Calm your nerves, massage your brain
March 11, 2019 5:07 PM Subscribe
The article talks about the Shakespeare volume of a few plays, previously owned by the poet Keats, and how Keats heavily underlined Hamlet, but not so much Romeo and Juliet, Lear maybe and a couple of others plays. Reading Hamlet it is full of so many quotes we use still. There is a speech in which a father, Polonius counsels his son, Laertes before a journey. In a few stanzas occur primrose path, neither a borrower nor a lender be, to thine own self be true, give men your ear, but rarely your voice. Hamlet brims over with memorable quotes. Romeo and Juliet is a very different tale, more an absorbing, rare and beautiful drama. I can see how that might be more tear stained than underlined. Anyway what a well done article. The books are lovely.
posted by Oyéah at 6:43 PM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by Oyéah at 6:43 PM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
Polonius counsels his son via Gillian's Island. I curse my brain for only thinking of this any time this speech comes up.
posted by hippybear at 8:23 PM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 8:23 PM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
Also, books as works of art, either intentional or not, are glorious things. I was pleased to see the first photo was of a pop-up book, because books that are more than just text on a page are magical.
posted by hippybear at 8:26 PM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 8:26 PM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
Too much physical book fetish for me. For me it's the words that matter, no matter the format...
posted by jim in austin at 8:41 PM on March 11, 2019
posted by jim in austin at 8:41 PM on March 11, 2019
But what about books like House Of Leaves, where the text on the page becomes its own maze to explore? Is that book art? Or is that the words mattering, but maybe in a different way?
posted by hippybear at 8:51 PM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 8:51 PM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
I had no idea Kara Walker had done a pop-up book.
posted by josephtate at 9:22 PM on March 11, 2019
posted by josephtate at 9:22 PM on March 11, 2019
These are the luckiest students. A thoughtfully made book, where the form supports and enhances the text/contents, is a treasure of human civilization.
posted by janell at 9:34 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by janell at 9:34 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
Too much physical book fetish for me. For me it's the words that matter, no matter the format...
For several years I read mostly on Kindle. More recently I've been reading mostly paper books because I've been using my local library a lot more. I have concluded that I prefer paper books, mostly because the differing physical forms (size, weight, cover illustration, paper type, font, etc.) mean that each book actually feels like a different book. For me it's a subtle but important thing.
posted by nnethercote at 9:49 PM on March 11, 2019 [5 favorites]
For several years I read mostly on Kindle. More recently I've been reading mostly paper books because I've been using my local library a lot more. I have concluded that I prefer paper books, mostly because the differing physical forms (size, weight, cover illustration, paper type, font, etc.) mean that each book actually feels like a different book. For me it's a subtle but important thing.
posted by nnethercote at 9:49 PM on March 11, 2019 [5 favorites]
Remember the Griffin And Sabine books? Those were imaginative and fun. Very much about the experience of reading them.
Stand On Zanzibar is very much a book that one experiences rather than just reads.
Books are amazing. I heart them!
posted by hippybear at 9:58 PM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
Stand On Zanzibar is very much a book that one experiences rather than just reads.
Books are amazing. I heart them!
posted by hippybear at 9:58 PM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
Man, I wish I could have gone to Harvard. They get to do cool stuff (people I know who went to Harvard have confirmed this for me over the years).
Anyway, I really love studying books as objects. In the process of writing my undergrad thesis, I handled thousands of archival documents, and at one point I got really sidetracked by trying to learn more about the paper they were written on. They were military documents, and I looked into histories of military supplies, writing implements, common inks, and stuff like that (it was a way of dealing with stress, I think). I ended up learning Spencerian penmanship with a dip pen, just because I was so invested in these papers as physical objects.
In archaeology, there's this concept of studying operational chains. It basically means thinking about all the processes that contributed towards the construction of an object and its eventual deposition in the archaeological record. It's fun applying it to books, because it means looking past the written words to all the other stuff inside. You think about the different manufacturers who contributed to it. There's a spatial history to that book that's geographically far larger than the book itself. There was a paper-maker who supplied the raw paper; the leather, glue and cardboard for the binding; the raw materials for the inks. Did the scribe make the ink, or was it purchased? Where did they get the body for the pen, and the metal nibs? How many nibs did they wear down as they wrote 100+ pages? Or if it was typeset, how far away were the letters cast? All of these things were shipped or carried from one place to the other, all converging on the central points where the book was written and bound.
