Growing Diversity of Books for Congressional Oaths

It has become common practice in the U.S. Congress to provide a variety of texts for ritual oaths of office. The Washington Times reported in January, 2013:

As religions have expanded, so have the options for swearing-in ceremonies.
Both House and Senate lawmakers are officially sworn in on their chamber floors, and then have ceremonial swearings-in for keepsake photos afterward. Members are not required to hold any text at all, merely to raise their right hand and swear — but many do hold something, particularly during the ceremonial oath.
The Library of Congress even provides books to House members who don’t bring their own, and lawmakers can pick them off a table when they enter the ornate room for a one-on-one ceremonial oath with Mr. Boehner.
On Thursday they had nine options: Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Bibles, the Torah, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Hindu Vedas, an ornate box holding Buddhist Sutras, and copies of the U.S. Constitution.

Slovenian book art 2

A sculpture in the harbor of Piran, Slovenia, reproduces the town in the form of heaps of books (courtesy of Lyn Watts).

Slovenian book art 1

A mural on an apartment house wall in Ljubljana, Slovenia (courtesy of Lyn Watts). Translation anyone?

Blog on book-like objects

A new blog about book-like objects, About Blooks: Discovering the Book as Object, has been started by Mindell Dubansky, who ishead of the Center for Book Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her early posts include pictures and descriptions of book clutches and hand-bags, a book harmonium, and this 1849 ceramic flask.

Xu Bing's Book from the Sky

Zak Braiterman has posted great pictures of Xu Bing's installation, Book from the Sky (1988), that is part of the Metropolitan Museum's current Ink Art exhibit.

This "book from the sky" consists of scrolls written in unintelligible characters that literally say nothing. Braiterman summarizes the effect: "Rendered object-like, the word has been made neither clear nor intelligible. Not really a book or a communication, “Book from the Sky” is just an idea, suggesting something infinite, the idea of a book, the idea of communication, pure writing, non-intentional."

(See this blog's previous references to discussion of Bing's installation.)

500 years of beautiful print

Arkyves, a collection of sources for the study of the History of Culture, showcases the beauty of print fonts with a zoomable collage of printed pages produced between 1469 to 1935.

(click to view)

Torah to the Moon

The Washington Post reports plans to send a Torah scroll to the moon. "The Torah on the Moon project, based in Tel Aviv, has been courting private firms to deliver a handwritten Jewish scroll called a sefer Torah to the lunar surface. Later flights would carry Hindu scriptures called the Veda and the I Ching, an ancient Chinese philosophical work. Each document would be housed in a capsule designed to protect it from the moon’s harsh radiation and temperature changes for at least 10,000 years." The Post article concludes by noting, "The texts would join a Bible left on the moon in 1971 by Apollo 15 commander David Scott. The red leather Bible sits on the control console of an Apollo moon buggy."

Ambassador takes oath of office on e-reader

The Wire reported that Suzi LeVine, the new U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, "was sworn in ... by raising her right hand and placing the left on a digital copy of the Constitution. ... LeVine, a former Microsoft executive ...  used a non-descript "off brand" e-reader, so as not to stake an official U.S. government position in the Kindle vs. Nook wars."

Call for Journal Articles on "Religion and the Book"

The online journal, Mémoires du livre  / Studies in Book Culture, has issued a call for articles on the theme, "religion and the book." (This same theme is being used by the SHARP Annual Meeting in Antwerp this coming September.) Scott McLaren, the editor of this special issue of the Open Access peer-reviewed journal, "invites submissions in English or French that explore the relationship between religion and the book, broadly defined, in either historical or contemporary settings and from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Articles concerned with print culture and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as Asian and African religions are most welcome."

SCRIPT panels at SHARP

SCRIPT will present three panels of papers at the SHARP annual meeting in Antwerp, Belgium, on the theme "Religions of the Book: 

September 18, 8:30-10:00: Canonizing and Scripturalizing Iconic Books

• James Watts, Syracuse University, “Iconic Scriptures from Decalogue to Bible.” 
• Michael Como, Columbia University: “Canon, Ethnicity and Kingship in Ancient Japan" 
• Kristina Myrvold,  Linnaeus University, “Entextualization of Sikh Texts in Religious Historiographies and Performances”

September 19, 8:30-10:00: Literary and Iconic Canons

• Jonas Svensson, Linnaeus University, “The double Scripture: explaining diversity and conflict in Muslim perceptions and practices in relation to the Qur’an” 
• Rachel Fell McDermott, Columbia University, “When a National Poet is a Heretic: The Collision of Literary and Religious Canons”
• Karl Ivan Solibakke, Syracuse University, “Mimesis and Poesis: Walter Benjamin’s and Vilem Flusser’s Translational Approach to Script” 

