book of treasures

was scrolling through LinkedIn today, as I normally do not do, and I found a video post from the American Library Association which offered a glimpse at the Book of Treasures, or in the original old French "Li livres dou tresor," a medieval illuminated manuscript by Brunetto Latini, politician, historian, poet, philosopher, and teacher (and friend) of Dante Alighieri. Ooo, I thought, a glimpse at a great old tome from the National Library of Russia, count me in.

My first thoughts when the video starts: Wow, that book looks great for its age. Wow, that's not the book that's a box. A box? Wow, that book looks great for its age. Why does that guy opening it have his bare hands on it? Wow (now looking inside at the illustrated manuscript pages on vellum) that book looks great for its age. Well... [spoiler] its a copy. Limited? sure. Less than a thousand copies? yep. Handmade? no doubt. For sale, and this is the glam video for all those patrons of book porn? you got it. The LinkedIn poster: Victor Moliero. The Company: M. Moliero. to be fair, Vic is proly a member of the ALA. whatever.

Its a nice copy, I'm sure. I would have preferred to ogle the original however.*

Also known as Tesoro or Trésor (the treasure) the encyclopedia was written in French during Latini's exile to France between 1260 and 1267. There is a copy of the manuscript in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, where it is labeled as Ashburnham 125, which may or may not be the very volume from his old teacher that Dante read. The encyclopedia contains three books: biblical, Troy, troyian? Roman, and Middle Ages histories, and natural history, including astronomy, geography and animalia, the second book is about ethics, vices, and virtues, and the third book concerns political science as seen, and in the opinion of, the author. 

The National Library of Russia manuscript is rife with decorated initials, borders, and miniature illustrations including many "arabesques and drolleries" according to the Moliero video, which is why they chose this version to reproduce. Arabesques are ornate designs of interwoven geometric, floral, foliate figures. Drolleries are comedic images, designed to be oddly amusing, whimsical, or jesting. Examples of drolleries in this book include: deer-riding arrow-shooting monkeys, children jousting while riding piggyback on their parents, and a sword swallower. Many of the illuminations are gilded. Other versions are not as illuminated.

More about M. Moliero and what they do can be found on their website if you're interested in, what I assume, is an expensive copy of an awesome old book.

* I tried to find images of the original the Moliero folks copied on line so I could check it out--and share it here--but no luck. If you find it let me know in a comment.

rule of four

The Rule of Four appears to be the first book by Ian Caldwell, which he co-authored with Dustin Thomason. The info on the book jacket indicates that they wrote this over a number of years, in their twenties. I read his more current book last year, and that was terrific. I tried to find this book at the library then, but it was out. The reviews on this book were pretty good, and the publisher was then touting it as DaVinci Code-like. not really

Caldwell and Thomas have developed a really interesting story revolving around a mysterious 500 year old book called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,* which is the subject of a Princeton senior's research paper. The story, told from the perspective of the researcher's roommate, spins a tale that goes back to his own father's obsession with the same book, and was the spark that united the two roommates to begin with. The researcher, Paul, recognized his future roommate's name from the dedication in his father book; Thomas Corelli Sullivan. [Paul: Are you that Tom? I'm a big fan of your father! Tom: Yeah, I am. But, he's dead. And that book is whack, right?]†

By the time Paul and Tom are seniors, they have two more pals, Gil and Charlie, and all four are fast friends and roommates. Paul has been cracking on Hypnerotomachia Poliphili for 4 years now, and has finally begun to make some headway. His interest in the story is what brought him to Princeton, where Vincent Taft is a scholar on the book, and an old adversary of Tom's father. The two started out as friends before Tom was born, but soon argued over the book, and ended up hating each other. Another guy who was also into the book, and was friends with both Sullivan and Taft also shows up as a patron for young Paul. Everyone is trying to get in on the action as Paul, with some help from Tom, starts to uncover some of the book's secrets.

So its intrigue, mystery, whodunits, back-stabbery, and bumbling campus police; uselessly yelling 'stop right there!' about 20 times throughout the book. The title appears to come from math, rather than the Supreme Court.

It was okay. They took a long time to write it, and it still ended up being a little jerky and fragmented feeling. You don't need to read it prior to The Fifth Gospel, its unrelated. in fact, you don't need to read it at all



* Translates as: "The Strife of Love in a Dream." 
† That's not a direct quote. More of a synopsis.

rebel prince

The Rebel Prince is the third in The Moorehawke Trilogy by Celine Kiernan, which brings this trilogy to a compact and quiet conclusion. In doing my internet poking-about in preparation for this, I was interested to see that Kiernan is working on a web comic version of the story and is quite a talented artist. The fact that she has to pare the story down so that it fits into the comic format is telling in my mind when considering how she was able to truncate what could have been a very prolonged finale to the trilogy. Once an author has that many balls in the air, and can be tricky to extricate one's self from a story without feeling like you need to satisfy every little urge and need. christopher paolini, i'm looking at you. I was glad to see that Kiernan was able to let a couple of those balls drop in the interest of brevity.

