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.)
The Jerusalem Post reported that the Israel Museum is trying to date the mysterious Ezekiel Plates. These 66 stone tiles containing the entire Hebrew text of the book of Ezekiel were reportedly found in the traditional tomb of Ezekiel in Iraq.
... each marble or black basalt tile is about 12 inches square and contains raised lettering on one side in an ancient Hebraic script, with no spaces between the words. Examples of such raised lettering are known from the distant past, though most ancient stone tablets had the words etched or chiseled into the stone.
... the tiles were supposedly found over 100 years ago when visitors to the traditional tomb of Ezekiel in the small Iraqi town of Kfar al-Kafil, located about 50 miles south of Baghdad, noticed a stone tile had fallen off the inside of the burial chamber. Oddly, its back side contained an ancient lettering which had been deliberately hidden, facing the wall. Other tiles were removed and similar inscriptions were found on their back sides as well.
An explanation for this tomb inscription may be provided by the Talmud:
... there is an old Talmudic tradition that Israel's prophets and other great sages were often buried with copies of their writings. One such Talmudic legend held that the original book of Ezekiel was buried with the prophet in his tomb and was left there to be revealed in the last days.
That may not help in dating the text. But it does suggest that the Ezekiel Plates may be examples of eschatalogical texts that were created to be buried until a future or last age (see my previous blog entry, Burying Iconic Books).
I have twice already blogged about the Tripitaka Koreana (here and here), the 13th-century collection of 88,000 wooden printing blocks of Buddhist sutras stored and displayed in the Haeinsa monestary in Korea. On Sunday, I was lucky to see a procession in Seoul that began the cellebrations of the millenial anniversary of the carving of the original set of printing blocks. Participants carried reproductions of the print blocks on their heads or backs through the streets of the city, preceded by palanquins containing more blocks and followed by dancers and soldiers in period costumes. It was a vivid example of how ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts allows broad participation by lay people who are unlikely to have the linguistic skills necessary to read and interpret these Chinese texts.
The Good Book: A Secular Bible by British philosopher A. C. Grayling offers alternative content to the Christian Bible, but imitates its form, including two columns of text on each page, King James-sounding English, and familiar section titles, such as "Genesis," "Parables," and "Epistles." The collector of the volume explained the format to an audience in Virginia, reported The Christian Post: "Part of the success of the religious Bible is the function of the way it's organized, the way it presents itself," said the professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. "When you print something double column, chapter and verse, it's a very accessible, very inviting format." (The publishers, however, do not seem to have gotten on board: the book does not look very Bible-like.)
Reviews of the format have been decidedly mixed. The Telegraph called it "cheeky," while the New York Times review complains about Grayling's failure to cite the sources of his material and wonders, "Is this book an odd joke? A parody of the Bible?" The Guardian offers a more flattering account by focusing largely on Grayling rather than his book.
I haven't seen a copy of The Good Book yet, but it sounds as if Grayling has attempting to preserve the Bible's iconic form while replacing its semantic content. His mistake, I think, lies in failing to realize that the social power of scriptures is generated by being ritualized in semantic, iconic and performative dimensions. A Bible without a network of congregations to ritualize it is no Bible at all.
Paramount Home Entertainment is marketing its 55th anniversary gift set edition of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments in iconic style. As the New York Times reports:
It’s all packaged inside a dictionary-size box with a lenticular 3-D image of the Red Sea on the front; when the sea is “parted” on a built-in hinge, a plastic reproduction of DeMille’s sacred tablets rises majestically into view. The tablets themselves split open to reveal the six discs, which contain both DeMille’s famous 1956 version of the story starring Charlton Heston and his 1923 silent feature with Richard Dix that was his first pass at the material.
But the article complains of "tacky" execution: "And what’s worse, the tablets don’t work: the clasps holding the discs in place easily come loose, allowing the discs slip and slide against each other." But then, the complaint that the Ten Commandments don't work is hardly new ...
Bookseller Timothy McSweeney, produced a six part report on "The State of Publishing" in February that emphasizes, as he puts it:
The good news is that there isn't as much bad news as popularly assumed. In fact, almost all of the news is good, and most of it is very good. Book sales are up, way up, from twenty years ago. Young adult readership is far wider and deeper than ever before. Library membership and circulation is at all-time high.
I find the statistics that he gathered on library usage particularly interesting:
The more libraries I spoke with, the more I realized they are not only doing well, but that they did, in 2010, easily surpass historic rates of user growth in all fields—most importantly, borrowed items and registered borrowers.
McSweeney's statistics did not go unchallenged. Jane Friedman of Writer's Digest disputed his statistics on library usage, publishing and readership and Jeremy Dibbel of PhiloBiblos finds them "incomplete." The debate over the future of the book seems to be hamstrung by the fact that there is no agreement about the book in the present, or even the very recent past.
But before we leave the subject, I need to point out an observation that Jane Friedman makes about McSweeney's in a postscript to her critique:
I have been a longtime fan of McSweeney's. As my colleagues at Writer's Digest could tell you, I would repeatedly bring their publications to team meetings and say: THIS is what we need to do. I admired how their physical production was as much a piece of art as the writing contained inside. It made the print product worth having and worth investing in. I think a segment of print publishing may end up going in this direction. (Book as talisman, as keepsake, as identity giver.)
It is natural so see iconic books and e-books as opposites, but my recent research suggest their relationship is much more complicated. More on that later ...
Groups (families, ethnic groups, religions, nations) make texts iconic when they base ownership claims on some kind of historic identification with the texts, their authors or previous owners. The problem is, of course, that these identity claims often come into conflict with those of others. Many such conflicts rage over texts and other artifacts in Western museums, but I know of few that illustrate the stakes for group identity as clearly as the argument over who should get the Iraqi Jewish archives.
