the great Oz of bookbinding
Keith Smith
is the best kind of wizard; both hard working and far-out.
His next book will be “Smith’s Single Sheet Sewing” an exposition of his various thread bridlings of sheets into book works. His publications are based on both actual models and computer generated constructions and always convey the potent meaning of the physical book.
The visit with Keith and the chance to see his bridled leaves converged perfectly with my recent visit to the Regenstein Library where Anna and Shanna and I recorded examples of early Greek and Armenian bindings. Keith also demonstrated the FreeHand drawing techniques that will be necessary to illustrate an explanation of the turn-in sliting, darting and welting needed to produce the miraculous Greek caps.
mining referers
“Artificial light was rarely used, and silence was imposed upon the scriptorium, but copying was not silent. Silent reading was a development of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Before that time, each scribe essentially dictated to himself and the scriptorium was filled with a dull murmuring. In order to communicate, an elaborate system of hand signals was devised.” Richard W. Clement
“Gutenberg never intended to imitate anything or mislead anyone: he was merely making books by a new means. The end product was really little different than the product of the scriptorium. It was the means of production which was revolutionary, not the book itself.” Richard W. Clement
a wonderful narrative
The Online Resource Book for Medieval Studies (ORB) is a cooperative effort on the part of scholars across the internet to establish an online textbook source for medieval studies on the World-Wide Web.
tepee village in Wales
The Google crawlers and spiders work at night. The only evidence of their foragings and hoardings are the left over referers. A Google search for a Welsh tepee encampment demonstrates the resourcefulness of the wily bots. The composite required assembly of each keyword out of an entire narrative. What’s strange is that the narrative does consider books as a product of village life but it doesn’t say so and I didn’t fully realize that.
Is our own on-line reading behavior somehow a mimic of automated exemplars? Now I am going to set out some excerpt bait and see if I can entice the reading rats into another useful construence. .excerpts
This is not an idle exercise, except it is; an excursion into the on-line reading mode.