part of the support you want to get for your book.
@dbellingradt@histodons irgend eine Idee, wann dies passiert sein könnte? Gibt es ähnlich beraubte Sammelbände in der Sammlung oder ist dies ein Einzelfall?
I have to teach tomorrow, but for many students in a college town--as it once was, so shall it always be, Alpha et Omega--the weekend begins tonight, on Thirsty Thursday.
Here is a huge line of students waiting to get into a local bar, circa 8 p.m. (I was coming from dinner after our #BookHistory seminar on materiality, spatiality, and temporality in Martial's poetry
Run, early modern postal horse with your messenger sitting on top blowing the post horn, run. @histodons
You see a video of the identical printed image used in the 1670s on the title page of the Nuremberg “Wochentliche Ordinari Post-Zeitung”. Re-used Woodblock, here we go. #bookhistory #histodons#newshistory
This is the account for Manuscript, Rare Book & Archive Studies (MARBAS) at Princeton. We're an initiative dedicated to sharing resources and techniques related to textual artifacts produced before 1600. That's manuscripts, archival documents, early printed books, papyri, inscriptions, the list goes on! We're all about premodern texts and the multitudes of materials that have carried them.
On the painting with the title "The Alchemist" from the Flemish Mattheus van Helmont, circa mid seventeenth century, are many uses and abuses of #earlymodern paper products reflected in the details. I will address 7 of these paper issues in the thread. Bonus for #Alchemy friends: a large écorché figure, a distillation apparatus over a fire, and metal working assistants.
Enjoy.
Spot the difference: on the left, the copperplate print is hand-coloured after the print run, and on the right no extra work is done. Colouring prints was a thing in #earlymodern Europe. Guess which version was more expensive - and sold better?
@dbellingradt@histodons Als "Malen nach Zahlen" verpackt, wären die Drucke sicher zum Verkaufsschlager geworden. Es ist alles nur eine Frage der richtigen Werbekampagne.
@dbellingradt@histodons
Even some early movie films were hand coloured. All those tiny frames!
Though there was RGB colour film at the end of the Victorian age an exposure was 20 minutes. It wasn't till there was CYM layered film that colour movies were possible.
I think before 1742 China was doing coloured prints using multiple wood blocks.
Nitric acid was 14th C, or maybe 10th C. But using it for silver nitrate photos was 19th C.
The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution: The Making of Humanitarianism. by Dr David de Boer (Oxford University Press; Sept. 28, 2023)
PDFs are a print/publish/preview format, not ebooks. Practically unusable except on a large screen. A reflowable epub 2 is an open standard and open access as it can convert to Kindle or PDF and be read on anything.
At least search works well.
I have a 23.5″ 4K screen, like paper in quality, so I can read it on the desktop. I'll see what it's like on a 10" eink, but those are not common. Reading on a tablet is ghastly.
#BookHistory people! Have you ever read a book or article that proposed anything like the communications circuit for manuscripts? Basically a conceptual model of the creation, circulation, and reception of mss books? I would love to know about them for my quals paper!
@BiblioWingate
Not off the top of my head, but any smart person--e.g. you!--could bang one out. Sapere aude!
Gotta say (tho I hate to, for multiple reasons) the vaunted communication circuit was nothing original + skewed toward an atypical set of sources. A lot of this canonization, frankly, depends on being a scholar in a position to command attention
Cf. these (more complex) examples from Walter Hömberg's excellent book, anno 1975. I could cite more