Alex Joffe in Jewish Ideas Daily describes the situation of the archive discovered in 2003 by American troops in a building of the Iraqi secret police:
The earliest item dates to 1568, but most of the other materials are from the late-19th and early-20th centuries.Judeo-Arabic manuscripts, Torah scrolls and mantles, children's primers, family photographs, letters, all seized from Iraq's long-banished Jews. Through a confluence of initiatives involving the U.S. military, the Iraqi opposition, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, the trove was transported to the U.S. where it was freeze-dried, conserved, and photographed. It remains in the charge of the National Archives and Records Administration and the Center for Jewish History.Representatives of the Iraqi Jewish community in Israel have staked a claim to the trove. But so, for its part, has Iraq itself, whose new Minister of Tourism and Antiquities has named the return of the archive as a top priority.
After recounting the history of Jewish persecution in Iraq, Joffe asks: "By what right should a society that barely tolerated and then expelled its Jews, and that loathes and forbids the presence of Jews now, be given 27 cases of Jewish documents and books?" He suggests: "International refugee law provides for 'non-refoulment': that is, refugees must not be returned to a situation where they would be put in jeopardy. Might a similar principle be considered for antiquities?"
Here is the program of SCRIPT's panels in its concurrent meeting with the AAR-EIR in Syracuse on May 6-7. The program for the entire conference is available here.
ICONIC BOOKS (Friday 12:00-1:30)
Nancy Menning “Wunderkammern as more than iconic: Watts’s model of scriptures and the Book of Nature”
David Dault “The Strange Case of the United 93 Bible: Tragedy, Iconicity, Materiality”
James W. Watts “Iconic Electronic Texts, or How Ritual Makes ‘Virtual’ Texts Material”
TEXTS AND IDENTITY (Friday 1:45-3:15)
Marcie Middlebrooks “The Inner Spirit and Outer Performance of Korean Buddhist Shinhaeng-dam Stories”
Steven Christopher Johnson “Empowering Oppression: LGBT Gaudiya Vaishnava Scriptural Interpretation”
Margaret Robinson “Pride, Performance and Praise: Bisexual Anthology as Bible”
TEXT AND COMMUNITY (Friday 3:30-5:00)
Chris Duncanson-Hales “RastafarI ‘Q:’ National Geographic “Modern Ethiopia” and “Coronation Day in Addis Ababa””
Cecile Marie Wilson “The iconic status of the original manifestos seems confirmed by AMORC’s recent emulation of them.”
IMAGE AND BOOK (Saturday 8:30-10:30)
Karl Ivan Solibakke “The Gospel of the Haunted: Arnold Daghani’s What a Nice World”
Glenn Jonathan McCullough “Blake’s Job and the Alchemical Tradition”
Judith Oliver “A Multi-Media Performance of the Easter Liturgy In A Nun’s Choirbook from Late Medieval Germany”
Jason Neelis “Rebirth Narratives in Gandhāran Buddhist Literary and Material Cultures – Different locative tendencies in early manuscript fragments, art, and pilgrimage accounts”
SCRIPT ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION (Saturday 10:45-12:15) with Brent Plate, David Dault,
Joanne Waghorne, and James Watts.
SCRIPT membership now includes an online subscription to current and back issues of Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds, which later this year will be publishing a special issue containing the papers from the three Iconic Books symposia held in 2007, 2009 and 2010. Memberships including that subscription are $70 (45 GBP); student memberships without the subscription cost $15. Apply for membership at the Postscripts SCRIPT member's page.
The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT) was founded in 2010 to encourage new scholarship about the social functions of books and texts that exceed their semantic meaning and interpretation, such as their display as cultural artifacts, their ritual use in religious and political ceremonies, their performance by recitation and theater, and their depiction in art.
The society sponsors programming at existing regional and international scholarly meetings and at colleges and universities. Next month, SCRIPT is sponsoring four panels meeting concurrently with the Eastern International Regional Meeting of the AAR in Syracuse (May 6-7). We welcome ideas for other programs and venues to host them. For more information, see www.script-site.net.
I was asked to write a short response to Moerman's essay. It concludes:
... Book and text rituals, which include their public performance and interpretation as well as their physical display and manipulation, serve to focus the attention of communities on enduring values. They cherish texts that contain those values as material representations of them, as relics of their faith. Anxiety about the future fuels efforts to reproduce and preserve those texts, so that they become material guarantors of cultural and religious persistence and, in Moerman's words, “a rhetorical center around which other personal, familial, and political anxieties converge” (p. 86).
Find the rest of it, as well as two other responses, here.
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.
The call for papers for Novembers's Society of Biblical Literature meeting in San Francisco includes this request for a thematic panel on "The Materiality of Texts / The Word as Object":
At some point in the development of sacred texts, readers became aware of them as material entities. How did this awareness affect their adornment, both inside with ornate calligraphy and illuminations, and outside with ornamented covers? How did this development influence ritual practices? What happens to our understanding or even interpretation of text when it depends as much, if not more on the materiality of the text than on the words themselves? How does thinking about the materiality of ancient texts (and attendant technologies) provide insight into the development of ritual practices and other embodied ideas of the sacred?
The panel will be co-sponsored by three program groups: Religious World of Late Antiquity, Art and Religions of Antiquity, and Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism.
Michael Lieberman on Book Patrol has mined the online photographs of the Museum of the City of New York to put together a collection of pictures of the private libraries of famous New Yorkers, such as this one of Thomas Edison in his library:
Some custom book binders have found a profitable business in creating custom mathing bindings to make libraries match the work of interior designers, according to a New York Times article from last month.
In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves — lots and lots of shelves — and turning to companies like Mr. Wines’s Juniper Books for help filling them.
Jeffrey Collé, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from one of his creations. A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Collé had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books.
