The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.9
Julia S. Carlson
{"title":"Tangible Burns","authors":"Julia S. Carlson","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.9","url":null,"abstract":"The publication in 1786 of both Robert Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and Valentin Haüy’s Essai sur l’education des enfans-aveugles, the world’s first book printed in raised letters to be read by the hands, demonstrates the diversity of the eighteenth-century printed book. While the poems and songs of the Scottish Bard disrupted the hegemony of standard printed English, their oral-auditory effects would not be made accessible to blind and low-vision readers in Britain for one hundred years, only after suspicions of the revolutionary-era French technology had lapsed and the Protestant control of printing and education for the blind had ceased. I investigate the tactual and hermeneutic discipline by which Scottish reformers sought to assimilate the blind to an Anglophone community represented by the common Roman alphabet, and the passing of this physically, imaginatively, and linguistically restrictive regime by the embossing of Burns’s poems in the more tangible Braille code.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128473544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.11
J. Goldsby
{"title":"Book Faces","authors":"J. Goldsby","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.11","url":null,"abstract":"Across the first half of the twentieth century, author portraits migrated from the frontispiece inside of books to the exterior covers of dust jackets; at the same time, while Jim Crow segregation reached its repressive heights in the United States, African-American literature enjoyed unprecedented circulation in the mainstream literary marketplace. This chapter traces this convergence to explore the cultural work performed by the “face” of a book—frontispieces, dust jackets, and author portraits. Examining these lays bare the signal development that distinguishes mid-twentieth-century African-American authorship from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precedents: namely, the turn away from writing as corroboration of black humanity to writing as expressive of black pluralities or personae. By setting alterity, not authenticity, as the threshold where readers meet and interpret black literature as works of art, the migration of author portraits also functions as a trope for the ethics of reading.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114164875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.5
A. Kraebel
{"title":"Ordinatio","authors":"A. Kraebel","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.5","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning especially in the twelfth century, developments in the presentation of texts in medieval manuscripts became increasingly bound up with understandings of textual forms, the structures inherent in texts. Scribes sought ways to express ideas of what was called a text’s ordinatio (or the forma tractatus) visually, in their approaches to copying and their organization of the page, and—especially insofar as scholastic literature increasingly favored ever greater subdivisions of texts—emphasis was placed on distinguishing and quickly locating these smaller textual pieces. After reviewing earlier scholarship on these intersecting issues of intellectual and material history, this essay extends this work in two ways: first, by exploring the overlapping contributions of scribes and authors to the visual presentation of their texts, and, second, by tracking “ordinational” impulses beyond single texts, to the organization of whole books, multiple volumes, and entire libraries.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124930886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.10
M. Rubery
{"title":"Book Audio","authors":"M. Rubery","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.10","url":null,"abstract":"Audiobooks can do more than reproduce printed books. Whereas the book requires audiences to construct the narrative in their minds from a set of visual cues, the audiobook supplies a sonic dimension muted on the page. The use of sound is sometimes perceived as a shortcoming since it allegedly diminishes the imaginative labor of fiction. Yet focusing on deficits alone neglects those instances in which the addition of sound effects might be said to enhance the reading experience. This chapter examines recordings that take advantage of the audiobook’s affordances in order to go beyond simply replicating print. The “audio” in “audiobook” stands for more than just speech, after all. What happens when publishers experiment with sound in order to create “book audio” instead of audiobooks—that is, recordings whose soundtracks go beyond the verbal description of sounds by using actual sounds?","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129301209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.20
Joseph Rezek
{"title":"Transatlantic Traffic","authors":"Joseph Rezek","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.20","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the eighteenth-century transatlantic traffic in books by analyzing one extraordinary letter by Phillis Wheatley. Written in Boston on 18 October 1773, and addressed to David Wooster, in New Haven, the letter enlists Wooster’s help selling copies of Wheatley’s book, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” describes Wheatley’s manumission from slavery, and mentions a number of books Wheatley acquired during her recent trip to London, including Paradise Lost, Alexander Pope’s complete Works, and Don Quixote. Many of the books Wheatley mentions have survived with her signed inscriptions. An examination of those particular books and the letter that describes them provides a rich understanding of Wheatley’s relationship to books as a reader and published author, an enslaved and freed person, and a literary celebrity. In emphasizing the intimacy of transatlantic traffic, Wheatley’s letter suggests printed books remain “unfinished” until they change hands from one person to another.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123235719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.27
