Care and Hanlding of Books

Preservation is a never ending challenge in libraries, especially in rare and special collections, archives, historical societies, and other cultural institutions. We need to think about the condition of materials before handing them to a researcher. Can we provide a surrogate or facsimile or is the original necessary for the researcher? What type of storage container does the item require? These are important questions to ask in special collections and for circulating collections.

Yale University Libraries just posted a 1980 slide show on YouTube http://youtu.be/3cLIhWprMq4 covering care, handling, shelving, and processing books in libraries. What's great is that it covers all the information you could possible want to share with your students and staff. Of course, clothing styles are lots of fun to look at also. (According to the text on YouTube under bullet 3, there is a pause of four seconds between each slide. Here is the link to the transcript : https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1eGH1p97a4STXJTc3lOWFBEa2s .

I hope you enjoy this discussion of preservation, care & handling of books.

Digital Collections

Today I went to the Center for Jewish History http://www.cjh.org/ for the formal launch of the digital archives of the Leo Baeck Institute. http://www.lbi.org/digibaeck/ There's actually a video of the 2 hours of presentations. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive http://archive.org/ spoke about making the knowledge of the world freely accessible to everyone. Here's his TED Talk http://www.ted.com/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html
   where he talks about digitization, the book, and the idea of collecting all cultural materials of our societies. The talk here really duplicates what he talked about at the symposium.

The Leo Baeck Institute digitized 4000 linear feet of archives (all their collection) and made it freely accessible to the world. There are documents, translations and transliterations of materials. Photographs, videos, and sound recordings. Here's an example of an early printed book Augenspiegel (1509) that promotes printing in Hebrew http://digital.cjh.org/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=431433  What do you think about the viewer? the metadata? and the text itself?

I also learned a lot about how the Internet Archive and the Center for Jewish History are digitizing materials.  

Tell me what you think?

Oh yes, they have an amazing wall called "Luminous Manuscript" which imitates a page of glossed text. Here's the site http://www.cjh.org/p/89, (there's not great image of the wall on the site) and here's a link to the video about the wall http://www.cjh.org/programs/programarchives.php?vid=luminousmanuscript.flv   

All in all, a great experience. Tomorrow I'm off to Columbia University to see one of their rare book collections. I'll take photos and share.

Biblioclasts

Biblioclasts are a class in themselves when it comes to collectors and dealers. These are individuals who break apart books or sets of plates and sell them separately.  As we read in the article by Karen Edwards "Rip, Slash, and Tear: Can Plundering Books be a Form of Preservation?" Fine Books & Collections 5 no. 5 (Sept-Oct 2007): 44-49, biblioclasm is not rare. Book dealers do purchase books or sets of prints and break them apart to sell individually at a higher price. These legitimate dealers can be confused with thieves who take items from libraries and sell to unsuspecting dealers and collectors. Maps, prints, plates, and illuminations are all candidates for theft. The most famous being Gilbert Bland, map thief extraordinary who stole from libraries across the United States, the last being from the Peabody, as described by Miles Harvey in The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (NY: Broadway Books a division of Random House, 2001). Island of Lost Maps actually traces the history of map printing and theft through time, and the trial of Bland.

 The most famous biblioclast is Otto F. Ege (1888–1951) who was Dean of the Cleveland Institute of Art and collected medieval manuscripts. In a nutshell, he took the books apart, matted the leaves along with descriptions and sold them in portfolios to libraries and collectors around the world. Today, scholars are both studying the leaves Ege disbound, and are attempting to collate the leaves into books. Many of the university libraries that hold Ege leaves have digitized their collections and made them available on the web. Below is just a small sample of virtual exhibits and just two of the many articles about Ege and his amazing collections of leaves. 

Kent State University Special Collections has three sets of Ege leaves. There are others throughout the state, the country, and the world. Take a look at the leaves and at the articles to learn how scholars are piecing together these fragments.

Otto F. Ege Collection of Manuscript Leaf Portfolios at Dennison University, Granville, Ohio http://ege.denison.edu/index.php

Otto F.Ege Collection of Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts, Western Europe XII-XVI Century at University Libraries Digital Collections at the University of South Carolina http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/ege.html

And at the University of Massachussets   http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/ead/mums570.html

Remaking the Book:Digitally Reconstructing the Otto Ege Manuscript Portfolios (June 13-14, 2005) University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon  http://library2.usask.ca/ege/   

Stiocheff, Peter. "Putting Humpty Together Again: Otto Ege's Scattered Leaves." CHWP A. 42 (July 2008) http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/chwp/CHC2007/Stoicheff/Stoicheff.htm 

