treebook
Gaylord Schanilec has a
wonderful book on trees growing.
innovations for book studies
Iowa Book Works will host a small
exhibit in association with a workshop at the
Center for Book Arts.
precursive transmitted cookies
ìThe immediate precursor of cuneiform writing was a system of tokens. These small clay objects of many shapes ñ cones, spheres, disks, cylinders, etc. ñ served as counters in the prehistoric near East and can be traced to the Neolithic period, starting about 8,000 B.C.î
ìÖcorresponding to the increase in bureaucracy, methods of storing tokens in archives were devised. One of these storage methods employed clay envelopes, simple hollow clay balls in which the tokens were placed and sealed. A drawback of the envelopes was that they hid the enclosed tokens. Accountants eventually resolved the problem by imprinting the shapes of the tokens on the surface of the envelopes prior to encasing them.î
ìThe substitution of signs for tokens was the first step toward writing.î How Writing Came About, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, University of Texas press, 1992.
***where’s waldo?
The lively
blog discussion over the role of
Google Book Search shows us were some of the Instituteís attention should be focused. It should be focused on research libraries where the future of the book is being played out. It should also focus on research libraries because that is where the books are. In this forum it is sometimes forgotten just what books are and what it means to systematically assemble them into collections.
It would be strange if considerations of the future of the book neglected them.
There is a difference between presenting a digital copy of print on the screen and presenting the original book. You can always make more and different copies if you have the book. We have gone through this fantasy of the one-time copy to superceed the original before. We have gone through this fantasy over and over.