September 20, 8:30-10:00: Scriptures as Icons and Talismans 

• Dorina Miller Parmenter, Spalding University,  “Saved by the Book: Exploring the Christian Bible as Effective and Affective Object.” 
• David Ganz, University of Zürich, “Clothing Sacred Scripture: Books as Holy Objects in the Western Middle Ages.”
• Bradford Anderson, Mater Dei Institute, "'This booke hath bred all the quarrel': The Bible in Seventeenth Century Ireland"

The Bible in American Life

Coinciding with their national study on The Bible in American Life, The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis is soliciting paper proposals for a conference to be held August 6-9 on "how Americans past and present have used the Bible in their daily lives."  This seems like a great opportunity to talk about iconic uses of the Bible in America, adding to the "historical, cultural, sociological, and theological" approaches that the conference claims to highlight.

Andrew Hayes' Book Art

Robert Bolick on Books On Books presents an interview with book artist, Andrew Hayes, along with many pictures of his works, such as this one (Wry, 2013).

Brolick observes:

Book art can easily fall off into mere craftwork. On the one hand, the book artist requires the freight that the book’s content and form carry, .... But the degree to which the freight weighs down the treatment, or the handling does not take the material beyond itself, that is the degree by which the work is closer to handicraft than to art. 

 And then quotes Hayes:

The book pages are a loaded found material. Other materials I use like steel that I find at the scrap yard come with built in history as well but it may not be as universal as the book pages. 

ABS survey on "Bible-Minded" cities

The American Bible Society has published rankings this week for the most and least "Bible-minded" cities in America - complete with helpful infographic.

Top of the list (the most) is Chattanooga, Tennessee. At the bottom (the least) is Providence, Rhode Island.

An article about it is here.

Jim Watts adds:
And here is Brent Plate's critique, requesting a survey of "Bible-bodied" cities instead.

Book Shelves in Snow

My second New Year's gift comes from Emma Brodeur, who took this picture in the Cazenovia, NY, art park:

Bookish Iowa Rest Stop

My New Year's gifts included new photos of iconic books in art and architecture. First, from Cordell Waldron, come these pictures of a rest stop on an Iowa high way (I-80 Westbound near Tiffin). Cordell notes that, "The rest stop theme is Iowa's education history, so the columns of the building are books."

A Book and the Founding of the United States and Its Religion

UPDATE: The book sold for $14million

A little old Psalm book has stirred some small controversy in Boston. According to the New York Times, a Bay Psalm Book from 1640 will be auctioned off at Sotheby's, and may fetch tens of millions of dollars on the 26th of November. A hefty sum for a church, like Boston's Old South Church, in need some building repairs. But the book is part of the church (and has more history than the well-known image of the Italian Gothic steeple from the nineteenth century), and the majority vote by the congregation to sell off the book caused the church historian, Jeff Makholm, to resign.

Michael Inman, curator of rare books at the New York Public Library, said this book is one of eleven existent of the early American Psalms. Since it was one of the first books ever printed in the colonies, the workmanship was not great, with some sloppy layout and misspellings. Hebrew characters were inserted with wood block cuts, while the rest of it was done with metal type. Nonetheless, Inman says,

“These 11 copies symbolize the introduction of printing into the British colonies, which was reflective of the importance placed on reading and education by the Puritans and the concept of freely available information, freedom of expression, freedom of the press. All that fed into the revolutionary impulse that gave rise to the United States."

Religious history also suggests how this "freely available information" and the book's small, hand held size, helped lead to the great mythology of the single individual, both as a citizen and a believer.

Old believer's iconic books

In recent months, two bloggers have drawn attention to the role of Iconic Books in different religious communities.
Vlad Naumescu, on the SSRC forum Reverberations, profiled the importance of iconic prayer books to Russian Old Believers. He includes a short video of the book in use in prayer.
MormonDeadHead, on the Faith Promoting Rumor blog, built on Tim Beal's exposure of the multiplicity of Bibles to find the same results from examining the manuscripts of the Book of Mormon.  

Baby's Hug-A-Bible

Collecting iconic Bibles can start early in life ...

SHARP theme, "Religions of the Book," Antwerp, September, 2014

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) has announced the theme for its September 17-21, 2014, annual conference in Antwerp, Belgium, as "Religions of the Book." The Call for Papers casts a broad net, inviting submissions that explore

the relationship between any religion(s) and the production, distribution and consumption of books and texts, in whatever form (manuscript, printed or digital), in any region or any period of time.  Religious and anti-religious censorship, iconography, spiritual literature, preaching practices are only a few of the many possible approaches. Moreover, participants to SHARP’s 22nd annual conference are invited to explore the more metaphorical dimensions of its central topic. We warmly invite proposals relating the theme to bibliophilia (a religion devoted to the book?), cult books, the role of authors as high priests, reading as a trance-provoking practice, the sacral status of the printed book in Enlightenment ideology, the strong belief in the freedom of the press… One may even consider the cultural apocalypse some pessimists see ensue the on-going process of digitization, or, inversely, the imminent salvation promised by internet and tablet gurus. 