R. Buurma
{"title":"Indexed","authors":"R. Buurma","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.27","url":null,"abstract":"The index in the modern, printed book can seem secondary, supplementary, and belated today—especially if we are reading the book in electronic form. But its past seems newly relevant as we work to construct continuous histories of the last few centuries of information management. Recent scholarly work on the book index often emphasizes it as form of totalizing information control that seeks to fend off information overload. But turning to the nineteenth-century theories and practices of Henry Wheatley, Charles Reade, John Todd, and the Dodgson family (Lewis Carroll and his sisters) reveals an idea of the index as extensible and connective. This extensible index renders the book unfinished, connecting it to places, persons, and things beyond its pages. To trace its history, we must grapple with the consequences of computation’s conceptual and literal remaking of the print index.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115670525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.32
Joshua Calhoun
{"title":"Book Microbiomes","authors":"Joshua Calhoun","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.32","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter posits the value of learning to read and interpret non-textual and even nonhuman markings—what we might call eco-annotations—on the pages of the aging books we investigate. Manuscript annotations in a book can reveal patterns of readerly use and interaction; similarly, biomatter on the pages of our books allow us to see unexpected patterns and gain new insights into book production, transmission, storage, and deterioration. My case-study here is foxing, the rust-colored blotches that stain the pages of books. After considering the ways book lovers, librarians, and scientists have attempted to make sense of foxing, I suggest a few approaches one might use to read and revalue biomatter in books as biodata: legible, living records that can reveal new insights about the history of books and about the ecosystems in which they are made, preserved, and eventually cease to be.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124166860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.22
D. Tenen
{"title":"Reading Platforms","authors":"D. Tenen","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.22","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting on the history and future of the book, the chapter imagines several possible alternatives to electronic texts as we know them today. The terms “platform” and “format” guide a speculative exploration through an archive of extant literary technologies—micrographic prints, Computexts, HyperCards, and ePUBs—and consideration of these distant materialities and their associated practices, interfaces, and affordances. The way in which a book’s spine or a reading chair realign the positions of the back, eye, and hand suggests another type of structuring when reading electronically, within environments made of polymer, rare metals, and liquid crystal. How does one mold the human senses to fit such alien media? The history of electronic books ultimately attests to the process of trans-mediation, contested at the boundary of hardware—paper or silicon—and software—body and code.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"123 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134207550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.17
Jeffrey Todd Knight
{"title":"Institutional Forme","authors":"Jeffrey Todd Knight","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.17","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores prospects for a reenergized history of the book amid the recent turn to a capacious formalism in literary studies that encompasses the sociopolitical reverberations of “form” in the traditional, aesthetic sense. The chapter argues that a key opening for book historians is the new formalists’ emphasis on the organizing power of institutions, something that book history implicitly engages in the course of its work but that literary criticism too often ignores or treats with hostility. Rereading D. F. McKenzie’s paradigm-setting proposals for a research program in the history of the book and using as a case-study that most literary of institutions, the library, I advocate a turn away from the field’s particularist mantra, “forms effect meaning,” toward McKenzie’s forgotten parallel claim that a sociology of texts “alerts us to the roles of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and present.”","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"116 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132761778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.25
Simon Reader
{"title":"Notebooks","authors":"Simon Reader","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.25","url":null,"abstract":"The eighteenth-century German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg developed a utopian style of note-taking that anticipated the fantasy of democratically organized information promulgated by social media in the twenty-first century. In his “waste-books” (a term drawn from accounting) Lichtenberg made a virtue of the unfinished, promoting the use of the notebook as a tool directed to purposes other than publication: first, as an accumulation of informational wealth (“pennyworths); second, as an incubator for future possibilities over which he exercised no control (“seeds”); and, third, as a space where the micro trades places with the macro (“keyholes”). Lichtenberg elected to live in manuscript, relinquishing his witty retorts, aphoristic reflections, or ideas for whole books entirely to posterity. He kept marginal notations as a way of honing an individual style that was simultaneously divorced from social exchange with the living.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"37 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120920693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}