Fishy scroll book art

 

Robert Bolick at Books on Books draws out attention to Yasutomo Ota’s Die Forelle (2014):

  

 A poem about a trout here appears in a book that moves like a fish, thanks to its Chinese scroll form which Ota has repurposed into a codex format. Go to Books on Books for more pictures and a video demonstration.

That leads Bolick to show other examples of book art that uses similar formats to highlight the text they contain. "Form draws attention to itself but also inevitably back to the content. ... That is book art at its best."

Handwritten epidemic bibles

Writing in Christian Century, Heidi Haverkamp reports on her personal experience participating in hand-writing part of the Bible. The idea began in at the Abbey of St. Gall (which, btw, has a famously iconic library):

In the early days of quarantine, the Roman Catholic Abbey of St. Gall in northeastern Switzerland invited more than 1,000 parishioners to create a completely handwritten and
illustrated Corona-Bibel while they sheltered in place. The project inspired clergy in Chicago and Lincoln, Nebraska, to launch similar projects. While the American iterations are smaller in scope than the Swiss Corona-Bibel, focusing on select books of the Bible rather than all 66, the projects all share a common purpose: to gather people into community during a crisis and encourage them to experience the healing, comforting power of God’s word.

Haverkamp signed up to take part. She reports that

copying the text of Matthew made God’s Word sacramental in a new way. I had to pay attention to the text of the chapter as a whole, and it felt like I was reading with a part of my brain I have never used for Bible study before. The result was a deep and tangible immersion in scripture; I was inside each passage, not just looking on from a distance.

... Alone at my desk, I joined that vast spiritual family, the communion of saints, with Hebrew scribes, medieval monks, and kids and adults in Chicago and around the world, picking up our pens together.

This is a creative response to the isolation of the epidemic. But some European churches have sponsored and displayed bibles hand-written by the parishioners for some time. 

Here is an example I saw in a church in Muenster, Germany, in 2015. The page is open to the Beatitudes:

Great Bible of 1539 on Twitter

The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) is providing frequent Twitter updates on its scientific analysis (including X-Ray Fluorescence, microscopy, and spectroscopy) of a presentation copy of the Great Bible (1539) thought to have belonged to either Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell. See https://twitter.com/1539Bible.

 

They invite "your thoughts, comments and suggestions as the research unfolds."

Gun on Bible

 

The week before the US election, the "Idaho Freedom Foundation" issued a video declaration by nine current or former state legislators and the Lieutenant Governor, Janice McGeachin, who chose to speak her lines while placing her handgun on top of her bible.

 

The image buttressed their rhetoric of "God-given rights" from the Declaration of Independence and visually conflated it with the "right to bear arms" in the Constitution's Second Amendment. The actual targets of the statement's complaints, however, are public health orders from the Idaho governor to combat the coronavirus epidemic.

History provides some precedents for extreme reactions to public health orders. Sheldon Watts (in Epidemics and History, 1997) wrote about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century social unrest because of bubonic plague:
"Everywhere they were imposed, plague regulations met with a muted or overtly hostile response from the populace. Evidence ... suggests that people were terrified by the plague for the first week or so after it arrived, but that they then grew accustomed to its depredations and, when left alone, attempted to go about their ordinary affairs. If social breakdown did occur, it was more likely to be caused by the enforcement of a plague code than by the disease itself."