The conference planners have even produced a U-Tube video about it.

Paper and panel proposals are due November 30, 2013.

Print and Personal Religious Identity

It is exciting to see the many new studies of the impact of book technologies on histories of religions. In some cases, history is recast in new ways and what we thought happened ends up looking a little different in retrospect. In other cases, attention to the materiality of books bolsters already argued histories, but shows the origins of an event to be not so much intellectual as physical: ideas are constrained and disseminated in printed and bound forms, just as the ideas would have been impossible without the resources of writing and print.

Kathleen Lynch has recently published an essay at the Martin Marty Center's Religion & Culture Web Forum with the provocative title, "How does the fixity of print become a problem for religious identity?" Lynch is Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library and knows a few things about the power of books. Her 2012 book, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World, (Oxford UP) argues that the genre of Protestant autobiography was bound up with print, and with the trans-Atlantic book trade.

Lynch's recent essay on the fixity of print supplements Protestant Autobiography, and focuses on Sarah Wight's 1647 publishing "sensation," The Exceeding Riches of Grace. Because of its existence as a bound book, the conversion story becomes fixed, in spite of any future doubts and questions Wight might have had. Even with new editions published over the following two decades, addenda were relegated outside the narrative proper, leading Lynch to suggest: "Despite the multiple opportunities and anecdotal prompts, the continuation of the story is resisted, with the material constraints of the number of sheets at least bolstering, if not precisely establishing, a conceptual boundary."

Print itself makes it seem that religious identity is secure, "the physical properties of the book helped shape the model of godly selfhood that was being advanced in this narrative." Stories of conversion are fixed in print, while the personal early-American gospel of an interior-focused religiosity is spread through thoroughly external, material means.

Georgia on My Mind: The Invisible Power of Typeface

(cross-posted with the Material Scripture blog)

My thanks to my colleagues who made sure I saw the article in The Week from a few days ago, "How Typeface Influences the Way We Read and Think."

The insight here is a helpful one for those interested in materialist questions in the study of Scriptures: namely, that the visual presentation of the words themselves create a psychological effect in the reader, leading to increased credulity (in the case, say, of Georgia) or outright derision (as in the case of Comic Sans).

The only book on the subject of which I am aware is Graphic Design and Bible Reading: Exploratory Studies in the Typographical Representation of the Text of Scripture in Translation, by E. R. Wendland and J. P. Louw. Sadly, it looks like it has gone out of print, though I do have a copy if anyone would like to do some more exploration.

Besides that one text, I have not done much formal study of typefaces in Scripture; but I am pretty sure S. Brent Rodriguez Plate has, and I would love to hear his response to this (and other responses, as well).

Iconic Books and Texts has been published!

Iconic Books and Texts has been published! This volume contains nineteen essays from the Iconic Books Symposia of 2007, 2009 and 2010, and three from my Idea of Scripture seminar in 2005. They were previously published in Postscripts 2 (2006/2008) and 6 (2010/2012) and appear here together in one volume from Equinox. Click here for the flyer with full Table of Contents and an offer of a 25% discount on orders.

Bible Portraits website

Dori Parmenter launched Bible Portraits: What Real Bibles Look Like. It invites viewers to upload pictures of themselves with their Bibles along with stories about them.

Parmenter wrote "Iconic Books from Below: The Christian Bible and the Discourse of Duct Tape" (Postscripts 6 [2010], 185-200) where she documented the iconic status of marked-up and tattered Bibles as a counter-discourse to the marketing of specially-bound Bibles and Bible covers. Her goal here is to create a collection that illustrates "the physical appearance of Bibles and people’s relationships to this book."

Religious Book Destruction in Central Asia

Bradford Anderson calls my attention to legal actions to suppress religious literature in several countries of Central Asia. Russian authorities have ordered the destruction of modern books tauting the views of Muslims, Hare Krishnas, and Seventh Day Adventist. Protestants and their libraries have been targeted in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Christianity Today interprets this news in the context of Christian revivals in Central Asia in the last several years.

Much of our attention to book desecration and destruction on this blog has focused on highly symbolic actions at attacks on religious legitimacy. But book destruction has in past ages been an effective means used by states to suppress entire religious movements and their memory (e.g. the Manicheans). Governments and courts are still trying this tactic, despite the increasing difficulties posed by two information revolutions--print and digital.

