Drawn to the Word: The Bible and Graphic Design, by Amanda Dillon

 

 

Drawn to the Word: The Bible and Graphic Design, by Amanda Dillon, has been published by SBL Press (2021), which describes it this way:

A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception

How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs.  Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.

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."

Qur'anic Matters by Natalia Suit

New book by Natalia Suit, Qur'anic Matters: Material Mediations and Religious Practice in Egypt (Bloomsbury, 2020).

The publisher's description: In Qur'anic Matters, Natalia Suit explores the materiality of books, focusing on the mushaf. With its paper, binding, ink, and script, the mushaf is not simply a carrier of the Qur'anic text but, by the virtue of its material body, it also has the ability to engender reformulations of religious knowledge and practice. Reading the Qur'an on a screen of a phone, for example, does not require the same forms of ritual ablutions as reading a printed text. The rules of purity limiting the access to the Qur'anic text for menstruating woman change when the Qur'anic text is mediated by digital bytes instead of paper.

Qur'anic Matters spans the time between two important technological shifts-the introduction of printed Qur'anic books in Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the digitization of the Qur'an almost two centuries later. Throughout, Natalia Suit weaves together the theological, legal, economic, and social “presences” of the Qur'anic books into a single account. She argues that the message and the materiality of the object are not separate from each other, nor are they separate from the human bodies with which they come in contact.

Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Part I: The Makers
1. The Beginning(s)
2. Pens, Letters, and the Politics of Correctness
3. Qur'anic Icons
Part II: The Custodians
4. Debating Defects
5. The (Ortho)Graphic Blueprint
6. What the Eyes Can't See but the Hands Can Touch: Mushaf in Braille
Part III: The Users
7. How Printing Created Manuscripts
8. Uses and Abuses
9. Enacting the Electronic Qur'an
Conclusion

NYT Review of “Blooks: The Art of Books That Aren’t”

"It’s hard not to be charmed by the emotional intensity, inventiveness and sometimes sheer whimsy of the items in the chockablock display cases," says the New York Times of Mindell Dubansky's exhibit, “Blooks: The Art of Books That Aren’t.” The Guardian calls it "decidedly quirky – but utterly delightful." The display of 200 book-shaped objects from her collection can be seen at the Grolier Club in Manhattan through March 12th.

Dubanksy has been collecting blooks for nearly twenty years. This preservation librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art uses her collection to better understand people's love of books.

“People have a real love of the book as an object,” she said. “But what is that connection about? Why do we feel a need to live with books, to have them around? I figured that if I could eliminate the text and collect objects made to mimic the form of books, I could figure that out a little better.”

Indeed, it is hard to think of a better demonstration of people's affection for the codex shape itself. Their bibliophilia expresses itself in whimsically utilitarian cigarette holders and spice jars, and even gag gifts like exploding books. But it also takes book form in much more serious displays of affection. Truly iconic is this sculpture from the Cultural Revolution of Mao's Collected Works:

For more pictures and examples, see Dubansky's blog about blooks. 

Marginalia and Its Disruptions

{from the Los Angeles Review of Books}

While there has been a growing conversation about the role of marginalia in the past two decades — including several library and art exhibitions devoted to the subject, studies like H. J. Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001), and many of Grafton’s own books and essays — the debate about the appropriateness of writing in books is quite old. Considering marginalia have been found in texts for as long as there have been books, scrolls, or writings on papyrus, it seems odd to say that now is the moment. But indeed it may be. There is an obvious reason for this, and a less obvious one.
[...]
There is a second, less obvious reason for marginalia’s moment, joined to the first at an obtuse angle, and that is the diminishing status of the human body. If the book is being threatened with extinction in the wake of the digital, the human body is even more so. Essays, movies, novels, speculations, and suspicions pervade contemporary culture concerning artificial intelligence, robotics, and the “singularity.” Ray Kurzweil’s future — replicated in films like Ex Machina, television shows like Caprica, and precursed by the disembodied HAL and Philip K. Dick — foresees a jacked-in consciousness, with little left of a sensate body that moves and breathes and reads.