 I can't say that this was my favorite fantasy story but it was fun to read, and its clearly written for the YA set, and will appeal to those who enjoy a fun fantasy story with a fair amount of action and a touch of romance. Some of this sub-plots, like the ghosts and the talking cats seemed a little tacked on in the end, by which I mean that the story would have been the same with or without them. It left me feeling like there was more to it that I just didn't hear about. While I'm grousing, I will also say that the main character was kept in the dark about a lot of things, for a long time, and I had to suffer along with her. Once I found out, I wasn't sure the secrets that were being kept from her really warranted so much cloak and dagger. This ended up accentuating this young woman's feelings of being left out of matters that were perhaps above her station--certainly things being discussed by men in most cases--and it may have been the author's intent to point this out.

Now on to some classic smut: Sons & Lovers by D. H. Lawrence for Banned Books Week!

the inventer

I ran across this little book in an antique shop in Yarmouth last week. Its got a beautiful feel in the hand, and a little red ribbon bound bookmark. Then I find that its got a raised seal on the title page indicating that it comes from the Mark Skinner Library in Manchester, Vermont; a building I have recently complete a study on, and am now engaged to design a replacement building for, as they've outgrown their building and their property. So that cinched the deal.

When I got this book home, I found that it was signed and numbered by the author. This brought me back to the title page and I find that this book was written, illustrated, printed and bound by the author at the Diamond Hill Press in Brandon, Vermont. The Inventer is the second book in the Beanville series, which I understand are collectable.

The Inventer, by Philip Sutherland, is a chapter book, so I read it in an afternoon. The writing is folksy and warm, and some of the feelings the author attributes to his child characters walk the line between 'thoughtful for this age group' and 'do ten-year-olds really think like that?' The illustrations appear to be linoleum block prints, and fill full pages within the body of the book. The illustrations are printed in a deeps sepia brown, but they aren't plates so I wonder if the the text is also the same deep brown, but just isn't as obvious.

Sutherland also does a great job of setting the tone and the mood, of a quiet New England town, in the first weeks of of summer vacation. Its so sleepy, that when the excitement begins, its almost seems like too much for this quiet town to handle.

The story was fun, and I can see that Beanville could be rich with stories to fill a series of these beautiful little volumes. I'll keep my eye out for another, but not so much for the story, but for the whole package. Its clear that Sutherland loves books, loves stories, and enjoys the craft that goes into creating them from beginning to end.

the digitized library

This is exactly what I was talking about!

Gwen Glazer has just written a paper about making all the information in libraries accessible on the web. I'm so excited, I could spit!

Image: National Diet Library digitization project. (They're digitizing everything yo!)

My recent blog entry--of which I spit--is titled "what is a library[an]" This blog entry was actually noted in the June 1, 2011 American Libraries Direct newsletter! That publication directed over 1,600 people to my lonely little blog, and some folks were nice enough to read a little, and even click through! Sweet! Anyhoo... what that means to me is: that in some small way, AL Direct has been nice enough to include my ideas in the conversation, for which I am grateful. So imagine my excitement when I hear that one of the biggest ideas I'm crowing about, namely: getting access to all that great stuff in our libraries, shows up in a policy paper from the ALA's information policy office!

Go ALA, I'm right there with ya, brotha! Or sista!

Okay so, the paper is like 10 pages, so I'll summarize for you. The ALA has such a thing as the Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) which releases policy briefs on info tech. The announcement on the 2nd was for the inaugural edition of their OITP Perspectives. A new publication designed to supplement the policy briefs, and to "provide an outlet for topics that are more specialized than those covered by policy briefs." So they tapped Gwen Glazer.

Glazer is a writer, editor and social media coordinator at Cornell University Library. She put together this ten page paper for the American Library Association's OITP in Washington, D.C. The ALA announced this just days ago. Click here to read the press release which includes a link to Glazer's paper.