Bibliocide

On the iconicity of the Encyclopedia Britannica 

and the deconsecration thereof

Ashes to Ashes. Arctic to Biosphere. Birds to Chess. 

There's an earlier post on this site on the digitization of the EB. Here writer Julian Baggini gives his own end to the bound bundle. His essay and the narrative accompanying the video point to the socio-economic dimensions involved in knowledge acquisition, and how books (here explicitly the EB sold by door-to-door salesman) become part of that. The way up in life is through reading and learning. Or so it was.

One of the best lines in here regards the "ossification of knowledge" in the encyclopedic medium. Knowledge is already dead in this form. He's just giving a proper burial.

What is particularly interesting are the comments at the end. So many wrote in to suggest how wrong was the action, that these books could still be used. That they should have been donated, or recycled. The irony here being most of the ones arguing that books should not be burned were the ones that clearly didn't actually read the essay to understand his finer points.

Religion and Visual Culture CFP

An international call for papers has gone up for a conference that focuses on "religious studies" and "visual culture."  It looks like the event will take place in Paris.  The CFP is open until September 1, 2013, and you can find more information here.

West vs. Obama @ MLK's Bible

Dori Parmenter pointed out Cornell West's complaint that President Barack Obama should not use Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Bible for his inaugural oath. Here's West's sermon:



Frankly, the issue of King's Bible simply provides West a launching pad in this video for reviving and translating King's issues into the politics and social reality of 2013, which he does very well. But if we pause to think about how he uses King's Bible rhetorically, it's clear that he objects to Obama claiming legitimacy from King's legacy. Ritualizing iconic books legitimizes those who own and manipulate them. By taking the presidential oath on both Lincoln's and King's Bibles today, Obama laid claim to the legacy of both with powerful imagery.



We could take time and space to interpret its significance, but the power of ritual and symbolic imagery lies in making such claims without using words. Obama identifies himself in this way with Lincoln and King. West contests the taming of King's legacy for good reason, but I doubt even his rhetoric has much chance against the legitimizing claim expressed by this photograph.

SCRIPT calls for papers

SCRIPT has issued two calls for papers for panels at concurrent meetings in May and in November:

 

May 10-11, 2013: SCRIPT panels at the EIR regional meeting of the AAR in Toronto:

We invite proposals for a panel of four papers that address the iconic and performative dimensions of specific texts or a range of texts. We particularly encourage comparative studies that cross traditional scholarly boundaries of time, culture, religion, media or genre.

Each proposal should contain the following in a single e-mail attachment in MS Word format: One-page abstract (300 words maximum) describing the nature of the paper or panel Current CV(s) for the participant(s) Cover page that includes the submitter’s full name, title, institution, phone number, fax number, e-mail, and mailing address. For panel proposals, identify the primary contact person.

Send proposals to scriptsecretary@gmail.com. Deadline: February 15.

 

November 23-26, 2013: SCRIPT panel and annual meeting at the AAR/SBL in Baltimore:

For Baltimore, SCRIPT invites proposals for a panel of four papers that address the iconic and performative dimensions of specific texts or a range of texts. We particularly encourage comparative studies that cross traditional scholarly boundaries of time, culture, religion, media or genre.

Submit paper proposals here. Deadline: March 1.

 

Other Events involving SCRIPT topics and members:

 

March 15-17, 2013: Panel on "Publishing and Protection: The Material Reality of the Bible" in the Religion, Culture, and the Arts Section of the SECSOR in Greenville, SC:

• Dorina Miller Parmenter, "Dangers, Toils, and Snares: The Materialization of the Saving Grace of the Bible"
• David Dault, "’Battlezone’ Bibles and Bulletproof Covers: The Material Rhetoric of Armor Plating in Contemporary Bible Production”

June 23-25, 2013: "Sacred Texts and Human Contexts" at Nazareth College of Rochester

Congresswoman Sinema sworn in using Constitution, not Bible

When we discuss the iconic dimensions of texts, an important point made by Jim Watts and others is that it is not simply "holy books" like the Bible that exercise iconicity.  Indeed, we can point to many secular documents that also exercise iconic effects.

Hence this recent news item, pointing out that Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema chose recently to be sworn in using a copy of the US Consitution, instead of a Bible.

