Iconic books are texts revered as objects of power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight. In religious and secular rituals around the globe, people carry, show, wave, touch and kiss books and other texts, as well as read them. This blog chronicles such events and activities. (For more about iconic books, see the links to the Iconic Books Project at left.)

Friday, December 4, 2020

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."

Monday, November 30, 2020

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:




Sunday, November 29, 2020

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.

 Image

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

Thursday, November 12, 2020