Here's how I break it down:

THE GIVEN
-Libraries hold a vast amount of info
-Often, these collections contain local and/or special info, available nowhere else
-This info is searchable (typically) by title, author and subject only
-This info is searchable (typically, and as stated above) only from within the library*

THE VISION
-It would be good if all of this info was accessible, and searchable
-It would be even better is all this info was accessible, and searchable, from anywhere

THE PROBLEM
-If this info is not made available on line, it will become increasingly 'invisible'**
-Special collections may be at an even higher risk of loss, due to reduced demand over general info
-In their current forms, some special collections are at risk of loss, or decay
-Some items are difficult to convert to digital forms given their age, fragility, or form
-Smaller institutions are especially disadvantaged due to lack of resources

THE PLAN
-Establish a program to digitize collections in public libraries
-Digitize all the info
-Create a single portal through which these collections can be accessed

Easy, right?

So what does all this do for us? Making our collective knowledge, history, memorabilia and records available on line and in a searchable form will put our libraries back in our own hands, allow access to materials that many don't know even exists, and may allow for some of these rare and or historical materials to be linked to other materials, projects, records and data-streams elsewhere. And you know how I love the linkage!

Image a Smithsonian type institution, with a display on hometown parades, with all kinds of old-timey documents and prints to help flesh out the exhibit, all tied into their on line exhibit, with all of the materials cataloged. We've all seen things like that, right. Now imagine another layer, that digs down to the historical collections in your own hometown--right there on the Smithsonian site.--Links to pictures, postcards, advertising, newspaper stories, speeches by the town fathers, at the parades in your own town, from your library. See, it ties these stories to us. Yeah, gimme some of that.

In fact, don't imagine, go to the Library of Congress site, and check out their digital materials collection. There's even a page on their standards for metadata and retrieval protocols. Clicky-click around on there for a few minutes and see for yourself. Go ahead, I'll wait...



Your back, great! Amazing, right?

One of my favorite short stories in a collection I just read by Orson Scott Card, is based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Card's short story takes place, far in the future of mankind, 10,000 years or more. Man's spread across the galaxy is vast, and this collective of human inhabited worlds is what is know as Foundation. spoiler coming Card's story is essentially about the end of Foundation, or more accurately: the beginning of a new, Second Foundation. Built by librarians.

Let me say that again: The Second Foundation, according to Card, is a movement to [re]create a better Foundation for all mankind, by building a better, more interconnected and annotated public library; the basis for a reborn civilization. And there is a physical place where the librarians work, called a library, which is the repository of man's collective history and knowledge, and a workplace for the librarians and scholars, specifically designed to aid in the fruitful and free thought processes, upon which the Second Foundation will be built.

Maybe it is pie-in-the-sky, but I don't think it ever hurts to think big, and then act incrementally. Glazer and the ALA are talking about the first incremental step in this move toward our technologically rich future. There's enough crap on internet; wouldn't it be nice to have the internet enriched with more quality information?

* - In this case, 'within' the library means via the library's catalog system, whether or not the catalog is being searched remotely. This is whats called a 'Hidden Collection'.
** - That is, unused, or at the very least underutilized.

birthdays

Incunabula are books which were printed, rather than inscribed, prior to the year 1500. The date is a little arbitrary, but its what most folks consider the cut off point for incunabula.

Gutenberg Bible, Volume 1, Old Testament, Exodus, Leviticus: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

So why does that matter today, February 23, my birthday? Because today is also the birthday of the printed book, and for us, its also the birthday of the incunabulum.

On this day in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg printed the first book in Europe using movable type: the Gutenberg Bible. Gutenberg developed his press, using movable type, in Mainz, Germany and chose a bible for his first foray into mass production. Gutenberg chose the bible because of the demand, which hand inscription kept high, due to its time consuming, and often times, inaccurate process. Gutenberg printed about 200 copies; some on vellum, and more on paper, the numbers vary according to where I've looked. Only 21 are known to still exist, that number seems pretty well established.

I should probably mention that this date, today, is the traditional date used. Most reliable sources I've read, don't mention this date. Most state that it probably took Gutenberg a number of years to complete all of his work on the bibles. In fact, on the talk pages at Wikipedia, there is an active discussion about what exactly happened on February 23rd, and how to include it in the entry on Gutenberg and his bible.

Interestingly, each of the 21 surviving copies is different. Gutenberg's work was to print the pages, and then the collected pages were folded into quires and sold. The buyer, typically churches and monasteries, would have added the illuminations and rubrications most bible users would expect to find in an inscribed manuscript copy. And then the book would be bound, according to the owner's wishes. These hand embellishments, and individual bindings, make each Gutenberg Bible unique. Compare paper and vellum copies here!