Book as Object in current issue of Terrain

Elizabeth Castelli brings to my attention that the September 2012 issue of Terrain: revue d'ethnologie de l'Europe is devoted to the topic of l'objet libre (the book as object). Here's the table of contents:

• L’objet livre (Stephen Hugh-Jones et Hildegard Diemberger)
• Quand le livre devient relique: Les textes tibétains entre culture bouddhique et transformations technologiques (Hildegard Diemberger)
• Les Agamas: des livres saints canoniques: Le rituel hindou entre transmission orale et textes sacrés (Chris Fuller)
• Le livre comme trésor: Aura, prédation et secret des manuscrits savants du Sud marocain (Romain Simenel)
• Le Coran et ses multiples formes (Casablanca, Maroc) (Anouk Cohen)
• L’objet livre à l’aube de l’époque moderne (Warren Boutcher)
• Quand le texte se fait matière: Une exploration des versions du manuscrit arabe (Christine Jungen)
• Le synthétique sacré: Réflexions sur les aspects matériels des textes juifs orthodoxes (Jeremy Stolow)
  
  

Bodleian's Crossing Borders Exhibit

I finally went to NYC to see Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries at the Jewish Museum. Like several other displays of manuscripts since 9/11, Crossing Borders aims to show the cultural interplay and continuity between Jewish, and Christian and Muslim manuscript cultures in the middle Ages. It does this most successfully by setting side by side copies of Euclid's Geometry in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, all from the 13th and 14th centuries. The exhibit's centerpiece, the illuminated Kennicott Hebrew bible (late 15th c.), also appears next to the carpet pages of an illuminated Qur'an and a 13th-century Arabic gospel.

The exhibition is less thorough than others have been in carrying through this theme. Its underlying goal shows through of exhibiting the Bodleian's hebraica collection, which has been growing steadily for 400 years. The exhibition hall with elaborate woodworking, dark red walls, and dark interior reinforced the Oxford effect.

The exhibit shows the maturation of using electronic technology to show more  of a book than just the two pages open in the exhibit case. Many of the exhibit cases included built-in tablets that allowed visitors to browse more pages and zoom in on details. The Kennicott Bible was accompanied by five tablets that allowed browsing every single page of this illuminated Bible. Now that people are increasingly familiar with using cell phones and tablets, this is a very user-friendly interface. It is the culmination of a trend that began with the British Library's "turning the pages" displays more than a decade ago.

Most striking to me were the set of folio-sized and illuminated commentaries from the 12th to 15th centuries. They included Herbert of Bosham's glosses on Lombard's commentary on the Psalms (12th c., at left), a Hebrew Bible with Rashi's glosses (13th c.), Nicholas of Lyra's two-volume biblical commentary (14th c.), and Jacob Ben Asher's Evev ha-Ezer (15th c.). They contrasted with the more utilitarian sized and produced works of Maimonides and Richard of St. Victor. The illuminations of the folio volumes (especially Herbert's glosses) rivaled the Bibles and prayer books displayed beside them. Obviously, they must have been produced for wealthy patrons or institutions. Still, it is surprising to see so much wealth invested in scholarly products.

The exhibit remains at the Jewish Museum until February 3rd.

ADDENDUM: Zak Braiterman summarized his reaction to seeing the Kennicott Bible, both on display and online here, in this way: "So what does this Bible look like? Austere and illuminated. Black, gold, red, blue. Carefully tended. Deluxe. I think this says a lot about the Spanish Jewish milieu in which this thing was produced. Does it say anything about the Bible itself? It suggests something about the plastic character of a text, including Holy Writ, something about the shape of its appearance. We’re so used to reading the Bible, to the idea that the Bible is something to be read, that we lose sight of its objecthood and the fact that it is also something to look at. The decorative device frames the physical text and also its “sense.” ... I’m pretty sure that this is not the same Bible that “we” read today. “Our” Bible is more folksy and Ashkenazi. This one is very aristocratic and Sephardic. And private."

Reading the Readers, Performing the Texts

Here is an interesting essay at the Chronicle, sparked by Leah Price's new book, How to do Things with Books in Victorian England. Jennifer Howard reviews:

Price sketches out a broad, shifting range of uses for books that go beyond just reading. Because paper was expensive and therefore precious in early 19th-century Britain, people reused and recycled it. Books might be unbound and their pages used to make dress patterns, line trunks, or wrap pies. What began as text might end up as toilet paper. As a result, Price says, "even people who are illiterate for reasons of rank or sex still have a very sophisticated, fine-grained taxonomy of paper." Mayhew reports, for instance, that food vendors preferred certain newspapers because of the absorbent or repellent characteristics of the newsprint.

I haven't read Price's book, but apparently there are some good references to 19th century use of Bibles and tracts that might be worth a read.

Howard's larger essay is to point out that, while the history of the book has become well established, the history of reading is less so, though rising. The bibliographic details herein are worth the read. And I wonder who might be doing this with regard sacred texts? Here's a topic for a dissertation, or two.

And check out the final paragraphs, well worth some conversation within SCRIPT:

"There's such an increasing awareness today of nontextual uses of books," she says. "Now that the textual meaning of books is migrating online, all that's left is an empty shell."