It’s up to the buyers or their decorator to fill that space, said Mr. Collé, who has collaborated with Bennett Weinstock, a Philadelphia decorator known for his English interiors, on some of his libraries. ...
The first open call for papers of a meeting of SCRIPT has been extended until January 31st. SCRIPT will meet concurrently with the Eastern International Region of the American Academy of Religion at Syracuse University, May 6-7. We invite paper proposals on all aspects of the iconic and performative dimensions of books and other texts.
Librarians are a not-infrequent theme of love songs (think "Marian the Librarian" in Music Man), but this great song by Reina Del Cid is the first I've heard from the librarian's perspective, or at least the perspective of the library work-study student. Enjoy!
Lyrics (dedicated to "To all kindred nerds"):
Shelving books on the night shift It takes some time, but I guess I like it Dewey's decimals keep me company
Out the window, you are dancing With those girls who can't stop laughing Lip-gloss, too hot, fake-baked drama queens
You were drinking a margarita I was reading My Antonia I got to thinking that
I don't fit inside that world And I'm not like those other girls Oh no, I'm not, I think a lot But please don't be afraid
Just 'cause I navigate the media And use encyclopedias It doesn't mean that I don't need A boy just like you to talk to
Set my cup back on its saucer At the coffee shop, reading Chaucer With my iPod on my favorite track
The girls you're with get turtle lattes Decaf, skim-based, extra frothy But you and I both drink our coffee black
You were talking about ACDC And I was playing my Puccini I got to thinking that
Repeat Chorus
You can buy me a margarita And I will lend you My Antonia You can take me to ACDC And I'll play you my Puccini It doesn't matter that
I don't fit inside that world I'm not like those other girls Oh no, I'm not, I think a lot But you are not afraid.
That I navigate the media And use encyclopedias It doesn't mean that I don't need A boy just like you to talk to
Interesting little piece in the Sunday NY Times by Steven Heller, a regular there on graphic design. Heller has several excellent books on graphic design and culture, including the recent, "Pop: How Graphic Design Shapes Popular Culture."
Of note is the connection made between the simplicity of a corporate logo and the potentially magical, talismanic properties it might invoke. There is the wonderful, ongoing power of visual symbols, and capitalism's necessary reliance on the imaged fetish.
The Washington Post reports that the new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives plans to open the new session on January 6th by reading the Constitution aloud. They will also "require that every new bill contain a statement by the lawmaker who wrote it citing the constitutional authority to enact the proposed legislation."
The article goes on to quote some who dismiss these new rules as "symbolic flourishes" and "cosmetic." That is a typical reaction from a culture, especially academic culture, that has been trained for millennia to underestimate the power of rituals. But I wonder if the Tea Party advocates of these ceremonies understand their social effects either.
The U.S. Constitution, together with the Declaration of Independence, has long been ritualized in both its semantic dimension (the court decisions and legal commentaries that make up the vast literature on constitutional law) and its iconic dimension (most obviously in its shrine in the Rotunda of the U.S. National Archives which provided a memorable backdrop for Pres. Obama's speech about Guantanamo Bay in 2009). But ritualization of its third, performative, dimension lags behind. Since Congress established September 17th as Constitution Day in 2004, however, this annual event has included recitations of the Constitution's preamble by dignitaries and school children.
In a 2004 article analyzing the movement to establish or defend Ten Commandment's monuments in court houses, I suggested that it was an attempt to gain for the Bible the same iconic recognition as the Constitution. The ritualized readings of the Constitution in Congress and elsewhere could conversely be understood as (subconscious?) efforts to grant this document the status of scripture. Andrew Romano observed in Newsweek that Tea Party's rhetoric of constitutional rhetoric echoes the Christian right's rhetoric of biblical reverence in the early 1990s. Rep. Ron Paul has been the most explicit but hardly the only right-wing politician to suggest that the Constitution is divinely inspired.
Analogies between the U.S. Constitution and the Bible are actually not new. Soon after ratification it was being hailed as a product of divine providence. People still regularly repeat Supreme Court Justice William Johnson's description, in 1823, of the Constitution as "the most wonderful instrument ever drawn by the hand of man." The country's history has witnessed periodic attempts to ritualize its performance regularly through school recitation competitions and public pageants. But statements like Rep. Paul's quickly draw withering criticism from religious leaders and commentators fearful that the Bible's unique status in Christian culture may be challenged. Though many cultures and religions employ multiple scriptures without any difficulties, Protestant Christianity tends to emphasize the Bible's sole authority. Thus ritualizing the Constitution's performance, like its iconicity, risks splitting conservative religious support.
Nevertheless, repeated ritual practices frequently generate beliefs as much as reflect them. Once Congress starts reading the Constitution, it is unlikely that any American politician will try to stop the practice at some future time. This ongoing tradition of public readings could spawn imitation in other settings and may, as Tea Party supporters hope, generate even greater reverence for the country's foundational document. Doing so, however, will highlight the question of its status relative to religious scriptures in general and, in mostly Christian America, to the Bible in particular.
I have already had reason to comment that Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws fuel the invention of charges of Qur'an desecration in that country (see also my case study comparing different cultures). However, the efforts of human rights organizations to change the law seem to be suffering setbacks this month. The New York Times reports:
A crippling strike by Islamist parties brought Pakistan to a standstill on Friday as thousands of people took to the streets and forced businesses to close to head off any change in the country’s blasphemy law ....
The general strike and protests Friday are an indication of the power Islamists hold on the streets of Pakistan. It is also a sharp contrast to the campaigns by rights activists and opponents of the blasphemy laws who have vented their opposition and discontent mostly on the Internet and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Protest rallies by rights activists have been ineffective and relatively small.
... the huge show of force by religious parties, and even the attention local news media outlets gave them on Friday, would only embolden the religious elements in the country, analysts said. The dynamic was such that “the government may not be able to make any changes in the blasphemy laws in the coming years,” Mr. Rais predicted.
