metal clad
“The authors point out that
Latvian metal-clad bindings, produced in a
particular part
of the country and during a limited span of time during the c19, are
unique in bookbinding history.”
Well, not perfectly unique. We have them here in Iowa as an attribute of the material culture of the Mennonite and Amish communities. Our local Kalona Mennonite Museum displays many with the debossed metal hardware features of the Latvian.
google settlement
The Google Print
settlement opens copyright sectors to Google vended service. Curiously the target source material remains print originals and the target repositories remain libraries and not publishers.
This proprietary virtual library plan leverages almost every attribute of print source material including the attribute of their survival or preservation by libraries. It also leverages the work of authorship and the investment of publishers. It also leverages Googleís position as the most capable delivery infrastructure. As to which investors will benefit most by on-line access, it is likely that libraries may benefit least.
The library leverage still seems under positioned in all this. The preservation commitment and its cost, the collection building and classification, and the construction of access utilities have all been required to enable this on-line re-mining. Still other prerequisite services, known best by librarians and bibliographers have been overlooked. These are the contributions of producers of the print collections. Book designers, papermakers, compositors, printers and binders have not even been even acknowledged in this re-mining and revaluing of print collections.
The libraries can leverage the unrecognized and under-valued labor and skill of book producers. This can occur in context with on-line demand for print facsimile or on-demand book delivery. Here the resolution needed for paper delivery, the issues of permanence and durability, and the special appreciations of print production can be leveraged with library oversight and library revenue of facsimile print copy production. Such copy production may well require recapture from print masters.
behind the curtain
St. Gallen Abbey
library is imaged on-line with a view of the binding of each manuscript. It is such a pleasure to view these plain monuments still standing together.
“The digital world has in fact multiplied the number of facsimile representations of medieval texts, and yet in the absence of the effective power of the material book, these facsimiles are often a alienating as they are, apparently, exact.” Sian Echard, Printing the Middle Ages, 2008.
Turns out that print renditions of medieval manuscripts were affected, conveying the manuscripts as venerated antiques. Now we feel differently that digital imaging mirrors them truefully. But the inadequate letterpress facsimile was at least real and in that sense replicated the medieval book. Our face book facsimiles flicker on the screen.
” our current attitudes toward facsimile differ .and may in fact inhibit our ability to see the extent to which we too are re-creating medieval text-objects according to our own tastes.” Sian Echard
Turn-the-page software can even accentuate the unreality of a screen surrogate as we gladly attempt to trick our own mind and hands. So the risk is not the authentication of the image, but the authentication of our encounter with a medieval book.
“The medieval books are present to us in digital form, yet their absence haunts these recreations.” Sian Echard