Then as now, devaluing the object sometimes creates more emphasis on content. "Going back to the 19th century makes you realize that a phenomenon we tend to blame on digitization actually happened a century earlier," Price says. "Once you can throw it away, the value of books comes to reside in the words they contain rather than their potential for reuse."

I think this might be part of the evangelical use of Biblical words into the 21st century, and the emphasis on the semantic meanings. 

Bibliomania animated

"Bibliomania," a film by Rosalie Osman , bravely takes on the task of dethroning book love (lust)...



(h/t to Michael Lieberman of Book Patrol)

Physical digital data pollutes

The New York Times details the energy consumption of the huge database servers that power the internat. In doing so, it calls attention to the material realities that are hidden behind words like "the web" and "the cloud" and the cost of the illusions they create:

With no sense that data is physical or that storing it uses up space and energy, those consumers have developed the habit of sending huge data files back and forth, like videos and mass e-mails with photo attachments. ... To support all that digital activity, there are now more than three million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide.

So the material form behind today's virtual world hides in featureless warehouses, betrayed only by its growing appetite for electricity ...

Framed for Blasphemy with Books

Scripture desecration is in the news again, because of the charges against a young, Christian (and possibly mentally disabled) girl in Pakistan. Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws make such news unfortunately routine. Three years ago, I surveyed furors over scripture descration around the world. It was obvious that local laws make a greater difference than religious sensibilities, and that charges of scripture desecration thrive in environments of political instability. Pakistan has both, and I since completing my article I've resisted blogging repetitiously about the drumbeat of additional cases coming from that country, even when they led to the assassination of a governor who advocated for the law's reform. The pattern seemed monotonously and brutally consistent, even as it got worse.

But now something may be changing. Pakistani police have arrested the girl's accuser. ABC reports:

The cleric, Khalid Chishti, was arrested late Saturday for allegedly planting pages of a Quran in a shopping bag containing burned papers and ash that had been carried by the Christian girl, said Munir Jaffery, an investigating officer in the case. The bag was then submitted as evidence to the police.

Jaffery said a member of the mosque where the cleric works came forward Saturday and said man said the imam had placed the evidence in the bag. According to police, the man claimed Chishti said it was a way to get rid of the Christians.

The man's testimony only surfaced more than two weeks after the girl was originally arrested, raising questions about why he did not come forward sooner.

Though the girl's defense attorney's quickly assured the press that they do not oppose the blasphemy laws, perhaps this is the first sign that the tide is turning. The willingness to prosecute those who use the blasphemy law to frame others may begin to restore some sanity. Charges of blasphemy can be too easily abused in this way, not just to persecute religious minorities but also to exascerbate political feuds, business disagreements and marital conflicts, as my previous research documented. When communities feel empowered by law to defend their touchy sensibilities, whether they be iconic books or iconic buildings (see the recent Pussy Riot trial), an individual's right to justice and due process gets trampled (see Chloe Breyer's a propos essay).

September 3: And now the Chairman of All Pakistan Ulema Council, an influential group of Islamic clerics, has hailed the Christian girl as a "daughter of the nation" and stated that "our heads are bowed in shame" because of the Imam's attempts to frame her. Things are changing!

 

Illustrator Gavin Aung has produced an cartoon-style art-print that is a "love-letter to printed books." It uses a quotation from Carl Sagan that begins, "What an astonishing thing a book is," and ends, "A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." In between, it invokes the immortality of authors able to speak across time.

The illustrations show books being found on shelves, checked out from the library and carried home. Sagan starts from the material object too: "It's a flat object made from trees with flexible parts, on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles." But he then evokes the power of material books to disappear, creating for readers the illusion of immediacy, of being "inside the mind of another person."

Students of books history and iconic books ask us to remember the mediation of fonts, paper, bindings, publishers, book sellers, teachers, schools, churches, families and governments that provide the infrastructure that supports reading. But the power of reading nevertheless derives from forgetting all that and falling back into the illusion of direct mind-to-mind communion.

Here it is. Aung sells posters and prints here. (h/t Michael Lieberman on Book Patrol)

Greater Truthiness with Baskerville

Errol Morris wrote a two-part essay in the New York Times about the effects of type-fonts. He used an online quiz to test whether six different fonts affected people's answers. He found that more people believed a statement printed in Baskerville than in Georgia, Helvetica and three others. Along the way, he has much to say about the tendency inherited from reading hand-writing to evaluate letter-forms for the credibility of what is written--the legitimacy earned from iconic fonts. He also summarizes John Baskerville's turbulant life.

Sacred Texts Online

The British Library has made available in digitized form online over 70 sacred texts from ancient and contemporary world religions.

The link to the online collection can be accessed for free here.

Notably, the curators of this online resource have included both aesthetic and kinesthetic elements in the display, such as the ability to "turn" virtual pages of the texts, as if flipping through a "real" codex.