The Guardian reports on the fate of a bizarre relic: a Qur'an written in Saddam Hussein's blood.
Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur'an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight - locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant's legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with.
The article goes on to discuss how the Iraqi government is dealing with other monuments and relics of the dictators reign.
I suspect, though, that the Blood Qur'an will prove to be a unique problem for them. It combines in one relic an object of the most intense veneration for Muslims, the Qur'an, with a bodily substance closely identified with the deposed and executed dictator, his blood. Here the political pressure for its preservation and for its destruction will both be felt most fiercely.
Books have often functioned as relics of venerated figures that rival in importance their bodily relics. But in this case, the book IS a bodily relic.
Now Book Patrol draws our attention to the photo archives of the Los Angeles Public Library. Some distinctive pictures here of the politics of books in 1962, by two different parties:
Michael Liebermann on Book Patrol calls attention to the fact that the Boston Public Library has put 15,000 images from their archives on Flickr. They include vintage advertisements like this 1895 poster
and also images of the libraries and their patrons, like this of the Dorchester Branch's summer reading club:
I'm just back from a few weeks researching gardens in Japan, the kind of Zen-type designs that are most idealized in a place like Ryoan-ji. The wonderful thing about Japan, like so many modern contemporary places today, is the ancient-modern juxtaposition that stares you down around every corner. You can walk out of the austerity of a 500-year old garden and in five minutes be at the local 7-11 skimming pages of the latest manga series. Which is somewhat what I did.
Along the way I stumbled upon the manga title Seinto oniisan, which usually gets translated into English as "Saint Young Men," but also carries "brotherly" connotations. The brothers in question are none other than Jesus and Buddha, who take a vacation from otherworldly life to shack up together in the Tokyo suburb, Nachikawa. They share a spartan, tatami-clad flat, wonder over new technology, do their own laundry (mostly jeans and t-shirts with various Buddhist and Christian references), visit amusement parks, get their food from the local 7-11, and celebrate Christmas and Shinto festivals.
Campus Grotto has produced a list and pictures of the "Most Beautiful Campus Libraries" (reproduced as a top-ten list by Huffington Post). It is limited to U.S. colleges and universities. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the list is dominated by architectural styles inspired by European religious traditions: most are either Gothic or Neo-Classical.
Yale's Stirling Library exhibits the extreme end of this tradition, with its circulation desk dominated by an icon of personified wisdom surrounded by the seven liberal arts.
But Yale also hosts the most stunning modernist library architecture, the Beinecke Rare Book Library, whose glass-enclosed climate-controlled cube within an alabaster exterior cube displays the books themselves as the objects of veneration.
Its goal is to foster academic discourse about the social functions of books and texts that exceed their semantic meaning and interpretation, such as their display as cultural artifacts, their ritual use in religious and political ceremonies, their performance by recitation and theater, and their depiction in art. SCRIPT then incorporates the interests of the Iconic Books project, but also invites broader consideration of both iconic and performative dimensions of texts.
The society will sponsor programming at existing regional and international scholarly meetings and at colleges and universities. The first of these will be a concurrent meeting with the Eastern International Region of the AAR at Syracuse University, May 6-7, 2011 (see the Call for Papers).
We welcome new members and ideas for programs and venues to host them.
The Long Now Blog passed on this piece from Stanford libraries:
Who Needs a Library Anyway?
When then-President Gerhard Casper rhetorically asked this question, 12 October 1999 – as the title of his remarks at the dedication of the Bing Wing – there was much talk in the air about the imminent demise of libraries. Were these not a bunch of dinosaurs about to be smacked by the meteoric impact of the Web? Was the book not rapidly becoming an anachronism, a fetish object of a dying pulp-based culture? Many of us, with President Casper, disagreed with these glib notions then. But that was several generations ago, on the timescale of the information world around us. How have we fared since on the extinction short list?
Last month, forecaster and chair of our Advisory Council Paul Saffo delighted a select group of our donors with a talk about books, revolutions, and timescales. In a dense web of connected thoughts, he tied the great information revolution of the late 15th century to that of the late 20th, likening the titanic publisher-scholar Aldus Manutius to Steve Jobs, linking the once-revolutionary idea that a printed book is what it is (not a cheap knock-off of a proper manuscript) to the emerging identity of digital works as being something other than bad substitutes for physical books. He reminded us of an intrinsic life-cycle law of objects: things fade, or even disappear, after about a half-century, even (or particularly) Aldine editions or 1960s bestsellers. I am reminded that we avidly collect medieval “binding fragments,” i.e., pieces of manuscripts, mostly on vellum, that were cut up and recycled as stiffeners in bindings of later books, a practice we would now consider barbaric and wasteful (and very expensive). Apparently, after a century or so of European printing, manuscripts were considered expendable, rendered technically obsolescent by the printing press (and the scholarly efflorescence it made possible).
Universities and their libraries have been around for a fairly long time, say 700 or 800 years. The great university libraries that we are familiar with – those with millions of volumes addressing myriad subjects and disciplines – evolved through the vast post-war growth of academic research, coincidentally about a half-century ago. Are they – or, should I say, we – suffering decrepitude and irrelevance? I offer as evidence our experience with the New Graduate Student Orientation program last month, detailed later in this issue. It seems that Stanford’s new crop of grad students, arguably the most savvy and motivated class of information users alive, are quite aware they need libraries. Some of them may even need Aldine editions or binding fragments. All of them will use electronic resources on various sorts of devices. Whatever the form, the libraries will stand ready to help them obtain and use the stuff of scholarship.