Shailor,Barbara A."Otto Ege: His Manuscript Fragment Collection and the Opportunities Presented by Electronic Technology."The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 60 (2003): 1-22 http://reaper64.scc-net.rutgers.edu/journals/index.php/jrul/article/viewArticle/4

Of course, Ege's disbound leaves are not the only ones that scholars are reconstructing . There are many others in our collections. Most recently, Eric Johnson, Associate Curator of Rare Books at Ohio State University is endeavoring to collect all the dispersed leaves of the Hornby-Cockerell Bible. Here is a link to just three of the hundreds of leaves that OSU has collected. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.526213757394922.135022.200441529972148&type=1

What do you think about biblioclasm?

Fragments and miscellaneous bits in books

When we look at early printed books, we often find materials are reused inside newer books. The Harry Ransom Center has a wonderful website that provides photographs of manuscripts bound into books. http://www.facebook.com/HarryRansomCenterFragments They also have images up on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/ransom_center_fragments/ Some of the manuscripts are identifiable, others are not. Here's an example of a recycled manuscript that's in the collections at Ohio State University Rare Book Division http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.529393493743615.135790.200441529972148&type=1  If you are interested in what OSU Rare Book Librarians are up to, follow their Facebook page and blog http://www.facebook.com/RBMSatOSU?ref=ts&fref=ts

Aside from fragments of other books, we often find bits and pieces of materials in books. Sometimes there are dried leaves & flowers. Rare book librarians and conservators will encapsulate these herbal samples so they don't discolor the pages of the books more than they already have and so all the pieces and parts don't disintegrate. Geraldine Brooks' recent work People of the Book: A Novel describes the study of a book, all the extraneous parts, spills, stains, hairs, and more, as a conservator repairs the book and a librarian studies its history.

When conserving a book, repairing joints and reattaching boards, you'll want to retain the original parts. This is particularly important if the conservator replaces parts. Historians of the book will want to examine how the book looked before conservation treatments. Of course, you want the conservator to document the item before and after treatment for your own records. Here's an example of a cover (Amerbach Biblia Sacra at the American Bible Society) that shows damaged covers.

Here's an example of a spine that was repaired (left). It's actually a later binding (right) than the text within, which is a 1487 Hebrew Bible printed on vellum and held by the Dorot (Jewish) division at NYPL. 

No matter what, rare book curators and conservators want to document treatments, digitization, and miscellaneous pieces of books in catalog records and keep the parts together with the original text whenever possible.


 

Gatherings or Quires

I know that we discussed format in class. There were a few lingering questions about imposition, signatures and collation. While I believe that you all know this by now, let me try to describe deciphering a gathering or signature one more time.

Let me see if I can explain the page and page numbers and gatherings so they make sense. Take three sheets of paper and fold them in half so they make a pamphlet. That's a GATHERING. Now, number each page on the bottom corner, RECTO and VERSO in order from 1 through 12. Now take them apart. Each sheet now consists of two leaves or four pages. The first sheet has page numbers 1,2,11,12, which could be signed A. When you COMPOSE the type (IMPOSE the pages) you have just printed those specific pages. Now you print the next sheet, A2 will contain page numbers 3,4, 9, 10 and sheet A3 will contain page numbers 5,6,7,8. 

The GATHERING of a FOLIO consists of sheets signed A,A2,A3 nested inside one another. Now you try it. 

When you have a book that's format is a QUARTO, that is a sheet folded twice to make 4 leaves or 8 pages, the imposition and pagination works in the same way as described above. If the gathering of a QUARTO has 16 pages, it is said to have gatherings of 16, that is two sheets nested inside one another. If there are 24 pages, then how many sheets are nested together?  

This practice becomes more difficult when your book's format is an OCTAVO or DUODECIMO. Consult MOXON or GASKELL if you want to learn the mechanics of imposition.

A Weekend Together

Wow! I'm so tired and happy about how our two day in-person session went. There was a good mix of lecture and hands on. All the materials I wanted to cover were at least touched upon and you had a chance to see rare books, special books, reference tools, and lots of bibliographies. 

More than anything else, this was a weekend to meet one another, learn from each other, and begin to build stronger working and collegial relationships. Now that you've all met, the discussion boards should be even livelier. I cannot wait to see the changes in your discussions and interactions with one another.

I hope you all feel this was a useful and productive weekend. Now you can relax, reflect, and think about what you learned and how you will use some of the new knowledge in your professional activities. I hope you recognize that some of the reference tools aren't in public libraries, but in academic libraries; that you may never learn about them again but should explore and examine every reference tool for its usefulness, contents, organization, and audience. Do that, and you are half way to mastering any subject.

