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 "A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking." Jerry Seinfeld
Posted by Andrea.
Librarian's Instruction to a Bookbinder Concerning a Hebrew Book
"Please bind backwards, Hebrew is mirror image of English."
Captured List Report
Terry Belanger has posted an excellent report on the Bookbinding 2000 conference.
Have you read this for a second time yet?
Every reader that I have encountered has been overwhelmed with the consequence of Adrian John's book. It is both a literary pleasure and a magnificent exposition. It is titled The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, and it describes the environment for book publication in London in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Johns book is a counterpoint study of Elizabeth Eisensteins work since it reconstructs the role of print interms of its textual mutability, exploitation of authors, captive production means and illicit and corrupting distribution; the dissembling role of print. At the same time this disertation on the struggle to achieve dependable stored knowledge is also supplied with wonderful diaramas of print shops and bookmans' coffee houses. As John Feather said in his SHARP review (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing, SHARP News, Volume 8, Number 4, Autumn, 1999); "Adrian Johns has written a very important book."
One of the important insights that Johns brings to the book studies community is a realization of the extent of our own contrivance of the book as authoritative and immutable and how atypical such bookly dependability has been. It is also relevant that Johns reconstruction of the ifier earlier nature of print has an eerie similarity to a new context of digitally stored knowledge.
Book Studies Conference
Just finished with the Johns book and want to hang out with book studies characters? Go to the conference at University of Edinburgh, http://www.ed.ac.uk/englit/research/chb/matcult/
Posted by Gary.
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