Happy 4th of July!

Obviously I’m very busy mixing fireworks and alcohol this weekend, but I’ve somehow managed to squeeze in a links post.

— You’ve likely seen this already, but a bookseller in Georgia (represent!) discovered an amazing porn stash in hollowed out books.  Booksaga is definitely a new favorite, featuring great writing and really funny stories of life as a small town bookseller.  Thanks to William for the link.

— Bibliophile Bullpen went to the thrift store and found the coolest thing ever.  I want one.

I went to the thrift store a couple of weeks ago.  Found an awesome old Polaroid camera set for a couple of bucks.  Bummer.  Bought it anyway.

— It sounds like Jeremy had a great trip to Charlottesville!

— More amusing housecalls from Bookride.

— Hoefler & Frere-Jones present a 223-year old specimen sheet featuring the “smallest letter in the world” at 4 points.

— Instructables has a nice article on getting started with wood block printing.  Via Moleskinerie

— Be sure to check out the excellent multi-part Slate piece on the troublesome science of gender differences.  There’s an entire page on the supposed gap in verbal abilities between men and women.  Good stuff.

— Bill Gates gets his old textbook back.  Aww.  Via Book Patrol.

Book History Timeline

Fellow SHARPist Dr. Paul Dijstelberge has discovered a nifty timeline creation website called Dipity which he’s used to start a fantastic printing and book history timeline.  He’s added a lot of content, including images, text and Google maps, and has invited other book historians to request editor status.  I’m looking forward to contributing in the weeks to come!

The Beatles in Wellington

Not really book related, but some cool new photos were uploaded today by the National Library of New Zealand.  The information on flickr says that we’re free to reproduce the images in blogs, but the links seem to be intentionally broken, so check out the set here.

Links

— I recently discovered the aptly titled blog Do I really want to touch that with my hand? This week Holly, who works as a conservator at the University of Virginia, discusses the recent (and timely) water damage training simulation which she coordinated.  It’s really fascinating and there are lots of great pictures at Flickr.

— Check out Paul Collins’s Slate piece on the rise and fall of the semicolon.

— This week Ace Jet 170 has an awesome Found Type Friday - take a look!

— More graphic goodness from Book Patrol - a  lovely, typetastic poster for the M25 in London.

— Michael of The Dispersal of Darwin points out some very funny/sad mistakes in an exhibit of scientists’ portraits at a museum in Valencia, Spain.  Fail!

— Richard at Reading Archives offers a thought-provoking post on digital curation.

— Via Morbid Anatomy, an incredible photo exhibit, Picturing the Museum, at the American Museum of Natural History.  Also images from the newly digitized Die Kleyner Chirurgie, an anatomy book published in 1542.

— More on the library rescue (and photos) at the University of Iowa, from the Fine Books Blog.

— Video of a CNN commentator calling books for boys “emasculating.”  Via Quillblog.

— From the NY Times, a piece on the last volume of Camus’s notebooks to be translated into English.

Getting It Really, Really Wrong

The Discovery Channel is reporting today on a new study of high mercury levels in medieval monks, believed to be caused by exposure to the ink used in creating manuscripts (among other possibilities).  It seems interesting, but unfortunately both the Discovery Channel and the scientists who preformed the research err quite seriously in referring to the books as incunabula.  One has to wonder what else the archaeologists got wrong about medieval book production.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm, did not have these diseases [syphilis and leprosy] but contained mercury in their bones, scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books.

And again:

Even today “one should really not touch, or much less rub, the parchment pages of an incunabulum,” Lund Rasmussen said, adding that mercury “was used in the first place because cinnabar (a type of mercury) has this bright red, beautiful color.”

And this is the worst bit.

By 1536, books were no longer written by hand, but were instead printed, so the scientists suspect the toxic red ink literally faded from the monastic picture.

Where did they get this random date of 1536?  Printing had already spread across the Continent by 1500, even if some books continued to be produced by hand.

And of course there’s no email address or comment section.  Argh.

*edit* I found a comment submission page and wrote a note explaining what incunabula means.  I’m sure it will never be read.

The Department of Forgetting

Fascinating article over at Slate today on the FBI’s archival management system (or lack thereof.)

Not Book Related: Cool Beetle!

This weekend I went to a wedding in Sewanee and found this beautiful Rhinoceros beetle outside our hotel.  He was strong!  Once I’d picked him up it was really hard to get him off my hand and into the bushes.

Dante

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to Dante, but I finally read the Inferno this weekend.  I guess it never seemed like something I could get into, not being very religious, but I ended up loving it.  I found a copy in the library with really good commentary, and at some point in the near future I hope to find the last two volumes by the same translators.  In the meantime, some really good Dante links.

— MS Holkham misc. 48 is a late 14th century illuminated manuscript of the Inferno at the Bodleian Library.

— One my favorite sites is Renaissance Dante in Print: 1472-1629.  This online exhibit from Notre Dame exhaustively covers the early printing history of the Divine Comedy, with image links at the bottom of each page.  I particularly liked the section on Dantean cosmography, which compiles the different graphical representations of Dante’s Hell.

— The National Gallery of Victoria displays 36 of William Blake’s watercolor illustrations for the Divine Comedy, created during the last years of his life, between 1824 and 1827. The images are small, but clear.