Penguin has published Ammon Shea's The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads. I will be interested to read it, since I have often used the phone book as my best example of a completely un-iconic book: it is ritualized neither in the semantic dimension (the point of Shea's subtitle) nor in the iconic or performative dimensions. Despite being an instantly recognizable feature of 20th century culture (and so "iconic" in the popular sense of the term), the phone book's lack of ritualization makes it vulnerable to electronic replacement.
The interest of this conference is twofold: the patronage of sacred texts in comparative contexts and the role of inter-religious elements in the production of sacred texts. The participants will address the adoption of book-making techniques across religious boundaries, Jewish/Christian/Muslim collaborative translations of art/text productions, interest in reading, producing, or interpreting the sacred texts of other religious traditions, and other related questions.
Jill Hurst-Wahl attended the third Iconic Books Symposium and wonders about the social effects of iconic books on her blog, Digitization 101:
Does the iconic value of the book keep us tied to this medium more than we should be? Is our move toward other ways of transmitting information being inhibited by our connection to the book as a representation of knowledge?
My questions are: What are the stakes that people (and companies and universities and governments and religions) have in material books? And what are the stakes that people (and companies and universities and governments and religions) have in electronic texts?
First there was Torah, Bible, Coran: Livres de parole at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2005, then Sacred at the British Library in 2007. Now there is Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam at the New York Public Library. This series of exhibits comparing amazing manuscripts and printed books from each of the three Western religions represents a concerted effort to demonstrate what they have in common. "These exhibitions have a distinctive post-9/11 cast," observes Edward Rothstein in the New York Times.
The British exhibition even had the subtitle “Discover What We Share.” And in New York, too, the emphasis throughout is on commonality. At this historical moment, this is meant to defend Islam against anticipated accusations.
But the exhibits and, especially, their online promotions linked above also demonstrate how libraries are using electronic media to publicize their treasures. In New York, images from the exhibit will even be projected on the side of a Fifth Avenue building . These electronic texts, far from obscuring the physical books, celebrate and revel in them. They broadcast their iconic, even monumental, status and draw crowds to see the material objects themselves.
Last week, I was privileged to address the Oreck-Alpern Interreligious Forum hosted by the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, on the subject of "Scriptures in Three Dimensions," the first event in this year's series, "Exploring Sacred Texts."
The third Symposium on Iconic Books was a great success! Claudia Rapp has written an insightful synopsis and analysis of the papers and discussion, which now appears on the Iconic Books website. She approves that the symposium brought together scholars from diverse fields: "Comparative studies are most successful when undertaken in dialogue as it reveals the strangeness of things that had been taken for granted."
Victor Mair on Language Log posts the following picture, with translation and commentary:
He translates: “Use of Party newspapers and magazines as toilet paper is strictly forbidden.” And comments: "It is evident that some types of paper with writing on it are more precious than other kinds. In old China, one was not to wrap fish or wipe oneself with any paper that had writing on it, because writing itself was to be respected, no matter what the content or who the author was." (h/t to Ayse Tuzlak)
The New York Times reports that a private company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired to manage public libraries in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas. CEO Frank E. Pezzasnite describes the resistance he has encountered to such privatization with frustrated sarcasm: "There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries. Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization."
The reaction has been mostly led by patrons who say they cannot imagine Santa Clarita with libraries run for profit.
“A library is the heart of the community,” said one opponent, Jane Hanson. “I’m in favor of private enterprise, but I can’t feel comfortable with what the city is doing here.”
... The suggestion that a library is different — and somehow off limits to the outsourcing fever — has been echoed wherever L.S.S.I. has gone.
... “Public libraries invoke images of our freedom to learn, a cornerstone of our democracy,” Deanna Hanashiro, a retired teacher, said at the most recent city council meeting.
Whatever one may think of Mr. Pezzasnite's business, he has described an overlooked phenomena. Why books and the libraries that contain them are regarded as "somehow ... sacred" is precisely what the Iconic Books Project tries to describe, on this blog, through our symposia, and in our publications...
A recent New York Times article about mezuzahs left behind in apartments after their Jewish residents move out points out one very good illustration of how the iconic dimension of sacred texts is often venerated and manipulated across religious lines:
The doorways inside 30 Ocean Parkway, an Art Deco building in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, are studded with mezuzas of all sizes and styles: plastic, pewter, simple, gaudy, elegant.
The people behind those doors are an assortment, too: Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, Buddhists, atheists and even a few observing the High Holy Days this week.
... Jews have left their mark on every aspect of New York life, but perhaps none are so ubiquitous and tangible as the palm-length encasements attached to countless doorways. So in a city that both savors history and likes to shake things up, it is perhaps inevitable that many of those mezuzas now belong to gentiles.
Left behind when Jewish residents died or moved out, they have survived apartment turnovers, renovations, co-op conversions, paint jobs and other changes wrought by time.
... Jews leaving a home are expected to leave the mezuzas behind if they believe the next residents will also be Jewish. If not, they must take the mezuza with them, to guard against the possibility that a non-Jew might desecrate it, knowingly or not. If a mezuza becomes too weathered, dirty or otherwise damaged, it is to be buried, as are all sacred documents, a service that a rabbi or synagogue can facilitate.
Non-Jews, naturally, are not bound by these customs, but many follow them out of deference. Alex Cohen of Borough Park, Brooklyn, who sells, installs and inspects mezuzas under the business name Mezuzah Man, said he had answered calls from non-Jews asking him to remove their mezuzas. The mezuzas should be handled respectfully, he said: “You don’t just put it in the garbage.”
But many gentiles choose to keep their piece of Judaica in place. “It’s good karma, if I can mix my religious metaphors,” said Brian Hallas .... The prospect of such a paint scar is what kept Eleanor Rodgers from removing the mezuza from the doorway of her home on Albemarle Road in Brooklyn, in a heavily Jewish neighborhood. “We’re not only not Jewish, we dislike organized religion,” said Mrs. Rodgers, a doctor’s receptionist who grew up in Ireland.
