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."

From Scrolls to Scrolling Sacred Texts, Materiality, and Dynamic Media Cultures

New open access book edited by Bradford A. Anderson, From Scrolls to Scrolling: Sacred Texts, Materiality, and Dynamic Media Cultures (De Gruyter, 2020).



Contents:

• Bradford A. Anderson, "Introduction: Materiality, Liminality, and the Digital Turn: The Sacred Texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Material Perspective" 1

I Sacred Texts and Material Contexts

• Anna Krauß and Friederike Schücking-Jungblut, "Stichographic Layout in the Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls: Observations on its  Development and its Potential" 13
• Dan Batovici, "Reading Aids in Early Christian Papyri" 35
• Asma Hilali, "Writing the Qur’ān Between the Lines: Marginal and Interlinear Notes in Selected Qur’ān Fragments from the Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar" 51
• Ben Outhwaite, "The Sefer Torah and Jewish Orthodoxy in the Islamic Middle Ages" 63
• Javier del Barco, "From Scroll to Codex: Dynamics of Text Layout Transformation in the Hebrew Bible" 91
• Eyal Poleg, "Memory, Performance, and Change: The Psalms’ Layout in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bibles" 119
• Amanda Dillon, "Be Your Own Scribe: Bible Journalling and the New Illuminators of the Densely-Printed Page" 151

II Sacred Texts and the Digital Turn

• Garrick V. Allen, "Monks, Manuscripts, Muhammad, and Digital Editions of the New Testament" 181
• Alba Fedeli, "The Qur’ānic Text from Manuscript to Digital Form: Metalinguistic Markup of Scribes and Editors" 213
• Joshua L. Mann, "Paratexts and the Hermeneutics of Digital Bibles" 247
• Natalia Suit, "Virtual Qur’ān: Authenticity, Authority, and Ayat in Bytes" 263
• Bradford A. Anderson, "Sacred Texts in a Digital Age: Materiality, Digital Culture, and the Functional Dimensions of Scriptures in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" 281