manuscript era
Peter Stallybrass, Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, is a renowned scholar of early modern culture, with a particularly alert eye to the history of printing, reading, knowledge, and cultural transformation.
Peter Stallybrass clarified that the term manuscript was first coined a century and a half after the advent of printing. The new mode defined the previous and their following interplay gave rise to bureaucracies of print annotation, forms, inventories and dispatchings; hybrid print and manuscript transaction.
Now paper and screen play out a similar dynamic, defining each other. They are instigating new interdependencies and hybrid transactions. But now the manuscript mode emerging on the screen is defining the previous tradition of paper. Perhaps the paper – screen interplay happened before with book annotation where the blank margins provided the screen like commentary for the fixed print text.
Let’s take this a step further. Why do we print out screen display? Why do we fix manuscript in this transaction to paper? Think about it….the decision to print is a decision to read copy in a different state. So it was Walter Ong that correctly watched the reading mode, not the production mode.
“In the transmission of knowledge the children and teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens, between newspapers and capsulated versions of news on the Internet, or between print and other media. Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause and use our most reflective capacities, to use everything at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next.” Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
kilgarlin update
The Kilgarlin Center site has been revised October 29th. Shown are the new facilities.
new booknotes book
More than a dozen insightful essays in one convenient, easily shelvable volume; BookNotes: Episodes in the Nature Preservation and Future of the Book. Included is an annotated bibliography on the strategic future of print collections in research libraries. This elegant work on the destiny of physical books is available now, post-paid for $10. Request your copy from iowa.book.works@mchsi.com or from Gary Frost, 615 6th Ave, Coralville, IA, 52241. Smart move…