... But the idea does not sit right with some observant Jews who see the mezuza as an important emblem of Jewish identity. “To me, it’s very offensive,” said Sara Sloan, a retired schoolteacher in Windsor Terrace. “It’s taking my custom.”
... Still, Connie Peirce, 87, a retired secretary and Catholic who lives in Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, said she often wished she had inherited a mezuza like many of her non-Jewish neighbors did. The tradition recalled her youth, she said, when her local priest appeared each Easter to write “God bless this house” on her family’s front door.
To her delight, one of her Jewish neighbors recently hung a mezuza on her doorway. “Every time I come home and remember, I kiss it and touch it and then I bless myself, saying, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.’ ”
The second edition weighs in at a hundred and thirty-five pounds—about as much as the average woman—and fills four feet of shelf space. Weight and size are central to the idea of what the O.E.D. is; authority, in dictionaries, seems to come proportionate to mass, and when it comes to dictionaries, the O.E.D.’s authority is supreme. I have a sense that a weightless O.E.D., instead of being the last word in words, would become just more “information” of the sort that’s found everywhere online.
... I can’t help but feel that if the printed O.E.D. were to disappear, our language would suddenly feel a little less important. We won’t be able to look at its twenty volumes on our shelves and see just how impressive a thing a language is. Random browsing might become less common, and words might fall out of use as a result. Though serendipity remains possible online, it will be a sad day when we no longer have the joy of stumbling by chance on an exotic, beautiful, and exactly perfect word by opening randomly to one of the O.E.D.’s twenty-two thousand pages.
As part of Changing Views, a city-wide exhibition of Muslim art in Munich, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is exhibiting its collection of illuminated manuscripts from Islamic cultures. Titled "The Wonder of Creation," it includes many exceptional pieces, such as these angels from a manuscript of Sakariya al-Kaswinis' "Cosmography" (1280). The exhibit runs from September through January.
On Religion Dispatches, Laurie Patton uses the idea of iconic books to meditate on last week's Virtual Book Burning and Its Consequences. She notes as I did in my last post that Pastor Terry Jones played on long-established tropes of book-burning that go back to antiquity. But she also points out the new effects of media and electronic communication:
... the Gainesville event might be the final culmination of the age of hijackers, where a small group’s manipulation of a powerful vehicle has far-reaching disastrous effects. Only in this case, the vehicle is the Qur’an, not an airplane. And the manipulation need only be virtual. Never has book burning been so effective without even occurring. Symbolic actions on the internet and their consequences in the real world now occur almost simultaneously. And the threat of a symbolic gesture and an actual one become one and the same.
Let me go even one step further. One could even say that the suggestion of book-burning is the only possible form of effective action today—far more effective than the book burning itself. In the twenty-first century it is virtually impossible (pun intended) to destroy books as a way of entirely eradicating a class of information, as Diocletian and many other emperors wanted to do. This is impossible to do because books are no longer physical objects but also electronic ones. It is also impossible to do because even electronic destruction may not be effective. At best, no matter how widespread a computer virus (a contemporary version of book-burning), there is no guarantee that such destruction would be complete.
Now that the 9/11 anniversary has passed, no Qur'ans were burned, and the media hype is dwindling, I feel free to blog about Pastor Terry Jones's threat to burn Muslim scriptures. I have written before about scripture desecrations, especially of Qur'ans, and this incident bears out many of those conclusions. It provides a vivid example of
1. the power of scripture desecration, or talk about it, to focus media attention and therefore political discourse;
2. the difficulties that religious and political authorities have in controlling such talk and actions (in this case, the threat of desecration was diverted, but only after extraordinarily unified efforts by political and religious leaders of all kinds);
3. the degree to which mass publication of scriptures has placed the means for such acts in many people's hands;
4. the mass media's amplification of the effects of scripture desecration.
The chief difference between last week's news and previous reportage about desecrated Qur'ans is that this time, the news was generated by threats to burn them at a future time. Whereas the strict anti-blasphemy laws of countries such as Pakistan and Israel make charges of past scripture desecration potent weapons of political or personal conflict, American legal protections of free-speech allow threats of future scripture desecrations to polarize public opinion.
With that addendum, the story unfortunately shows again that “the prevalence of modern news media means that iconic scriptures provide convenient tools for both giving offense and taking offense, and today’s politics give many people reasons to do both” (Watts 2009).
The New York Times on September 1st documented the divide over reading media within some (many?) families.
Couples find themselves torn over the “right way” to read. At bedtime, a couple might sit side-by-side, one turning pages by lamplight and the other reading Caecilia font in E Ink on a Kindle or backlighted by the illuminated LCD screen of an iPad, each quietly judgmental.
Although there are no statistics on how widespread the battles are, the publishing industry is paying close attention, trying to figure out how to market books to households that read in different ways.
A few publishers and bookstores are testing the bundling of print books with e-books at a discount. Barnes & Noble started offering bundles in June at about 50 stores and plans to expand the program in the fall.
The quotations that follow provide ample examples of the rhetoric that has become standard in the debate over e-readers, contrasting the "look-and-feel" of books to the presumed inevitability of the digital revolution.
The American Antiquities Society has created a wonderful online exhibit, A Place of Reading. It demonstrates the interesting result, and also the the difficulty, of the sub-field of the history of reading within book history. It also illustrates the strong value placed on reading and literacy in American history, such as in this 1764 engraving by Isaiah Thomas illustrating a mother’s "religious and social responsibility in teaching her children to read."
The British Library's online exhibit, "Treasures Known and Unknown" collected and annotated by John Lowden, calls attention to a remarkable 15th century manuscript, MS Egerton 1821. This devotional book contain two rosaries and a litany, Lowden tells us,
begins with three pages, each painted black, on which large drops of blood trickle down. The third page has been thoroughly worn. I am not absolutely certain this is the result of kissing, and part of it has been rubbed and smudged rather than merely kissed, but I think it very well could have been partially erased by kissing.