Posted wit' minutes ta spare! Happy Birthday to me and incunabula everywhere!

bivaldi

Mmm... high quality digital images of old books and incunabula. Biblioteca Valenciana, which is the library of Comunitat Valenciana, has a program called the Biblioteca Valenciana Digital (BIVALDI), to digitize import works relevant to the history and culture of the Comunitat Valenciana Autonomous Region. That's what I guess is like a state, province, or region within España. The library/project is associated with La Biblioteca Pública de Valencia, which may be their mother institution, and is supported by the Ministerio De Cultura and the GeneralitatValenciana (the Ministry of Culture, and the Regional Government.)

[I'm trying to translate what I'm reading from Spanish and Catalan, based on my poor Italian, so if you find an error, please let me know.]

According to their website, which thankfully, has an English version, the digital collection includes all kinds of stuff, "From incunabula to manuscripts, from books of local customs and manners to Valencian literary classics..."

charlemagne pursuit

Oh Steve Berry, you scamp! That Cotton Malone of yours, sure does get into a pinch now and again. Malone is the hardest working, ex-Magellan Billet agent around. Forget that there is no such thing as the Magellan Billet. Malone is like that lady on Murder She Wrote: he can't step out for a cup of coffee, or run into an old girlfriend, without an international incident blowing up in his face. But if that wasn't the case, then where would we be? We've got to suspend disbelieve and jump in.

I like the Cotton Malone series, and I've read a few of them, but this one didn't do it for me like the others did. I had a feeling about this one from the first few pages. Too many people died in this story without a real good reason. The other Cotton Malone stories had some kind of major discovery, or grand restoration, or unfathomable mystery that needed to be solved, but this one was personal for Malone. Sort of.

Malone starts out looking for something from his own past, and gets tangled up in a big mess. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why he didn't extract himself from it, and just go on with what he was doing. Berry just didn't explain that well enough for me. Its almost as if Malone was looking at a horrible accident unfolding in front of his eyes, and just couldn't look away.

Anyway, Berry always has some interesting, and entertaining historic tie-ins, and this one was no exception, although harvested from a little further afield than the Templar. The historical mystery in this one, was inspired, according to Berry, by the Voynich Manuscript: a mysterious, old and unreadable manuscript, which apparently was just dated by scientists to be early 15th century. The the manuscript was discovered by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, at the Villa Mondragone, in Monte Porzio Catone, just east of Rome, in a lot of books being sold by the Society of Jesus.

Steve Barry spins an alternative history yard with the best of them, but I'm not sure The Charlemagne Pursuit is his best, but it was fun and kept me reading. I'll probably read the next one, but I won't go out and get it. It will show up at some point, I'm sure.

endymion spring

Love that spooky, bookish, YA, quest-fantasy drama, with hints of sorcery, and a dab of good vs. evil? Of course you do. Endymion Spring is just that kind of book, and its more than just a great name. Endymion Spring is the first go by Matthew Skelton, who describes the research process he went through, which began as curiosity about this name: Endymion Spring, and grew into the inspiration for the book.

This was a fun and fast read. I think it took me three or four days to burn through this 400 pager. What? That's fast for me. The writing was easy, but not dumbed down. The kids are young, but not specifically aged, probably to appeal to a wider slice of the YA readership. The story is smart too, and based in history, which helps give it some backbone. Faust, Gutenberg (and his bible), Oxford University, and a smattering of other European schools, libraries, and books, lots of books, help tie this story to something kids can put their hands on. What's also here is a love of books, and of libraries, and what they can teach us. Just opening an old book, is infused with this almost magical quality of discovery; of secrets that maybe no one else knows, or at least knows anymore. What a great inspiration for young readers especially! Bravo to Skelton for this alone.

That said, Matthew Skelton does leave a couple of gaps and inconsistencies in this, his first novel. Stepping outside reality, into the world of the supernatural can be tricky. I don't think you can just drop a magical bomb into the middle of a storyline and just assume that your readers will say, 'Oh, the author doesn't need to explain that. Its obviously magical, and therefore needs no explanation.' Wrong. Some kind of groundwork needs to be laid, that will allow your readers to cross that gap with you. We, as readers, need to be able to understand how and why its possible for something magical to happen in the world you've created.

So that's a gap. An inconsistency is when, for example, our young protagonist opens a book, and sees something so frightening that he drops the book, and actually runs away. A moment later, when he pauses to catch his breath, the book is in his hand. More magic? No, its just that the story doesn't make sense if he leaves the book behind, and I guess the scared scene looked better when he dropped it. Oops.

