This was a further part of our project. We were tasked with keeping a Reading and Research Journal where we were to track all movements in UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. This was actually very helpful because I would have forgotten a lot of the notes I had made without my journal. For the first few weeks (as you will be able to see), I wondered aimlessly through this part of library, going down my own rabbit hole until I came out on the other side and wandered into Alice’s Wonderland!
Reading Section:
January 7th, 2016:
W.W. Greg, “What is Bibliography?” (pp. 3 – 13): “For anyone without a competent knowledge of bibliography to endeavor to deal with textual evidence is mere impertinence.” (10)
January 19th, 2016:
Andrew Piper, “Turning the Page (Roaming, Zooming, Streaming) (pp. 512 – 24): “We are breeding generations of distracted readers, people who cannot pay attention long enough to finish a book.” (512)
February 2nd:
Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton, “Reading the Invisible” (pp. 63 – 72): “Once given visual form, any text is implicitly coded by that form in ways that signal, however subtly, its nature and purpose and how its creators wish it to be approached and valued.” (67)
February 23rd:
David Scott Kastan, “From Playhouse to Printing House; or, Making a Good Impression” (pp. 353 – 73): “Although arguably Shakespeare does not “live” on the page quite as vitally as he does in the theater, at very least we must grant that in print he is preserved. It is not an entirely happy metaphor, I admit. Living beings are preferable to mummies, and print, in any case, does not preserve language as firmly as formaldehyde preserves bodies. Nonetheless, without print there is no Shakespeare for all time. It is the printing house that his scattered ‘limbs’ are collected and cured, as Heminge and Condell say, remembered as a body of work.” (355)
April 7th:
N. Katherine Hayles, “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine” (pp. 491 – 510): “The two tracks, print and digital, run side by side, but messages from either track do not leap across to the other side.” (493)
Research Section:
January 12th, 2016
-First day in Rare Books and Special Collections
-Haven’t found anything yet (forgot to bring my computer, so I’m just wandering around looking at the glass collections)
-Thinking about looking into The Picture of Dorian Gray?
-Still on the hunt
January 26th, 2016
-What was the audience reading? Possibly fairy tales? Maybe trace one fairy tale and see interpretations across different cultures
-Oo! New idea for book blog! Possibly “dangerous” books and their circulation -> e.g. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincot, 1890)
-What were the uses of dangerous books as other than books? -> e.g. The Picture of Dorian Gray was used as legal evidence to convict Oscar Wilde for being gay, when it was really just a piece of fiction (he was actually gay though)
-This shows that books have a greater impact then just pieces of entertainment -> idea of the censorship of books and systems set in place to get around them
-Why were certain books banned?
–Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Forbidden Books”): Madrid: E. Fernandez, 1747
-What elements did certain banned books have in common?
-Which books did people try to access once they had been removed from circulation?
-Were banned books ever published under pseudo-titles in order to gain access to them? -> like with “chap-books”
Now back to fairytale ideas -> see if any themes run across multiple cultures
-If not, note the morals/principles that are imported in specific (especially more popular) fairytales
-See if they still exist in remediation now in some form or another
New book!
–The Faery Queen and Her Knights: Stories Retold from Edmund Spenser by the Rev. Alfred J. Church
Damn, time’s up! Go back to this one next class.
February 9th, 2016
-Back to it!
The Faery Queen and Her Knights: Stories Retold from Edmund Spenser by the Rev. Alfred J. Church
-From the Beatrice Roslyn Robertson Collection
-Other books from that collection include: Cat of Bubastes: A Tale of Ancient Egypt (Call number: PZ6 1800z. H47), Hans Anderson’s Fairy Tales: To be Completed in 14 parts Issued Fortnightly (Call number: PZ6 1800 A524)
-Interesting to note in The Faery Queen and Her Knights -> in the section on the House of Pride (Chapter IV, pg. 24), there is no massive description of the 7 Deadly Sins as there is in the original
-Also, there are illustrations throughout -> copied into the book (not hand illustrated)
-The spread of Spenser’s stories -> written in Ireland/ England -> this children’s edition is published in New York (along with other places in the States) -> shows that these tales must be somewhat “cross-culturally” significant
-Also, due to the fact that they were taken from a complex book/poem used to teach men about how to be moral and adapted for children (very interesting)
February 25th, 2016
Alright, need to pick an artefact by the end of today! Looking at Alice in Wonderland with illustrations (1893 edition) -> had some fun with the search browser (had to get Bill to help me)
This edition has a red cloth binding, stamped in gilt on front cover and spine -> style of illustrations: engravings -> different feels of the paper (two different types of printing images -> lithographic [first image] vs. engravings/ cross-hatching [rest of the book])
Poem at the beginning (possibly added by the publisher?)