These attempts to make virtual texts more "book like" are worth exploring.  They involve resources of time, programming, and storage space--not to mention considerable extra monetary investments in website development.  How well, I wonder, do the curators research the desire, or "need," for this sort of feature before implementation?  Or do they simply assume that these sorts of functionalities are needed to make the site more appealing?

I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on these questions.

The Arts of the Book and Calligraphy

The Arts of the Book and Calligraphy

Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul

Fourteen years ago, a collection of calligraphy works from the Sakip Sabanci collection toured the United States under the exhibition title Letters in Gold. I vividly remember seeing the show at the Harvard Museums and gaining my first small steps toward understanding the intricacies, splendors, and fascination of Islamic calligraphy.

Since then the Sakip Sabanci "collection" has been established as a museum with its own building on the Bosphorus, a short journey north of the clamor of Istanbul's city centers. The new exhibition, The Arts of the Book and Calligraphy celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Sakip Sabanci Museum (SSM), and wonderfully displays both the significant permanent collection as well as some clever and provocative attempts at weaving old technologies of the book with new electronic technologies. It also, as the acronym of the title implies, gives an "ABCs" of the calligraphic tradition, providing a fabulous education.

I'll be writing a full review for Material Religion to appear later this year, but wanted to post some comments here that show the relevance of the exhibition for those of us interested in iconic and performative texts.

The exhibition is set up to introduce the book as object, an object that is technologically savvy, artistically creative, and pulls its users toward veneration--the latter occurring in part through technology and artistry. A large wall mural at the entrance depicts a line of people bearing gifts for a Sultan; the gifts are all large books (see image above). And so we enter this space that offers audiences an overview of bookmaking, including stitching, binding, cover work, the creation of pens, and ultimately writing and illustrating. Short videos document each of these processes, as finished examples from the Ottoman period are displayed in cases. Other sections of the exhibition focus on specific artistic forms like the hilye, levha, and kit'a. Many examples can be seen at the website.

The museum carries the tagline "Where history meets technology" for its permanent calligraphic collection. I spoke with Ayşa Aldemir Kilercik, the Collections Manager of the museum and co-curator of the ABC show. She tells me that the entire collection has now been digitized and SSM will be making it public as early as this year. This will be welcome news for many of us working on iconic texts.

The exhibition uses technology in one of the better ways I've seen in a museum setting. Visitors are offered an iPad at the beginning, and there are several stylistic QR Codes throughout that offer lighthearted, animated versions of Turkish miniature paintings that highlight the role of the book in various cultural and political settings. Here I am looking at four hundred year old books and illustrations through an iPad, and then taking a picture of the process (and you, reader/viewer, are adding another layer).

What struck me from a technological-textual perspective are the various objects that had been scanned at high resolutions. I was able to view the "original" object behind the glass case, then look at the screened version on the iPad. The iPad sometimes would then include translations, and further information, such as the image below shows. Of course, I wanted all the information, all the translations about all the objects. I found myself looking at the object, then studying the screen for close ups, then going back to the original object. The activity heightened my sense of engagement with the object itself, and shows the future of museum viewing as well as new technological engagements with books. 

Yet even with the limited number of works available now in full interactive form, the promises of such interactive technology are encouraging. The labor to do this is time intensive, and I wonder if we might develop new guilds--not just a programmers--that create these interactive works, creators who understand the texts, but also how to creatively put them in new forms, surrounded by new information settings.

One thing is clear: technology must be seen on a historical continuum. The making of books four hundred years ago is every bit as technologically sophisticated as the new iPads, every bit as interactive, creative, and sensually rich as video screens and digital manipulations. And so the future of the book rests not in its eclipse but in its resituation, its continual remediation. 

Park yourself with a good book

Many on this blog have noted the ways in which books are presented in various ritual and statuary fashions in our culture.  Here is one example that has been making the rounds of facebook this week.  The photo, attributed to Jonathan Moreau, shows the side of a Kansas City parking garage, adorned to look like a shelf of books.

What struck me, when I saw it, was not just the "larger than life" depiction, but also the choice of books to be depicted.  I can't make out all the titles, but clearly visible are The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, A Tale of Two Cities, Charlotte's Web, and Invisible Man.

So I find it interesting that books would be depicted, but also that these books (in many ways, a list of "usual suspects"--an accepted canon) would be chosen.  Not even the books, but the book spines, hold an iconic status in this case.

