There is a paper story to this painting from 1672 waiting to be told. Meet Jan Berckheyde's "A Notary in His Office" highlighted in 5 steps - a thread for friends of #paperhistory and #mediahistory of #EarlyModernEurope, and for #histodons in general. Expect a view into the inky paper states of Europe, a paper age dealing also with waste papers, fresh paper sheets waiting to be used, a high paper demand, and some document bags literally full of used papers. Let's roll @histodons
@histodons Using paper as a culture included storing. The neatly stored bound books are relatively easy to store, as #bookhistory knows. But the used paper sheets caused problems and messy storing decisions as highlighted in detail no. 2. Used paper was waiting to be used again (as reading matter). Too often newly written communication flows inspired new papers of the future. And in between: the sheets were waiting somewhere. Stored to rot a bit, bored as artifact can be, dear #histodons .
@histodons A closer look at every administrative activity of the period offers stored and waiting fresh paper sheets. Yet unused artifacts in different trading units of the paper trade: As detail no. 4 shows, you could buy paper as single sheets or in units up to 500, in the preferred format, quality and size, by the way.
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.
first a quick stop at the 1817 Athenaeum (closed today, but sister-in-law is a member). Once there were many of these loca institutions devoted to #education and #reading. Only 16 remain.
#TIH#OTD in #MedievalManuscripts & #BookHistory
Happy birthday to…
• Leonard Eugene Boyle, OP, OC (13 Nov 1923–1999), 🇮🇪 & 🇨🇦 medievalist & palaeographer, & 1st Irish & North American Prefect of the Vatican Library in Rome (1984–1997).
• Martin Bodmer (13 Nov 1899–1971), Swiss bibliophile, scholar, book collector.
And happy belated birthday to Wilfrid Voynich (12 Nov [O.S. 31 Oct] 1865–1930), Polish revolutionary, antiquarian, bibliophile of Voynich manuscript fame. @bookhistodons
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.
'The Hidden Voice of the #Medieval Scribe' with Erik Kwakkel, University of British Columbia : Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies : UMass Amherst
Five-College Seminar in the #History of the #Book, hosted by the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
'The Hidden Voice of the Medieval Scribe' with Erik Kwakkel, University of British Columbia : Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies : UMass Amherst
Five-College Seminar in the #History of the #Book, hosted by the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
But do and will AI text generators stop using old texts, let's say digitized #earlymodern print editions, when these prints still feature the contemporary copyright right advise on the title pages?
Like here: "nicht nach zu drucken" (do not to re-print!).
Things October 31 is besides #Halloween: #Reformation Day, celebrating the date in 1517 when Martin #Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg--or did he?
Modern scholarship long tended to dismiss the episode as fictional, citing lack of contemporary evidence. 1/n
Things October 31 is besides #Halloween: #Reformation Day, celebrating the date in 1517 when Martin #Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg--or did he?
Book historian Andrew Pettegree, who accepts the tradition, makes the key points in Brand Luther (2017):
Even Luther did not see the Theses as extraordinary
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.