A few of us in the Material Cultures of the Book Working Group are taking a printing class for the DE BAM. It’s really amazing to be able to learn how books are constructed first hand, but it is also a very time and labor intensive process. This photo is from my first print run on a 32 leaf octavo pamphlet. It took me 2 days of trial and error (along with a mid-print-run set-back), but it turned out well in the end.
The archive, as both an organizer of knowledge and a historical place, is a problematic category–one which this inaugural and international workshop will address.
In Global Archivalities we will be discussing comparative approaches to record-keeping in pre-modern societies, including materials and methodologies used by these past ‘archives’ as well as modern-day terminologies and frameworks for understanding these phenomena.
Please come discuss these issues with us!
General Information
When? Tuesday, May 7th at 9:00 AM-11:30AM
Where? History Department Library, HMNSS 1304, UCR
To read the pre-circulated papers, if you have any questions, or if you want guest access to the Adobe Connect site, please contact Heather at hvanm001@ucr.edu.
Refreshments will be provided.
Schedule
9:00 AM–Welcome and Opening Statement: Randolph Head, UC Riverside
9:10 AM–Introduction of Presenter Sites and their Projects
9:40 AM–Terminology: a response/critique to Head’s framework: Arndt Brendecke: escaping the term ‘archive’? and Diego Navarro: Imágen: expanding the scope of archivality?
10:00 AM–Discussion
10:30 AM–Break
10:40 AM–Getting Beyond Europe: conceptual vocabularies and frameworks: Hilde de Weerdt and Konrad Hirschler
11:00 AM–Discussion
11:20 AM–Closing Remarks with Fillipo de Vivo and Jake Soll
Perhaps I was spoiled in my youth, growing up near the Seattle Asian Art Museum, or maybe it was my long-standing fascination with Hokusai’s work, but LACMA’s Japanese Prints: Hokusai exhibit was underwhelming. This did not stem from the number of pieces—seeing even a single Hokusai print is impressive, let alone the Waterfall series which is rare—or its location in a cramped, narrow hallway in the Pavilion for Japanese Art. Instead my disappointment came from the exhibit’s lack of structural unity, historical context, and understanding of print.
Hokusai was most likely born in October, 1760 and died in May, 1849. During his life he revolutionized—both methodologically and aesthetically—Japanese woodblock print. Starting his career as an apprentice to Shunsho, he crafted images traditional to Japanese art, including courtesans, actors, and philosophers. Several of these early prints are included in this exhibit, the Two Kyoka poets: Kinkosha Karomichi and Fukujuso being a particularly elegant example. Even in this more traditional image, Hokusai’s hand is clearly seen: the artful symmetry, the wave-like flowing clothing, and the subtle shading.
After the death of his master, Hokusai began to explore his interest in the everyday life of his fellow urban Japanese. Images of wrestlers preparing for a fight or bathers mid-bath, captured movement and energy in ways never before seen in woodblock. I was pleased to see that pieces from both of these earlier stages of Hokusai’s work were included in this exhibit. In fact, I had never seen examples quite as interesting—in content, in style, and in artistry. However, the internal organization of the exhibit is quite confusing. The Two Kyoka poets is mixed in with pieces from his work on everyday life, which in turn appear next to examples of the work of his students. All of this without an explanatory note about either the time frame or the perceived unity of these works.
The rest of the exhibit focused on the later stage of Hokusai’s career: his landscapes. Although most people associate Japanese woodblock prints with sweeping landscapes, populated by people or animals, this was actually Hokusai’s invention. Fascinated (obsessed?) with Mount Fuji, he created a series of images depicting the mountain in its various moods, several of which are included in this exhibit. Also included is a print of his most famous work, Great Wave off Kanagawa—an obvious draw for people less familiar with his work. Again, there is a bit of information about these prints included in a placard; however, these images are mostly left to float alone on the walls, not rooted anywhere or at any time.
The crowning achievement, the real reason I wanted to see this exhibit was the inclusion of Hokusai’s A Tour of Waterfalls in the Provinces. Though not as iconic as his great waves, these waterfalls represent one of his greatest achievements. For Hokusai, water, like the rest of nature, had structure—where our eyes see change, he saw stability. In this series he works through this idea by depicting various Japanese waterfalls at different times of day and year. Each clearly has its own character, its own structure. Including this series lends weight to the exhibit overall, and will draw aficionados of Hokusai’s work.
His technical prowess, to manipulate the woodblock medium in order to produce layers of perfect shading, combined with his interest in the everyday lives of fellow urban Japanese and in the structure of water revolutionized not only Japanese art, but also art in the west. However, this revolutionary aspect is missing from the narrative (or lack thereof) this exhibit provides.