The one subject we didn't really cover were the bibliographic databases of EBBO, ESTC, ISTC, and ECCO (Eighteenth century collection that incorporates or uses the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalog). There are two sets of bibliographic tools for Nineteenth century literature and written materials. They are NCCO, the Nineteenth Century Collection Online http://info.library.okstate.edu/content.php?pid=210676&sid=2783437 and N I N E S, Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online http://www.nines.org/ They are slightly different in scope and use. While Kent State faculty and students don't have access to the resources on NCCO, we do have access to Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism, a Gale publication, through our library website.  These databases, along with the resources we discussed and specific website you discover will enhance your exhibitions and projects.

What did I take away from our two days in person? I better sense of who you all are, the importance of time for hands-on exercises, and an appreciation of how hard you are working. 

What else can I do for you to make the course better, stronger, clearer, or more useful? What can I do to enhance your learning experience and appreciation for the book? Send me e-mails, write me, let me know.

Until next time

making paper

A number of you asked about making paper, designing font, and other technical aspects of the book.

I thought you would enjoy this video of students and apprentices at the University of Iowa Center for the Book making paper. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEjZiPmRAV8&feature=share&list=PL837E9D2803517413   The video teaches the viewer that there were many steps needed to create paper that is used for printing on the hand press. Imagine how many sheets are needed for each book a printer made. First you have to calculate the number of copies, say 250. Then look at the manuscript to determine how many pages there are in the book, say 64. Now calculate how many pages fit on a sheet when you impose the book as a quarto or octavo (divide by either 8 or 16 - my math fails me here). Finally, you need to make extra sheets because there will be errors. And that's a short book. Now imagine a book of 300 pages. 

This second video describes how to make recycled paper on a continuous roll http://youtu.be/7SdJtYkAzTw

For those of you curious about how type is cast, you'll want to watch these videos from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Holland part 1 http://youtu.be/dthT9thCOrM and part 2 http://youtu.be/L7ICWE3Qko8 and part 3 http://youtu.be/-BXeuhvhqS4
Watch the wrist action as the type caster forces the liquid into the mold. 

This 35 minute video describes how linotype is made and pages are composed. http://youtu.be/EzilaRwoMus This type of printing began in the late 19th century and continued until computerized printing in the early 1960s.

Please let me know if you find more visual examples or videos that explain how paper is made or type is case.




 

exhibitions of books

Over the past two days, I've had the pleasure of viewing a fascinating exhibit of Hebrew and Judaica manuscripts at Columbia University http://library.columbia.edu/content/libraryweb/news/libraries/2012/20120814_judaica.html Here were unique manuscripts (the terms should be synonymous) of travelogues, prayers, prayer books, Kabbalah texts, Biblical and Talmudic texts, and more. The librarian explained that this exhibition was two years in the making, which included all the conservation work that was preformed. The manuscripts ranged from the 10th century through the 19th in many different languages. The range of Hebrew scripts was astounding. Of course, some were in vernaculars (French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic) where others were in Judeo-(fill in the language). There were a few illustrations but mostly texts to be puzzled out and compared to extant printed texts. http://library.columbia.edu/content/libraryweb/news/libraries/2012/20120814_judaica/jcr%3acontent/content/textimage/image.img.jpg /1345045665430.jpg The virtual exhibit is not available yet. Columbia University has many thousands of Hebrew and Judaic items from which to select materials for their exhibition. It will be interesting to compare their captions and selection decisions with other exhibits both in person and virtual.

Just yesterday, Monash University in Australia, announced their virtual exhibition of 17th through 20th century travel books and labels. http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/labels/virtual-exhibition/ Their exhibit is virtual with a pleasing layout and easy navigation. Note the text you wish to examine is full size on the left, and a "filmstrip" of other titles or images on the right. When you select a title, the caption and background or catalog materials appear. My favorites are the seventeenth and eighteenth century travelogues. The university curators included maps and illustrations to provide flavor for the viewer. Note that you can click through to the catalog record. 

What will you make of your exhibition? While the wiki site I selected is limiting, there is much you can do to enhance the viewer's experience. I leave that creativity up to you.

The printing trade

The men (and women) who ran the presses were from the merchant classes. They were educated and literate. Many had their fingers in multiple endeavors. Some were painters and engravers who drifted into the business.  You might read some of the short biographies, particularly those of Gutenberg to get a sense of these men. One book you might read is by John Man Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words (NY: Wiley, 2002). The book provides a view of the man, the printing business, and that period in history.

