futureofthebook.com

advent of the codex

The Robert Kraft annotated 2008 version of the Roberts and Skeat The Birth of the Codex, 1987 provides the perfect opportunity to re-read this classic. The sources are the most fragmentary survivals and these survive without binding structures. Yet scholars and bookbinders cannot resist study of the momentous advent of the modern book.

Can overt directives ever be confirmed in the transition from scroll to codex? Did genre or did format initiate the transition? Do hypothesis of the transition drivers fully encompass the possibilities? How impossible is it for our modern sensibilities to imagine the role of books in Antiquity? Whatever the possibilities, the whole investigation must be influenced by format constraints if the anomalies of evidence are to be interpreted.

One obviously topic is codex impositions. There is knowledge of the impositions of folded papyrus letters and these may relate. However the basic distinction of single and multiple quire codex imposition is loaded with implication and that discussion is missing. Unaligned tacket stations apparent in suspected single quire leaves would contrast with aligned stations of multi-quire sewings. Single quire constraints of multiple seatings in a single fold would eventually force multi-quire accommodation.

Even thick single quire works could benefit from alternative muli-quire structure. Another factor would be content determinants where a single tractate may be accommodated but a collection of works cannot. Gospels acting as exemplars could be bound together and dis-bound as needed if contained in discrete quires.

There is also a world of structural distinction between the single and multiple quire codex. This distinction is apparent in different cover-to-text attachment and contrast of a covered and uncovered structure and those relations to protective enclosures. The advent of the multi-quire codex, in a context of the pre-cursive single quire codex, is almost as consequential as the transition from scroll to codex.

librarianship

When all the media are deployed, the remote and local collections mapped, and the services allocated there will be a pause to look exactly between these commodities. What conflict and what enhancement occurs between print and screen, what readership personalities arise, and are libraries a place of a state of mind? Nothing other than librarianship is needed here. How dumb it was to disparage the “l” word.

presence

The Associated Colleges of the Midwest conference on the “Past, Present and Future of the Book” was well organized and well conducted. The scope and coverage was also admirable, but the concurrent sessions meant that only one third of the program could be attended.

This was a stage set for book art and book studies advocates. In each of the Colleges book activists are instigating their programs. Just as crucially an enrollment draw suggests that students, who are activists of digital research, smart phone communication and screen learning, are also looking for the larger contexts.

In the trilogy of past, present and future, I took away a new sense of the present moment. Students are shifting from semester to semester and suddenly wish to do their education on phones. We are experiencing a shift equivalent to classical transitions but one not occurring across centuries; this is happening as we watch.

A larger context of learning and skill building is needed now. One such context is book art and book studies.

unstable text

A number of thought provoking posts have scrolled by. One on text stability addresses a perennial topic; what is stability of text as conveyed to different print and screen display. Advocates on both sides can argue both sides. The entire planet is spinning and we are individually unstable. All we can hope for is momentary pause in the context of comprehension of a given work of literature.

The issue is if such a pause can be repeated. This repeat, not reproduction, can only be interpreted archeologically in the presence of the same print book.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.