Read more...

New articles: Religions & Books, and Iconic Scriptures

The new issue of Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture is devoted to the theme of "Livre et religion / Religion and the Book." The articles focus on various aspects of the multifarious interactions between religions and books. I particularly recommend the introduction by the guest editor, Scott McLaren, who draws together the theme and the articles in a broad theoretical overview:

• McLaren, Scott. "The End of Religion and the Death of the Book," Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture 6/2 (2015), online at DOI: 10.7202/1032705ar. 

 My own article uses the example of the Jewish Torah to emphasize that ritualizing the semantic dimension of texts does not necessarily take historical priority over ritualizing the iconic and performative dimensions.

• Watts, James W. "Iconic Scriptures from Decalogue to Bible." Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture 6/2 (2015), online at DOI: 10.7202/1032712ar.

Bibliography on Books in Art

A query about studies of depictions of books in art produced many suggestions this month on SHARP-L, the discussion list of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. It is interesting how many of them focus on artistic depictions of women reading or writing. When we first compiled a pictorial database for the Iconic Books Project, we noticed the prominent association women with books across a wide variety of cultures and throughout history. Since books in art have been a key interest of the Iconic Books Project from its inception, I have taken the liberty of compiling the suggestions here. 

Books and articles:

Adler, Laure, Stefan Bollman and Jean Torrent, Les femmes qui lisent sont dangereuses ("Reading Women Are Dangerous"), Flammarion, 2006, new ed. 2015.

Adler, Laure, Stefan Bollman and Jean Torrent, Les femmes qui lisent sont de plus en plus dangereuses ("Reading Women are More & More Dangerous") Flammarion, 2012.

Allen, James Smith. In the Public Eye: a History of Reading in Modern France, 1800-1940. Princeton University Press, 1991.  Chapter Five: “Artistic Images.”

Brown, Kathryn. Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890. Ashgate, 2012. Introduction online here.  

Docherty, Linda J. "Women as Readers: Visual Interpretations," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 107 (October 1997): 335-88, online here.
Inmann, Christiane. Forbidden Fruit : a History of Women and Books in Art. Prestel, 2009.

Lerner, Loren. “William Notman’s Portrait Photographs of Girls Reading from the 1860s to 1880s: A Pictorial Analysis Based on Contemporary Writings.” Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada 47/1 (2009), online here.  

Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Chapter 1.

Stewart, Garrett. The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Thornton, Dora. The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy. Yale University Press, 1998.

Warner, William. “Staging Readers Reading.” Online here.

Zanker, Paul. The Mask of Socrates: the Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity. Tr. A. Shapiro. Berkeley: University of California, 1995.

Exhibition and Sale catalogs:

il libro come tema, National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, September – November, 2006.

Das Buch in der Kunst - die Kunst im Buch. Graphik-Salon Gerhart Söhn, 1984.

Library and Museuam Collections:

Antwerp City Library: Former Antwerp city librarian Ger Schmook (1898-1985) collected a huge set of images of books in art; it’s a collection of photocopies with a card file.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: catalog by Mindell Dubansky of photographs and descriptions of bindings and images of books depicted in the art works of the Met: “Catalog of Bookbindings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art” [v. 9.] European Paintings, Representations of the book in art. -- [v. 10.] The Lehman Collection, Representations of the book in art.

SCRIPT at SHARP in Antwerp

SCRIPT sponsored nine papers in three panels at the of SHARP annual meeting in Antwerp, Belgium on September 18-20, 2014.

On the first panel, "Canonizing and Scripturalizing Iconic Books," I introduced the Iconic Books Project. My paper, “Iconic Scriptures from Decalogue to Bible,” described the iconic motivations that generated the Ten Commandments and the scroll of Torah in ancient Israel. Michael Como (Columbia University) explored the religious, social and environmental effects of bringing Buddhist scribal bureaucracy to Japan in “Canon, Ethnicity and Kingship in Ancient Japan." Kristina Myrvold (Linnaeus University) described how Sikhs narrate the early history of the Guru Granth Sahib in “Entextualization of Sikh Texts in Religious Historiographies and Performances.”