It's important to remember that printing isn't really illegal, it's what is printed that comes into question. England did have a prohibition on presses for a number of years, but that was lifted by the late 1400s. You'll find prohibition of printing and owning certain texts or parts of texts throughout the early modern period. These prohibitions were ordered by both church and crown. And in England, you needed a license to print any thing, similar to copyright today. We'll be reading more about these aspects of printing later in the semester.

As to the math of setting up or imposing the pages. Joseph Moxon wrote a treatise in the 1680s called Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing printed 1683-1684. Many libraries have copies on their shelves. The book describes to the printer and apprentice how to lay out pages, etc. I guess the ideas of imposition are complex because we aren't familiar with the techniques. We just type on the computer and the pages come out in order. But if we are trying to put together a booklet of multiple pages, layout becomes more complicated. Thus the use of signature marks and catchwords to help with both imposition and collation. Printing is a skilled trade. Remember that boys apprenticed in the print shop, or any business for many years, from about 8 or 10 years old. By the time they were in their late teens, they had a good knowledge of the trade and became Journeymen, because they traveled from place to place, learning under different 'masters' of the trade. If they were lucky, they became masters of their own shops and had apprentices of their own. This system is still in place in the building trades today.

When we meet in person, we'll review many of these concepts and they will make a little more sense. Remember to focus on the concepts and ideas, not the minutia. We won't be layout pages of type or imposing them. But it's a good idea to understand how books and pages are constructed.

Studying the book

As we continue to study the book and understand its place in special collections and rare book rooms,  it is important to see the results of a study.  Common-place http://www.common-place.org/ ,  a newsletter from the American Antiquarian Society http://www.americanantiquarian.org/ has four amazing articles about books including one about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin entitled "Containing Multitudes: The Biography of a Book" http://www.common-place.org/interim/reviews/graber.shtml

According to the article, the author studied the various editions and printings of Uncle Tom's Cabin to understand how the book changed over time and how it was received. This is a great example of what you could do with your exhibit, on a smaller scale, of course. I bring up the article because I want you to see the relevance of studying books, objects, buildings, and other pieces of cultural and literary history. 

Daniel Traister clearly teaches us in his article entitled "The Rare Book Librarian's Day" (RBML 1:2 (Sept. 1986): 93-105) http://rbm.acrl.org/content/rbml/1/2/93.extract, that curators and librarians do not usually have the time to study materials in our own collections let alone multiple collections. It is our researchers who have that opportunity. Even if you get a tenure track position that requires publication, you may not have the time or the resources to study multiple copies of a specific book. Researchers get to explore the riches of our collections and place our literary heritage into a cultural or historical context. So when do we get to do this? When we create exhibitions or pull materials for classes and instructors. These activities constitute publication, outreach, promotion, and education for a variety of audiences. That is why you are spending the semester studying a book.

Visual appeal of books

When we study books and enumerate their features, we tend to focus on the details or minutia.  What sets this edition or this issue, a particular book in your hands, apart from the next copy and the next. In their articles about bibliography, Terry Belanger and William Proctor Williams use very precise vocabulary to describe these differences. Indeed,  when textual scholars study the extant issues of specific edition or impression, they are looking at  minute differences. Broken type and misspelled words are one thing. Blobs of ink and blurred pages indicate press work done in haste or hurrying and neglecting to wipe off excess ink. Misplaced page numbers, incorrect signature marks, and mismatched catchwords are indications of what? A different state, a cancel (reset or reprinted page after the run is over), or just sloppy composition. 

Is this all we as students of the book should look at when studying the book? I think it's important to look at the differences between editions, editors, and printers. We must consider how printers and publishers treat the text. Some texts are reset to appeal to readers in different countries, or of a different age group.  Consider the Three Musketeers. Color illustrations and lots of swordplay appeals to a younger male audience, where illustrations that emphasize jewelry, clothing, and hair style may attract female readers. The lack of illustrations denotes a serious text that scholars may wish to study. Are there extensive notes? Maybe the edition is aimed at schools or literature courses. Reader reception is an entire field of the history of the book that looks at who read the book or to whom it might appeal. Of course, if there are notes in the margin, that makes this study a little simpler.

Many historians of the book now focus on cover art, whether it's the publisher's binding or book jackets. Of course marketing studies might tell us that different color covers attract different demographics of readers. And today, if it's digital, then yet another audience might pick up the book and read it. 

No matter who is studying the book, there's lots to discover on the covers and within.