[A few pages later] the pages turn blood red, and thick gouts of blood pour down them from innumerable wounds. This disturbing decoration continues for ten consecutive pages (the last folio was cut out at some date, leaving only a stub). I count approximately 540 wounds on the bloodiest page, so perhaps taken together they were intended to represent the 5400 or more wounds received by Christ according to texts of late medieval devotion.
There are two openings like this before one reaches a third with two further woodcuts pasted in. The first represents a Man of Sorrows surrounded by twenty small compartments with instruments of the passion. Facing it is a larger woodcut of the five wounds of Christ with a heart at the centre over a cross. The left image (think back to the miniature in Harley 2985) carries an indulgence (later defaced): ‘To all them that devoutly say five Pater nosters, five Aves, and a Creed afore such a figure are granted 32,755 years of pardon.’
Lowden notes that "The book that follows this extraordinary prefatory matter is mostly written not in black ink but in the brilliant red pigment used for the blood." Obviously, an extreme and vivid example of a relic text that fully justifies our comparing the uses of such texts with icons.
The Jardinde la Conaissance (Garden of Knowledge), a library garden and art installation made of 40,000 books, is part of the 11th International Garden Festival in the JardinsdesMétis in Quebec's Lower St. Lawrence region. The artists, Rodney LaTourelle and ThiloFolkerts, say that by "exposing these fragile and supposedly timeless cultural artifacts to the processes of decomposition... The garden becomes a sensual reading room; a library; an information platform; an invitation to a provocatively foreign realm of knowledge." At the end of the festival, the books will be composted and recycled.
I have now added a topical bibliography to the Iconic Books Projects webpages. It is categorized by approach, broad time periods or cultures. Please let me knowif you think some items are miscategorized.
It can be accessed here or by clicking on Bibliography at left and following the link to Topical Bibliography.
Kristina Myrvold has edited The Death of Sacred Texts: Ritual Disposal and Renovation of Texts in World Religions (Ashgate, 2010) which gathers descriptions of book disposal rituals in a seven different religious traditions: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Japanese Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Sikh. I was honored that she asked me to write the conclusion, in which I muse on some parallels between the religious concerns cataloged in these excellent essays and "secular" worries about the preservation and disposal of books. The authors and chapter titles are:
1 Marianne Schleicher, "Accounts of a Dying Scroll: On Jewish Handling of Sacred Texts in Need of Restoration or Disposal"
2 Jonas Svensson, "Relating, Revering, and Removing: Muslim Views on the Use, Power, and Disposal of Divine Words"
3 Dorina Miller "Parmenter, A Fitting Ceremony: Christian Concerns for Bible Disposal"
4 D. Max Moerman, "The Death of the Dharma: Buddhist Sutra Burials in Early Medieval Japan"
5 Måns Broo, "Rites of Burial and Immersion: Hindu Ritual Practices on Disposing of Sacred Texts in Vrindavan"
6 Nalini Balbir, "Is a Manuscript an Object or a Living Being?: Jain Views on the Life and Use of Sacred Texts"
7 Kristina Myrvold, "Making the Scripture a Person: Reinventing Death Rituals of Guru Granth Sahib in Sikhism
8 James W. Watts, "Disposing of Non-Disposable Texts: Conclusions and Prospects for Further Study"
Garrett Stewart, writing in Critical Inquiry (Spring 2010), theorizes the nature and function of book art. In "Bookwork as Demediation", he notes that "Book sculpture is something done to a book, done with it and others like it, or done in place of it--alteration, assemblage, or simulation." He calls this action "demediation" which "peels away the message service, leaving only the material support."
Stewart notes that book art, or as he prefers to call it, "bookwork" calls attention to books' materiality:
It is one way of studying their material preconditions, and this in the absence of their function as conduits--a function absent and gone but not forgotten. For nonbooks serve to itemize the features of book-based textuality that may otherwise be subsumed and elided by the channels of tansmission.
D. Max Moerman writes about "The Materiality of the Lotus Sutra: Scripture, Relic, and Buried Treasure" in Dharma World:
What is the Lotus Sutra? The scripture itself provides one ready answer: The Lotus Sutra is a Buddha relic. Like a number of other early Mahayana sutras, the Lotus Sutra asserts an equivalence between a roll of scripture and a relic of the Buddha. Employing a new theory of embodiment, the Lotus Sutra replaces the Buddha's corporeal remains with his textual corpus. The material form of the Buddha's word, rather than the material remains of the Buddha's body, is recognized as the central object of veneration and, as such, is to be enshrined in a stupa, a reliquary previously reserved for the remains of a buddha.
Moerman charts the development of ritual practices in medieval Japanese Buddhism that involved creating elaborate copies of the sutra in order to bury them in stupas. Such practices were motivated by concern "with the postmortem salvation of both the religion and the religionist." Moerman draws the moral for scholars of religion:
... the texts themselves did not bear the communicative or pedagogical function usually attributed to scripture. Great care and expense went into the production of these texts .... Yet the texts were never to be recited, studie, or taught, or at least not for 5.67 billion years. The value of their production and use lay in their media as much as in their message .... the power of sacred texts lies not only in their words and ideas but also, as the Lotus Sutra insists, in their materiality and instrumentality.
Jeremy Stolow has written a fascinating analysis of the Orthodox Jewish publishing phenomenon, ArtScroll. In Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the Artscroll Revolution (University of California Press, 2010), he documents the history of ArtScroll, its products, and their appeal to buyers. He then applies the analytical models of the field of book history to show how this publisher's attention to the material look and feel of its books has powered its sales.