On the second panel, "Literary and Iconic Canons," Jonas Svenson (Linnaeus University) borrowed the concept of contagion avoidance from cognitive psychology to describe Muslim concern to protect the purity of the Qur'an, in “The double Scripture: explaining diversity and conflict in Muslim perceptions and practices in relation to the Qur’an.” Rachel Fell McDermott (Barnard College, Columbia University) then described the life and controversial influence of the Bangladeshi national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam in “When a National Poet is a Heretic: The Collision of Literary and Religious Canons.” Karl Ivan Solibakke (Syracuse University) concluded the panel with by mediating two 20th-century uses of texts and images in “Mimesis and Poesis: Walter Benjamin’s and Vilem Flusser’s Translational Approach to Script.”

In the third panel, "Scriptures as Icons and Talismans," Dorina Miller Parmenter (Spalding University)  advanced theories of iconic books by employing Affect Theory in “Saved by the Book: Exploring the Christian Bible as Effective and Affective Object.” David Ganz (University of Zürich) described medieval Christians' concern to "cover the nakedness" of a book of scripture with decorative bindings in “Clothing Sacred Scripture: Books as Holy Objects in the Western Middle Ages.” Finally, Bradford Anderson (Mater Dei Institute, Dublin) explored the rhetorical and ritual use of Bibles to establish religious and national identity in "'This booke hath bred all the quarrel': The Bible in Seventeenth Century Ireland."

Discussion of each of the papers was lively and continued over several dinners in restaurants on various squares of Antwerp. The SHARP meeting, on the theme "Religions of the Book," provided a venue for many other papers on the impact of book production and book reading on religion, and vice versa. The full program can still be accessed here. 

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)

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.

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.

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. 

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)

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. 

Encyclopedia Britannica goes Digital

Last week NPR reported on the decision by the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica to shift from print-and-digital to an all-digital format. According to the report, this will be the first time in 244 years that the Encyclopedia will not be available in print form.

The NPR story quotes from a New York Times article, which clearly delineates the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of America's iconic books:

In the 1950s and 1960s, a set of encyclopedias on the bookshelf was akin to a station wagon in the garage or a black-and-white Zenith in the den, an object coveted not only for its usefulness but as a goalpost for an aspirational middle class. The books were often a financial stretch, with many families paying for their encyclopedias in monthly installments.

Indeed, I remember how fiercely proud my late mother was of our set of the Britannica. For her, it was a mark of our intellectual credibility. We may have been poor, but we were educated--and owning a set of the Britannica (and not just relying on the local library) was a tangible marker of that status.

My mother passed away in 2009, and being her only child, the task fell to me to sift through her possessions. I made the decision to part with the set of Encyclopedia Britannica, now more than thirty years out of date. There have been many days, however, when I have second-guessed that decision. Should I have kept them? Not for what they contained, but for what they meant, to my mother, and to me, all those years.

To me, there is no better criteria for the iconic status of a book (or set of books) than this: that you would be willing to make space in your life for them for no other reason than their sentimental value; not even for what they meant to me, but for what they meant to somebody else.

SCRIPT at EIR

This SCRIPT panel will take place at the AAR's EIR meeting in Waterloo, ON:
May 4, 4:00-6:00

Panel: The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT)

Room: REN 1404

• David Dault, Christian Brothers University: "On a Controlled Bibliographic Vocabulary for SCRIPT and its Related Organizations: A Response to Deirdre Stam"
• James W. Watts, Syracuse University: "Relic Books"
• Karl Ivan Solibakke, Syracuse University: "Identity, Mimesis and Script: Walter Benjamin's Mimetic Function Revisited"

All I want for Christmas is a Controlled Vocabulary...

...or, at least, to start a conversation about one.

A "controlled vocabulary" is a standard used in taxonomies to help control ambiguity about objects and resources. It cuts down on syntactic clutter.

