The Material Cultures of the Book Working Group at UC Riverside is pleased to present:
“Women’s Revolutionary Translation: British-German Books in the 1790s”
Alessa Johns (UC Davis)
Thursday May 8, 1:00-2:30, in HMNSS 2212
If you have any questions, please contact Rebecca Addicks-Salerno (raddi001@ucr.edu).
This event is free and open to the public!
An exhibit of extra-illustrated books is currently running at The Huntington. I visited the exhibit, “Illuminated Palaces,” last week and it was wonderful as well as a little frightening.
The process these books have undergone is called “grangerizing,” a method through which prints and other desirable portions of books are extracted and pasted into other books for collection.
The frightening part is that many books were destroyed or at least vandalized, their pages ripped, cut, and torn in order to yield the prints and images so sought after by collectors.
Some collectors added prints to extra-illustrate their books, while others added postage stamps, playbills, postcards, or handwritten letters of correspondence. In the end, many of these books resembled something of an academic scrapbook, with hidden links and connections between the pasted-in objects only the book’s creator could acknowledge.
Once many prints were pasted into the extra-illustrated book it could be difficult to close, forcing the book to be rebound. A single extra-illustrated book could suddenly divide itself into two volumes, akin to the cellular process of meiosis.
Although the desecration of possibly valuable books makes modern scholars cringe, I have to admit that I found the whole process fascinating. It became something of an obsession to find “heads” or portrait prints of famous individuals, and autographs were pasted alongside printed text. The urge to collect, collate, and organize printed materials was necessarily one of destruction, but it was also accompanied by a new creation, a remixing of knowledge and information.
“Illuminated Palaces” exhibit webpage at The Huntington:
http://huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary_02.aspx?id=11542
The video below shows the process of extra-illumination, which is definitely not a practice any scholar or conservator would engage in these days. Without the panels cut into each page, the pasted-in images would cause the book to bulge in the middle: http://huntingtonblogs.org/2013/07/stopmotion-inlay/
Please join us for the Year-End Colloquium for Graduate Students in “BAM.”
Designated Emphasis in Book, Archive, and Manuscript Studies – http://bam.ucr.edu
Friday, June 7, 10:00am to Noon
English Department Conference Room (HMNSS 2212)
Presentations by Steve Anderson, Cori Knight, and Heather Van Mouwerik
Display of printshop projects by Rebecca Addicks, Ann Garascia, Cori Knight, Jessica Roberson, and Anne Sullivan
This will also be a celebration of the new Mellon Workshop Grant awarded to the Material Cultures of the Book Working Group
In my previous post on the Global Archivalities Research Network, I described the recent virtual conference and the range of topics discussed. The concept of addressing the “social logics” of the archive was compelling, and it helps to reframe the discourse involving archival studies as one of complexity and imagination.
Another interesting concept, presented at the virtual conference by Dr. Filippo De Vivo, was “to turn the source into the problem.” By this, De Vivo meant to consider how the abundance and variety of archives across the globe could be a point of convergence rather than a point of apprehension. Instead of being overwhelmed by the immensity of the task, scholars should move even further into the myriad dynamics of archival networks, considering multiple agencies and pathways despite a lack of clear boundaries.
De Vivo considered this move toward an even more open concept of the archive as a strategy used successfully by historians of the book. By “enlarging the scope of the research” historians of the book, as noted by De Vivo, were able to create a field of research that was wide enough and inclusive enough to contain within itself multiple dimensions of study. In this case, relevance comes not from precisely describing the task at hand within certain academic limits, but instead by motioning to the immensity of the task and welcoming new interpretations. Indeed, this is the direction that Global Archivalities is taking by considering what might be referred to as non-traditional archives, non-archived archives, and archives outside of state control.
At our recent Material Cultures of the Book meeting at UCR, we discussed some of these very issues regarding archives, but in the frame of book history. The title of Heather Van Mouwerik’s post about this gathering, “Fixity in an Ephemeral Meeting,” speaks to the problem of defining books or texts with any concrete sense. However, rather than falling into a pit of despair we concentrated on the possibilities of research, and how the concept of the book itself can be a point of study.
Cross-posted: http://bam.ucr.edu/2013/05/turn-the-source-into-the-problem/