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About: I use these slides to present to English students about book as object studies, though much of it would work for other disciplines. When possible, I use physical examples along with the slides. I have included notes to give a sense of what I talk about with each slide.

-Melanie Hubbard

mail@melaniehubbard.com

The Book as Object & Literary Scholarship

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A Little Book History

As much as books are containers of information and narratives, they are technologies with their form and how they function speaking to their time and place.

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Cuneiform Tablet (Bronze Age)

Mediums

Roman Woman holding wax table (circa 55-79)

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Formats

Chinese bamboo Art of War book

Sub-Saharan African loose leaf Quran

Mayan codex

Indian palm leaf Tamil manuscript

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Formats

In the West, the text formats we are most familiar with are the scroll and the codex. The move from scrolls, a liner format, to codex, a format that can be experienced as linear and nonlinear, was a major shift in both the form a text can take and how one engages with a text. Other differences between scrolls and codices include things like storability, codices are easier to store, and portability, codices can be made to fit easily in pockets. To this day, scrolls continue to play a pinnacle role in Judaism as the Torah is in scroll form. The fact that the Bible was in codex form helped early Christianity spread more widely and quickly.

Images from the Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University: Scrolls and 1450 Book of Hours, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University

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France, circa 1300

France, later half of 6^th century

Manuscript

These manuscripts (handwritten texts) demonstrate a technological shift. The 6^th century leaf (on the left) is neatly written text lacking punctuation and space between words. The 12^th Century leaf (on the right) is an illuminated manuscript with historiated initials (a decorative initial that contains a picture), other ornate decoration, punctuation, and rubrication (the red text), which not only make the page more beautiful, but also more legible and navigable.

Historiated initials illustrate or play off of the textual content in the manuscript, reference other works, and/or act as memory devices to help readers memorize text and/or navigate back to a certain spot in the text. Rubrication brings attention to text, and, of course, punctuation makes text more readable.

Images from Getty Museum digital collections: Ruskin Hours (right) http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/1387/unknown-maker-ruskin-hours-french-about-1300/

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Metal relief type

Gutenberg Bible leaf

Print

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Gutenberg Bible leaf (circa 1455)

England, circa 1220

Print

Early printed European books typically looked like printed manuscripts as they had similar layouts, formatting, fonts, ornamented initials, etc. In part, this commonality is due to the “manuscript look” being what Europeans were used to and how they conceived of books. In the case of something like the Gutenberg Bible, there was also the need to not deviate from how a Bible should look. Were it to look radically different, it might have been seen as sacrilegious or nonauthoritative. This Gutenberg Bible example demonstrates well how the physical aspects of a book can be inextricably linked to its contents.

Scroll, codices, medieval manuscripts, Gutenberg’s printing press, these are aspects of the Western history of the book that will lend themselves well to book as object analyses you will be conducting in class. There is much more to book history, however, as humanity worldwide has been incredibly inventive in its approach to textual technologies.

Images from the Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University: Manuscript https://digitalcollections.lmu.edu/Documents/Detail/bible-england-ca.-1220/12229, Gutenberg leaf, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University

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The Book as Object

The “book as object” means focusing on books as physical or digital objects, artifacts to be examined instead of read.

Book as object studies can be limited to an object study or become part of a larger exploration that also considers the book’s textual content.

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Technology & Industry

Societal Trends & Values

Historical Context

Literary Markets

Publishing & Printing

Books as objects

tell us about

{

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Book bindings & materials used in production
Title pages (author, illustrator, publisher, date, location, etc.)
Book plates (previous ownership)
Book spines (additional or repetitive publishing information)
Type of illustrations / frontispiece piece
Glosses & marginalia (from various owners/readers)
Typography

Empirical Information

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Some things to consider:

Size & portability
Use of typography
Quality and condition of object
Whether the author influenced/designed the physicality of the book
The edition
Who published it? (Big or small publisher? Self-published?)
Was it commissioned? (demand & supply)
Was it mass produced? (supply & demand)
Book provenance

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Leaves of Grass, 1855

Gutenberg Bible, 1450s

The Temple, 1633

Typography

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Little Dorrit, 1855-57

All the Year Round, 1859-1895

Serial Publishing

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Jane Eyre, 1847

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 1891

Multivolume

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The Works of Our Ancient and Lerned

English Poet, Geffrey Chavcer, 1602

Leaves of Grass, 1855

Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 1869

Frontispiece

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Little Dorrit, 1855-57

As I Lay Dying, 1930

Illustration

Again, here we see examples of illustrations. Dickens’ works were known for their illustrations. Note the detail and care given to them. They were not crude woodcuts (as you might see with other works); they were fine copperplate etchings and engravings. Why does this say about the significance of illustration in Dickens’ works? What might this say about reader expectations?

Questions: The coffin in As I Lay Dying is particularly interesting as it interrupts the text/typography. This is very different than the detailed and standalone Dicken’s illustration. What might be the significance of this choice on Faulkner’s part? What might this say about the potential relationship between text and image more broadly? What technical difficulty might have been caused by incorporating the image into the text this way?

Images from the Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University

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Leaves of Grass, 1855

S. Ignatii episcopi Antiocheni &

martyris quae exstant omnia

Mummer’s Wife, 1885

Bindings

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Shakespeare’s first four folios, 1623, 1632, 1664, 1685

Editions

Paradise Lost, 1667

When buying a modern edition of a work of literature, you may not even consider what edition it is or whether there were different versions of the text a one time. Shakespeare’s plays were published in four different folios with differences between them. Milton’s Paradise Lost was first divided into ten books before it became twelve.

Questions: Seeing first and other earlier editions of texts can be a very eye-opening experience both in terms of differences in content and in their physicality. How does changes in the content shift meaning and effect the reading experience? What does they physicality of the book say about the audience, the market, the reverence for the text, etc.?

Images from the Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University

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Green Mansions, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, 1941

Republication

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The Gift: A Christmas and New Years Present for 1836

Marketing

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“In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself.”

Moby-Dick, Chapter 68, “The Blanket”

Book-Making References

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Art of Engraving, 1844

A Midsummer-Night’s Dream intaglio copperplate, 1908

Book-Making References

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Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale, 1851

Book References