What sort of clutter? Consider the word "football." The term means one thing in America, sure. As soon as we are out of the US, however, it could easily refer to what we yanks call "soccer," or even (in other parts of the world) rugby. As a descriptor, "football" is a poor one.

In the worlds of Iconic Books and Material Scripture, we have a similar problem. Our terms, especially terms like "book" and "text," are imprecise and (at worst) utterly confusing. Since these are the core objects of our discussions, it makes sense to take up discussions to adopt a standard of terms, a "controlled vocabulary," that will allow us to reduce ambiguities as we move forward in our research.

I am by no means the first person to call for such a move. Those who attended the third Iconic Books symposium in 2010 will remember Deirdre Stam's "Talking About 'Iconic Books' in the Terminology of Book History." I feel now - as I said then, as we were commenting on her paper - that this is the single most important matter facing our research. Hands down.

Now that SCRIPT is viable and attracting new members, we are at a perfect point to undertake a serious conversation about finding a scholarly standard for our bibliographic terms - a shared, controlled vocabulary that we can endorse and encourage the use of in all SCRIPT-related endeavors and publications. (Think of this is terms of the SBL Style Guide, for example - in principle if not in execution - offering a standard reference to writers in the field.) Now, precisely when things are still small and manageable, is the ideal time to put such standards in place.

I speak from bitter experience. In the process of writing my dissertation, I concocted an 80-page chapter where - in my utter ignorance - I attempted to develop a vocabulary out of whole cloth for theologians to talk about physical books. It was terrible; a Frankenstein's monster sort of affair. Moreover, it was executed in complete ignorance of the excellent groundwork in bibliographic studies that already exists.

It is my fear, if we don't establish such a standard, that my experience will be shared by many SCRIPT scholars to follow. Each will take their turn at the attempt to define their subject from the ground up, wasting time and effort that could be spent advancing the conversation in new directions.

For those who have never thought about these issues before, let me suggest two starting points for discussion. The first (shorter) is G. Thomas Tanselle's "The Arrangement of Descriptive Bibliographies," from Studies in Bibliography, Volume 37 (1984) and available online here. In the article, Tanselle suggests the second (longer) starting point, which I'd like to also include here, Principles of Bibliographic Description, by Fredson Bowers.

What is needed, ultimately, is a set of terms upon which we agree, that we will use moving forward to reduce ambiguity in our scholarly conversations. Tanselle and Bowers are two sources I have come across in my own research, but I have no doubt many readers of this blog have encountered others that they might suggest. Please do.

My hope (my Christmas wish!) is that this discussion will be taken up across all quarters of the SCRIPT universe in the next couple of years. I encourage my colleagues to follow Deirdre Stam's lead, and to present papers and perhaps whole conference panels where options for standards can be presented and debated. I also encourage robust discussion on these blogs about the question.

There are well-established, robust standards of bibliographic description out there. Let's share them, search out new ones, and eventually decide on the one that will best serve our scholarship. Then let's agree on it, use it, and move forward to the frontiers.

I'm very interested in suggestions and responses. Please share them in the comments below! Thank you, and happy holidays,

David Dault, Washington, PA

Thousands of rare books go up in flames in Cairo

Huffington Post has reported today that the "Institute d'Egypte, a research center set up by Napoleon Bonaparte during France's invasion in the late 18th century, caught fire during clashes between protesters and Egypt's military over the weekend. It was home to a treasure trove of writings, most notably the handwritten 24-volume Description de l'Egypte, which began during the 1798-1801 French occupation."

Thousands of volumes have been damaged, and many are burned beyond recovery. "This is equal to the burning of Galileo's books," Zein Abdel-Hady, who runs the country's main library, said.

The full Huffington Post article can be accessed here.

MLA CFP on Religion & History of the Book

From SHARP-L comes this call for papers:

Religion and the History of the Book

Special Session for the 2012 MLA convention

How technologies of inscription have shaped religious thought and practice; how religious discourses have affected the form of the book and other textual media. Send 250 word abstract to travis_decook@carleton.ca by March 15, 2011.