In the case of one of the archival papers I was looking at, it was fun to think about all the people who handled it. After it was written, it was folded four times and tied with a ribbon, then carried by stagecoach from a remote outpost to the department headquarters, hundreds of miles away. It was passed back and forth as it was read by officials, then placed in a safe place. Eventually, it was transported to an archive, preserved in an acid-free box (where was the box made?), its ribbon still intact, if faded where it was exposed to the air. Then some nerd (me), took it out of its box and took pictures of it in an air-conditioned reading room.
I mean, maybe I'm being overly romantic, but there's this huge spatial scene surrounding something like that. Think about a book! A high status book, the leather for the binding, the gold leaf that went in the margins. How many hands it passed through, as a highly valuable object.
That's not even getting into the quality of the workmanship, the setting of the typeface (I got interested in typsetting after I read a really nicely laid-out version of The Pine Barrens by John McPhee -- it was seriously a joy to read on the page, because of how clear the type was).
Anyway, I gotta go eat, so I can't write a clever end to this comment, but books are neat when you consider them as physical objects. And that's even before you get into what they say.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:03 PM on March 11, 2019 [15 favorites]
Anyway, I really love studying books as objects. In the process of writing my undergrad thesis, I handled thousands of archival documents, and at one point I got really sidetracked by trying to learn more about the paper they were written on. They were military documents, and I looked into histories of military supplies, writing implements, common inks, and stuff like that (it was a way of dealing with stress, I think). I ended up learning Spencerian penmanship with a dip pen, just because I was so invested in these papers as physical objects.
In archaeology, there's this concept of studying operational chains. It basically means thinking about all the processes that contributed towards the construction of an object and its eventual deposition in the archaeological record. It's fun applying it to books, because it means looking past the written words to all the other stuff inside. You think about the different manufacturers who contributed to it. There's a spatial history to that book that's geographically far larger than the book itself. There was a paper-maker who supplied the raw paper; the leather, glue and cardboard for the binding; the raw materials for the inks. Did the scribe make the ink, or was it purchased? Where did they get the body for the pen, and the metal nibs? How many nibs did they wear down as they wrote 100+ pages? Or if it was typeset, how far away were the letters cast? All of these things were shipped or carried from one place to the other, all converging on the central points where the book was written and bound.
In the case of one of the archival papers I was looking at, it was fun to think about all the people who handled it. After it was written, it was folded four times and tied with a ribbon, then carried by stagecoach from a remote outpost to the department headquarters, hundreds of miles away. It was passed back and forth as it was read by officials, then placed in a safe place. Eventually, it was transported to an archive, preserved in an acid-free box (where was the box made?), its ribbon still intact, if faded where it was exposed to the air. Then some nerd (me), took it out of its box and took pictures of it in an air-conditioned reading room.
I mean, maybe I'm being overly romantic, but there's this huge spatial scene surrounding something like that. Think about a book! A high status book, the leather for the binding, the gold leaf that went in the margins. How many hands it passed through, as a highly valuable object.
That's not even getting into the quality of the workmanship, the setting of the typeface (I got interested in typsetting after I read a really nicely laid-out version of The Pine Barrens by John McPhee -- it was seriously a joy to read on the page, because of how clear the type was).
Anyway, I gotta go eat, so I can't write a clever end to this comment, but books are neat when you consider them as physical objects. And that's even before you get into what they say.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:03 PM on March 11, 2019 [15 favorites]
"In the case of one of the archival papers..." just made me burst unexpectedly into tears.
Yes, this is beautiful. Books/documents across time, this fascinates me.
posted by hippybear at 10:16 PM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
Yes, this is beautiful. Books/documents across time, this fascinates me.
posted by hippybear at 10:16 PM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
I’ve never read anything on Kindle, so hippybear’s comment got me thinking: is something like House of Leaves even possible on there? Borges? Bolano? Pynchon? What about critical theory? Can I add my own notes into the margins of an e-reader version of Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari? In fact, my friends and I would have two copies of House of Leaves, one of which would be littered with post-it notes.
I love going through my girlfriend’s books and seeing things she’s underlined or scrawled in the margins. It’s a living document, a hint as to what this individual was thinking as she read.
posted by gucci mane at 11:49 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
I love going through my girlfriend’s books and seeing things she’s underlined or scrawled in the margins. It’s a living document, a hint as to what this individual was thinking as she read.
posted by gucci mane at 11:49 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
The library department I work in has a lot of these sorts of books, and I never get tired of wandering through the stacks and gawking at them when I've got a few minutes to spare.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:22 AM on March 12, 2019
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:22 AM on March 12, 2019
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