That being said, the online component of this exhibit is outstanding. From the high resolution versions of the prints to its accompanying text, it does a lot to contextualize Hokusai as well as the individual images within a larger woodblock and Japanese artistic history. Yet, I came across this digital component by accident—I wanted to know what one of the prints was called. This makes me wonder whether or not these two elements were meant to be seen together. Perhaps the physical exhibit would not have seemed so disjointed if I had been made aware of the digital component.
When I was in high school, I bought a Hokusai calendar—the pictures were pretty and the colors went well with my room. I had no idea who he was or that he was famous; it was not until several years later that I learned his prints were nothing like the glossy images on my wall. The Japanese Prints: Hokusai exhibit reminds me of this calendar: a series of pretty prints, which were put together simply because they share the same artist and divorced from their historical and aesthetic context. Nevertheless, when combined with the information on the LACMA website, this exhibit is worth a stopover on your way to some of the museum’s other, excellent exhibits.
Japanese Prints: Hokusai runs through July 28th, 2013.
On the morning of Saturday April 6th, a number of our members gathered for a special session at the 2013 (dis)junctions Graduate Student Conference, an interdisciplinary conference hosted annually here at UCR and put on entirely by the graduate students from the English department. Initially titled the “BAM and Book History Working Group Special Panel” we re-titled it in the introductory discussion as “An Intimate Chat about Archives” – owing both to the fact that, as a first panel of the day, the audience was sparsely populated, and that the short five-minute talks given by the panelists all revisited material produced for a seminar on archival theory taught by English Professor Robb Hernandez the previous quarter. It was a productive chat, however, and felt like a nice development of our fledgling working group meetings.
I’ve included below the opening remarks for the panel, which were intended to put our work in conversation with the theme of the conference, which was ‘encounters’:
Our goal for this “lightening round” is to explore several perspectives on book history and the places and spaces of books in the archive. We will encounter material forms of knowledge with and within texts. Our papers will touch on a variety of time periods, topics and materials.
We would like to consider the place of encounter as a theoretical concept in book history studies. Encounters happen between readers and texts, of course, often in an immediately material sense – the book may be accidentally encountered, serendipitously. The text, however, in the traditional codex book, must be encountered deliberately. Similarly, encounters in the archive might be between researchers and documents, scholars and librarians, or between the space and the resurrected dead of the archival material.
For this purpose, while we will each be presenting work that is a part of a larger project, I would like to ask both our audience and my fellow panelists today to focus not only on individual arguments but on the variety of book historical methodologies, theories and sources being employed, as our goal is to have an expansive conversation about new directions for book, archive and manuscript studies.
Anne Sullivan presented a paper positioning Wilkie Collins’ Victorian mystery novel The Woman in White as operating like an archive, containing the documents of individual testimonies that must be examined for evidence. Her talk also delved interestingly into the reproduction of visual document structures – or the lack thereof – in the novel’s remediation from serial to first edition codex, to its most recent reprinting by Penguin. Jessica Roberson presented on the reformation of urban graveyards in the nineteenth century, and the establishment of the modern cemetery within an archival discourse. Her talk also explored briefly the interactions of bodies and books contained within literal and figurative graves. Ann Garascia discussed the representation of ‘strong men’ within a critical theorization of freak performance, examining the strong man figure as documented in the online archives of the Circus Oz and in photography holdings of the San Francisco Public Library. Brittany Chataignier considered the archive of Hamlet, consisting of the material, the performed, and the speculative. Her paper productively wrestled with Diana Taylor’s theories of repertoire and the needs of Early Modern studies.
All four panelists and our engaged, informative audience members explored during a lengthy Q and A questions of encounter and confrontation with archives and archival methods, and the hierarchies of archival knowledge. We all emerged, I hope, with new ideas to chew on and to bring up in later meetings, especially as we continue to return to UCR’s own Special Collections to talk and work.
Our April Meeting will take place on Tuesday April 30th at 3:30pm (location TBA). For this meeting , Schuyler Eastin will provide a theoretical reading to guide our discussion of some medieval manuscripts. We look forward to seeing you there!
First book printed in America could sell for $30m
“The Bay Psalm Book is a mythical rarity,” said Sotheby’s David Redden.
“With it, New England declared its independence from the Church of England,” he added.
The 1640 edition of the Bay Psalm Book is the earliest surviving print from the press, and was adopted by nearly every congregation in the Massachusetts Bay area.
(via @JenHoward)
Our March meeting will take place on Monday the 4th at 10am.
Dr. Conway has generously offered to let us meet in Special Collections, and Sara Stilley has kindly agreed to help us present some materials for our discussion.
For the meeting, please read Borges’ “On the Cult of Books”. It is a little over 3 pages, but it is a wonderful introduction into the idea of “the book”. A copy can be downloaded here (password protected), and it is also available in A Book of the Book.
Rebecca will be presenting some materials from Special Collections to complicate the boundaries and definitions of ” the book”. Our discussion will help us negotiate this tricky term in defining the aims of our group, as well as in our own research.