These things shouldn't keep you from reading this book, or from reading it to your kids. I think my kids are too old for that, alas. But I'll recommend it to them. It was spooky fun.

incunabula

Check it. According to the collections page of the Wagenhein Room, at the San Diego Public Library: "Books printed from 1456 up to and including 1500 are called incunabula, the Latin word meaning cradle because they were printed during the infancy of printing."

That's cool right. I hadn't heard that before, and I love word origins baby. I'm a etymology geek from way back. So I checked my favorite etymology site, the Online Etymology Dictionary, and I find this:

incunabula - “swaddling clothes,” also, figuratively, “childhood;” 1824, from L. incunabula (neut. pl.), ultimately from cunae “cradle.”

incunabulum - 1861, singular of incunabula; taken up (originally in German) as a word for any book printed late 15c., in the “infancy” of the printer’s art.

Nice. According to Dictionary.com, the origin is as follows: "1815–25; < L: straps holding a baby in a cradle, earliest home, birthplace, prob. equiv. to *incūnā ( re ) to place in a cradle ( in- + *-cūnāre, v. deriv. of cūnae cradle) + -bula, pl. of -bulum suffix of instrument; def. 1 as trans. of G Wiegendrucke I don't know who G Wiegendrucke is, but I assume its a person, of the German persuasion, who did the translation.

I stole the pic by the way. [What? It goes with the quote.] This particular incunabulum is an Augsburg edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle (or Liber Chronicarum) from 1497, and goes on to note that the printers used 645 different wood blocks to produce the 1,809 illustrations.

But... according to University of Maryland Library's Rare Books Collection, the Augsburg edition was a later, less expensive and unauthorized copy of the original due to its popularity. (Click on this link, yo. Some nice pics and info on this book.)

illuminated manuscriptorium

be Books has a treasure trove for those of us who like to gaze upon old books, far beyond our means, and dream. I speak of the Abe Books Rare Book Room. And in that virtual room, is the Illuminated Manuscripts section, which holds things like: an illuminated Morte D'Arthur: A Poem, by Lord Alfred Tennyson (sold), a single page from a 1460 copy of a Book of Hours, and books about illuminated manuscripts and their history.

In the introduction to the Abe Books Illuminated Manuscripts section, Beth Carswell tells us that the word 'manuscript comes from the Latin manu scriptum, which translates literally to "written with hands".' Go Monks!

New York Public library has a vast illuminated manuscript collection, many images of which are available on-line. They don't say much about the collection, and the entrance page on the site has 3 or 4 links that seem like they'd be helpful, but not one of them works. The connections to the images via the contents page however, works fine. And the images are beautiful! Just check out this image of the Annunciation and beginning Hours of the Virgin in a copy of the Book of Hours.

The Library at the University of Glasgow has--or had--a Book of the Month page in their Special Collections department. They're on holiday from this while they re-design their website (so the link may not work indefinitely). The last entry before the hiatus, December 2009, brought what they call their "jewel in the crown of illuminated manuscripts: Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi (or Life of Christ)", which they describe this way: "A devotional account of Christ's life, this substantial French manuscript is comprised of four volumes containing 140 illuminated illustrations." Its pretty sweet.

quartos archive

Love old books, incunabula or otherwise? A whole collection of early Shakespeare works--hard bound and beautiful--are now all available for perusal online. You can read about the volume itself, read the text in HTML or XML, or you can look at wonderful, high-resolution photographic images of the actual volume, page-by-page.

This image is from another site. Hamlet; 1st quarto 1603; C.34.k.1; Provenance: Halliwell-Phillipps

Each of these 32 editions is a pre-1642 Shakespearean quarto of Hamlet. Hamlet was chosen as the inaugural play for the Shakespeare Quartos Archive project, but they have plans to add more in the future. A quarto is a book printing technique: a large piece of paper is printed with four pages on one side, and four pages on the other, and then folded twice to make 4 double-sided leaves of a book.

These volumes aren't incunabular, they're too late, but boy are they handsome. The pictures are really high quality. If you're planning to take a look, you're going to need a fat connection.

Mmm juicy.

steven schuyler bookmark

This bookmark is a gift from a friend who heard that I collect these funny little things. Its an advertising marker from Steven Schuyler Bookseller, in North Reading, Massachusetts. According to Dr. Schuyler's website, he specializes in materials for design/building professionals and in "things German".

Given that designing building is what I do, maybe I should go and check out this guy's shop. They also carry maps, prints, art and letters. And ephemera! Bookmarks are ephemera, but I don't think that the kind of thing they mean.

If I go and check it out, I'll let you know how it is. If you've been, write me a comment.

What the heck, even if you haven't been, write me a comment anyway, and I'll write back.