... through their material properties ArtScroll books can be seen to possess forces that strcuture and constrain the ways they are stored, read, displayed, or otherwise used in their designated social settings. This agency, embedded in thematerial design of the books themselves, is hardly incidental to the centrality ArtScroll texts are said to enjoy, whether in everyday life situations or in the ways ArtScroll is publicly imagined, discussed, embraced, or even rejected. (146)
This leads Stolow to draw some conclusions about religious books in today's rapidly changing book marketplace:
... books can be said to possess a material agency whereby, for example, a leather covering has the power to convey an affective charge through its signifiers of dignity, solemnity, and artisanal authenticity. Form this perspective, it would appear that the continued (and indeed growing) vitality of the market for printed books rests on a deeper set of cultural assumptions about what kinds of technologies and institutional frameworks are best suited to generate "authentic" religiosu experiences and to sustain the bonds of religious community. ... Far from being rendered obsolete as "old" media, today's printed books have been reinvented as viable means of exercising authority and securing legitimacy through the particular disciplines and habits and the connective tissues that constitute text-centered religious community." (178)
The Third Iconic Books Symposium is only a bit more than two months away! I have now posted a more detailed schedule of panels and presentations: click "Symposium 2010" in the margin to the left.
Stephen Doyle is a graphic designer who has worked with Barnes & Noble, Martha Stewart, The New York Times, and Wired magazine, among others. (See his company's website here for more information.) More recently he started using books as his media, cutting up the pages, and reforming the paper into sculptures. The images here are Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate" (top), and "The Trial," using Franz Kafka's book.
"Felt and Wire" has a nice interview with him on this process. Especially interesting was this comment in response to the reason he uses books:
Books are where ideas come from. The book is such a great form. Before doing these works, I was making concrete casts of books. What interested me was, if you take all the information out, does the form still have any power?
Somewhere along the line I started wondering, well, what does happen when you take the ideas out? So, I started taking out the binding and the pages and setting the words free. And I’ve been working from there.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Ohio State's newly completed library renovation pays attention to look and feel as much as utility.
Walk in the door and into the sunlit atrium and look up. You can't miss the central stacks tower, its skin ripped off and replaced with heavy-duty glass. The books inside beckon, and the people studying and milling around them are clearly visible.
... Not long ago, in the earlier, euphoric days of the Internet, college administrators could be heard questioning the role of the library as a physical place on the campus, especially when one could trawl an ocean of knowledge from the convenience of one's own dorm room or office. What's the point of a library building in an interconnected world?
Ohio State's $109-million library project, which renovated some 300,000 square feet of space constructed in pieces over the past 100 years, is about the strongest refutation of that point of view as any, reinforcing the role of the library as a central hub and place of connection. ...
"Clearly the university wanted to signal that knowledge generation, use, and application is a priority of the institution, and there is no better place than in the stature and status of the library," says Mike Sherman, vice provost for academic administration.
... The tower not only is a prominent structure on Ohio State's Oval, the campus's central lawn, but proved to be a fantastic asset to the renovation. Now clad in glass on the first six floors, the tower is a striking feature at the center of the building. Mr. Lee, from Acock Associates, says that the entrances to the building were intentionally designed with low ceilings, so that visitors could not help but look up and see the stack tower when they entered the atria.
"It was a conscious attempt to manipulate you by compressing you and then letting the space really open up," he says.
... Library renovations inevitably lead to greater use of the collections and more visits, and Ohio State's project is no different. The building attracted around 3,000 people daily before the renovation; now 12,000 people walk through the door each day.
Here and there, the designers laid down clues to the intellectual mission of the building, including the "foundation stones," 49 brass plates set in the terrazzo floor, along with 45 panels etched into elevator doors. The plates and panels represent various forms of writing that have been developed over the past 5,000 years. You can walk around the building and find alphabets, syllabaries, and graphic systems representing a host of languages, including Cree and Aztec, the old Irish alphabet Ogham, musical notation for the African drum called a djembe, and even Tengwar, the elvish script invented by J.R.R. Tolkien.
The stack tower is probably the building's most important statement. Ms. Diedrichs says the glass box of the tower serves as a reminder of what the library is for. "It conveys that scholarship and serious study are an important part of a college education and are a central part of the college," she says.
Ms. Diedrichs works on the third floor and takes the stack-tower elevators up in the morning to see what students are doing and what books they are pulling off the shelves. Early one recent morning she had already seen about 20 books lined up in a book truck, ready for reshelving.
"We like to talk about how everything is digital, but it's not entirely," she says. The marriage of study spaces with a prominent place for print is "like being at the intellectual crossroads of our campus," she says. "Students say, 'I am reminded of why I am at the university.'"
In BuenosAires, an artist created a "book tank" out of an old military vehicle. He has driven through Argentina handing out free books as an effort for "peace through literature." He calls his creation a "weapon of mass instruction."
See the video on YouTube where it is clear that the sight of this book-clad vehicle raises curiosity and attracts attention.
The Moscow city government has launched a campaign to encourage reading. It includes placing 100 billboards around the city with the slogan, "Read Books."
The theme is an old one in Russian culture. Michael Lieberman on Book Patrol points out these posters from the Russian Revolution tauting reading as the path to social revolution. The images come from the New York Public Library's digital gallery, "Posters of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1922." Ot mraka k svetu. Ot bitvy k knige. Ot goria k schast'iu. [Book with slogan: From darkness to light, from battle to book,...] (1917-1921)
Gramota - put' k kommunizmu. [Literacy is the road to communism.] (1920)
Kniga nichto inoe kak chelovek, govoriashchii publichno. [The book is nothing else than a publicly speaking person.] (1920).
Posts
See the 
Kniga nichto inoe kak chelovek, govoriashchii publichno. [The book is nothing else than a publicly speaking person.] (1920).