(JW: For another view, see Book Architecture)

Symposium papers published

I'm delighted to announce that the papers from the Iconic Books Symposia have now been published in a thematic triple issue of Postscripts. Here's the table of contents:

James W. Watts, Introduction, 1-6

William A. Graham, “Winged Words”: Scriptures and Classics as Iconic Texts, 7-22

Deirdre C. Stam, Talking about “Iconic Books” in the Terminology of Book History,23-38

Michelle P. Brown, Images to be Read and Words to be Seen: The Iconic Role of the Early Medieval Book, 39-66

S. Brent Plate, Looking at Words: The Iconicity of the Page, 67-82

Zeev Elitzur, Between the Textual and the Visual: Borderlines of Late Antique Book Iconicity, 83-99

Jacob Kinnard, It Is What It Is (Or Is It?): Further Reflections on the Buddhist Representation of Manuscripts, 101-116

M. Patrick Graham, The Tell-Tale Iconic Book,117-141

Natalia K. Suit, Muṣḥaf and the Material Boundaries of the Qur’an, 143-163

Timothy Beal, The End of the Word as We Know It: The Cultural Iconicity of the Bible in the Twilight of Print Culture, 165-184

Dorina Miller Parmenter, Iconic Books from Below: The Christian Bible and the Discourse of Duct Tape, 185-200

Kristina Myrvold, Engaging with the Guru: Sikh Beliefs and Practices of Guru Granth Sahib, 201-224

Joanne Punzo Waghorne, A Birthday Party for a Sacred Text: The Gita Jayanti and the Embodiment of God as the Book and the Book as God, 225-242

Yohan Yoo, Possession and Repetition: Ways in which Korean Lay Buddhists Appropriate Scriptures, 243-259

Karl Ivan Solibakke, The Pride and Prejudice of the Western World: Canonic Memory, Great Books and Archive Fever, 261-275

Philip P. Arnold, Indigenous “Texts” of Inhabiting the Land: George Washington’s Wampum Belt and the Canandaigua Treaty, 277-289

Jason T. Larson, The Gospels as Imperialized Sites of Memory in Late Ancient Christianity, 291-307

Claudia V. Camp, Possessing the Iconic Book: Ben Sira as Case Study, 309-329

James W. Watts, Ancient Iconic Texts and Scholarly Expertise, 331-334

Summer + books + libraries = sensual sacred space

Ben Ratliff writes music critique for the New York Times.  A piece this week has him roaming ("grazing") the stacks at Columbia, offering a paean to the sensuality of books. He tells of the stacks being "in a different sensory category," and through their arrangement they take on a spatial quality of separateness, abandon, becoming sacred.

What I like is that he contrasts his experience with his usual work on a networked computer, which creates its own sensory experience: "a hot thing blowing exhaust." McLuhan (always on whatever playlist operating in the back of my head) would tell of the various "sensoria" that create the worlds we live in, and one vital way to think through shifts in media is to see the sensory engagements that humans have with their objects of communication. (I wrote a bit about this myself recently.)

Ratliff's experience with books is a sensual one through and through, consciously engaging information through sight and smell:

You look at a row of spines, imprinted with butch, ultra-legible white or black type; your eye takes in more at any time than can be contained on a computer screen. You hold the books in your hand and feel the weight and size; the typography and the paper talk to you about time. A lot of libraries smell nice, but the smell of the Butler stacks is a song of organic matter, changing as temperatures do through the reaches of a pond.

As the temperature in Central New York reaches 90 today, you'll know where to find me.

More from the land of Book Art: Guy Laramee

Books used as artistic medium continues to be a shaping trend in visual arts and design.

Guy Laramee, Prajna Paramita, 2011.

I recently came across the work of Montreal artist Guy Laramee who, like Brian Dettmer, Stephen Doyle, and others noted in these pages (click the "book art" label below), carves books into sculptures and installations. Unlike the others, Laramee has an interest in the connection between sacred texts and landscapes. These would be stunning images if made with plaster and painted, but the medium layers a number of meanings and affects.

Laramee's recent project "Guan Yin" evokes the titular bodhisattva of compassion, but much else as well, such as the Himalayan landscape brought out through carving a bound copy of the Prajna Paramita sutras. There is also a "stupa" carved from a Tibetan-Chinese dictionary that may contain some political undertones. And the captivating cave carved through a copy of John Brown's "self-interpreting" family bible remains enigmatic.

Guy Laramee, Stupa, 2011

Guy Laramee, Brown, 2011

"CBS This Morning" did a brief interview with Laramee this Spring. The CBS correspondent asks whether he's had any negative reactions to what he does, because, after all "books are sacred." Laramee says, intriguingly, "I'm making them even more sacred, because they are a sacrifice." Any elaboration on that was edited down, though I'd suggest this is an example of de-con-secration" as opposed to desecration.

Much of his earlier work points toward interests in Romanticism and mysticism, and my sense is that a glimmer of the mysterious, perhaps even sublime, comes through books as well as landscapes.