— The William Blake Archive, UNC Chapel Hill, has an even larger digital collection, including 102 images for the Divine Comedy.  The only problems are that the image viewer is a bit buggy, at least in Firefox, and when you enlarge an image it blurs and the sides get cut off.

— Digital Dante, from Columbia University, includes a collection of small images by Gustave Doré, Sandro Botticelli and Salvador Dali.

— The World of Dante, created by the University of Virginia, is a great resource and has a lovely gallery that includes images from Yates Thompson 36, a strikingly beautiful 15th century illuminated manuscript held by the British Library.  The gallery also displays Dantean art by Botticelli, Doré, Alessandro Vellutello and John Flaxman.

• Carnal Sinners - Yates Thompson 36, British Library.

Egypt and the Engraving Machine

The man above, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, was the inventor of the modern pencil and the world’s first engraving machine.  I’ve been reading about him in Napoleon and the Scientific Expedition to Egypt, an online exhibit from the Linda Hall Library (all the images in this post are from the LHL.)

Conté was one of Napoleon’s 150 savants, intellectuals charged with the study of Egypt’s culture and natural history during the French invasion, which began in 1798.  Conté was known as a mechanical genius (he was put in charge of the expedition’s balloon corps,) but had originally been a portrait painter in pre-Revolutionary France.  As a cultural observer in Egypt he made detailed studies of local trades and technologies, and he became responsible for publishing the expedition’s scientific record, the Description de l’Égypte, after his return to France in 1802. (Though he died in 1805 before the project was completed.)

The Linda Hall exhibit explains the necessity for mechanical engraving in producing the Description:

The first edition of the Description de l’Égypte eventually included 837 copperplate engravings, most of them impressively large elephant folios and some of them even bigger, double-elephant folios that were twice as large.  A single plate might require hundreds of engraved lines to faithfully portray, for example, the cloudless Egyptian sky.  The sky had to appear dark at the top and fade gradually to a pale expanse at the horizon… It stretched the limits of human ability, and the time to complete a single plate by traditional methods could be up to six months.

Conté’s machine (pictured below in an engraving from the Description) made it possible to quickly create long, uniform lines in a variety of depths.  This cut production time down from months to days for each plate, though it still took 20 years for the entire work to be completed due to the vast amounts of material and the difficulties of compiling and organizing all of it.

I’ve been reading about this engraving machine all over the internet and I’m still not 100% positive about how it worked, though it looks simple enough.  I’m also curious to know if it was embraced in Europe and whether it had an impact on engraving in general.  I don’t know much about engraving, though, so it’s hard to say.  (Come to think of it, I have lots of unanswered questions like, ‘what happened to make the eye patch necessary?’)

The next image is the example page, showing the different engraving patterns the machine was capable of producing (click for a larger version):

And here’s a complete engraving, demonstrating how the machine was able to give texture and depth to the sky (click for a larger image):

I particularly liked this quote, from a 2006 NY Times piece, about the engravings:

The versatile Conté met the challenge of the images’ imposing scale and fine detail by inventing an engraving machine that yielded a more subtle spectrum of grays relatively easily…. Perhaps this facilitated the almost preternatural fusion of subject and medium that distinguishes these prints. The geometry of ancient Egyptian architecture, illuminated by harsh Egyptian light, could not have been better suited to the eerie formalities of the engraving technique and its miragelike effects.

If you’ve found this interesting I definitely recommend checking out the entire exhibit.  The content is very satisfying, with lots of commentary and images, and I was totally enthralled reading about a bunch of nerds on an extended scientific adventure (quite often the artists would paint other savants painting Egyptian artifacts!)  The engravings in the Description are some of the most enduring images of Egypt created by Europeans, and I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve seen one in a history book or documentary, so it’s very nice to have the whole story.

You can also view the entire Description online via the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.  The presentation is somewhat unfortunate, but the images are nice and can be enlarged.

Links

— Deeplinking points to an interesting, photo-filled piece in the Quarterly Conversation on three book artists.

— Via Ministry of Type, a set of truly amazing 3D foam letters.

— Bibliodyssey posts an eclectic and beautiful set of newly digitized Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts from the Bodleian Library.

— From the FAIL Blog, how did you get that backwards b? Pwned.

— New York Times article (with photos) on the upcoming auction of the Richard Green collection of scientific books at Christies.

— I recently discovered the hilarious blog Got Medieval, which makes me want to apologize to my own readers for being so horribly unfunny all the time. This week Carl has some excellent comments regarding Sydney Shep’s recent work on emoticons and the possibility of medieval precursors to the :-).

— With the arrival of summer everyone is getting all crafty. William at Hang Fire Books created his own corkboard, and Bibliophile Bullpen posts YouTube instructions for making an origami book.

— Bookride discusses a childhood classic, The Velveteen Rabbit.

— Brian Cassidy investigates his Kindle with a loupe and ponders the uncanny valley hypothesis. Also via Book Patrol, a neat Guardian article on writers’ rooms (with lots of pictures,) and a link to the online version of the art exhibition, People Reading.

— Philobiblos has a great links list this weekend - do check out the NPR story on the rescue of rare books from flooding at the University of Iowa.