Bibliography is not for the Faint of Heart

One of the most fun aspects of studying books is determining how they are constructed and what makes them different from other books, even when printed at the same time by the same printer. That's one of the joys of bibliography. Another is identifying each physical book's idiosyncrasies or unique aspects so a collector or librarian can differentiate one edition from another. After all, you don't want to purchase two copies of the same title, unless there's a reason, such as collecting all the extant copies of Shakespeare's First Folio, as they do a the Folger Library http://www.folger.edu/  Here's a link to their current exhibition http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/Ongoing-Exhibitions/The-First-Folio.cfm

As I consider what to talk about this week and next in my lectures, bibliography is top most on my mind. Of course, you will be putting together a brief analytical, descriptive bibliography with annotations, background, and more in your semester long project. But there's more to bibliography than that. The study of the book is the appreciation of the similarities and differences of editions, a growing familiarity with printing conventions, and a discovery of the construction of a text and text block. 

Scholars of the book vary in their interests. Some want to examine every issue, every extant copy of a title. Others want to gather together the corpus or works of an author to understand his or her growth as a writer. Still others are interested in the work of a specific printer or editor and how that individual influenced the profession. 

As  you study your author and book, you'll come to appreciate the work of bibliographers who study the minutia of texts, furthering scholarship. I challenge you to be creative in your study of the title you selected. Look beyond the printed and digital text, and explore the corpus of your author.

It's all about the Prep

There's one more week until this Rare Book and Special Collections Librarianship course begins. That means I'm busy taping introductory lectures, re-reading the first week's articles, and putting the finishing touches on the course.

The syllabus is done and mounted in BB Learn and on my website http://www.mbkcons.com/Courses/Rare60665/RaresylFall2012.htm . Except for some tweaks, that is finished.

Now I get to focus on the course. I'm filled with excitement and trepidation about teaching this course online. Most of my colleagues think I'm crazy and I'm out to prove them.... wrong. No matter what this is going to be a challenging semester for myself and my students. 

What have I learned so far? There's never enough preparation time and, yes, as much time as I allow, the course will take. Discipline is the key to a successful course and online teaching experience. Oh yes, and there's never enough time to do everything I want, which is also true in a face-to-face course. 

Deep breathing and a few walks around the block are key to a truly successful course. So take a deep breath, get some sleep, and look for my next post.

Searching for examples

After many weeks and months of preparing this RB course, I'm finally ready to work on lectures and exercises. Since this is the first time I'm teaching the course online I had to make some adjustments and design some exercises to do at home. Knowing we'll have two days to work together definitely helps and will allow me to build on the shallow foundation of early lectures and exercises.

I'm off on a hunt for visual examples to share with all of you while I consider what aspects of RB and Special Collection Librarianship are most important. I spent much of yesterday (8/14) at NYPL looking at incunabula and thinking of how to describe the experience. These early printed books feel so different from others and look different as well. Each is a unique publication with errors and individuality. Even the book I looked at, printed in 1501, contained an unusual set of signature marks, and lots of variations in the running header. If the last sentence doesn't make sense, look at Carter's ABC for Book Collectors http://www.ilab.org/eng/documentation/30-john_carters_abc_for_book_collectors.html .

Carter is a wonderful glossary, dictionary, and example of a book wrapped into one. Most parts of the book are identified as well as parts of the page (Exercises we'll do as part of class). Within are definitions of terminology used to describe books. There are other glossaries and dictionaries we'll consult as part of the course, including the one in your text book An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies 4^th Edition. 

As this course continues to evolve, I welcome feedback about how the lectures and readings fit together.  For now, I'll search for examples while you relax for two more weeks.

 

Lots of Preparation

There's lots of preparation time and effort to convert an in-person course to online. Not only do I have to reconsider each lecture, but also find activities to correspond with each topic. I'm re-engineering and re-designing all the assignments so they fit an online mode of learning and keep pace with the course.  Most of all, I'm considering what project I want to work on that will help you understand each assignment. There are bound to be a few blips along the way.

I'm busy collecting samples and examples to illustrate my lectures. Then I'll need to prepare each lecture. In an effort to remain spontaneous, I'll wait to record each lecture until the week before. 

I hope you'll find this course stimulating and challenging. I know I continue to learn something new every time I teach it. This fall will be more educational than ever as I take a course that encourages interaction, tactile interaction with materials, and visual acuity and move it into a virtual environment.

What will I write about?

This blog for my Introduction to Rare Book (and Special Collections) Librarianship course. It will be my reflective journal for the course and a place for you to read what I'm experiencing as I teach online this fall and explore special collections in a wide variety of cultural institutions.