Why would there be two different mediums of printing in the same book?
Who was the publisher was and what other things they published? -> If it is a children’s book, who is it aimed at? -> What ages? (Look at how the book is designed)
Binding does not really look like a children’s book (What does an adult book look like at the time? How do they differ?)
Inscription at the front (handwritten)
Does the poem at the beginning appear in other editions? Is it authorial?
Probably not because it is pretty bad quality compared to Carroll’s the works -> Could just be an addition by the publisher? Trying to sneak his work in?
March 10th, 2016
Alice in Wonderland Continued…
The illustrations -> two different types
One at the front of the book (opposite the title page) -> glossy paper denotes it as different than engravings (look up this method)
Rest of the images are engravings-> engraved images are incorporated into the body of the text as well as given their own pages
Was lithography more expensive? Could that be why its on the title page? Make the book look more impressive?
Publisher’s name: T.Y. Crowell and Company, New York
Look at this publisher and other things they have published. What type of books were mostly produced by them?
Alice in Wonderland is typically thought of now as a children’s, yet the binding does not look like a children’s book
Look at other children’s books of the time (compare the way they are designed) -> suggested by Bill!
If this is a children’s book, who is it aimed at? What ages?
Maybe compare it to an adult book of the time, see how the design and stylings of the two books differ (or are alike)
Also, there is a handwritten inscription at the front -> From “Aunt No” to her niece “Nele” and her nephew “Buddy” (this would indicate that this is a children’s book -> it is to be shared by the niece and nephew when they are sick -> could be read aloud to them by a parent?)
Can tell the book is higher quality book because we see discolouration of the paper within it, which was probably caused by a poorer quality of paper (probably a bookmark left in the book for years and it started to decay, but instead of eating the pages, due to the high quality of the pages, it only left a mark)
Try and decipher the topography of the book (also the illustrations suggest that this is a children’s book)
March 22nd, 2016
I was not here this time!
March 31st, 2016:
-Thoughts on how to structure the blog
-Background Information:
The artifact that I have chosen to do my Book Blog assignment on is the 1893 illustrated copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published by T.Y. Crowell & Company.
-History of the book: eg. when it was originally written, how many times it had been published before, information about the publishing company of this specific artifact, history of Alice in Wonderland and how it is still read today (and remediated through films: Disney and live-action)
-The Illustrations: mention the two types (lithographic and engraving), explain what they are, give a brief summary of how these types were used, what they were typically used for, and how they worked, why the printer decided to use two different methods of printing illustrations in the same book
-The Binding/ the Cover: how it was bound, what methods were used, how this alludes to how much the book would have cost, the gold embroidery, what type of audience was the publisher hoping to capture with such a cover (try and discern who the book was aimed at)
-Is this a Children’s Book: try and figure that out throughout the blog, talk about how it is considered a children’s book today, compare it to other contemporaneous children’s books, but also list the contrasts like the expensive binding and the lack of pictorial cover art, also see if Carroll was so well-known by this time that simply putting the title of the story would have been enough to denote it as a children’s book
-The Publisher: background research on T.Y. Crowell & Co., what they have published, what they mainly publish, if they still exist today, when they were founded, if they later printed other copies of Alice in Wonderland or other Carroll books
-Poem at the Beginning: was it originally put in by Carroll or was it a publisher’s addition?
-Handwritten Inscription
-The Typography of the Book: what font was used, why?
-The Method of Printing Prevalent at the Time the Book was Printed: which one was used to print this book (mostly for text: cover illustration in a different section)
-Type of Paper Used: thick, good quality paper (possibly expensive book), mention the acidification stain probably left by a book mark
-How this Copy Differs from Other Contemporary Copies: look at two different copies from around the same period
-Part of a Collection at UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections: name the collection, say what else is in it, how it came to be at UBC