Tag: book arts

Book and string

This from erikkwakkel:

Smart page with string

These pages from a late-16th-century scientific manuscript share a most unusual feature: they contain a string that runs through a pierced hole. Dozens of them are found in this book. The pages contain diagrams that accompany astronomical tracts. They show such things as the working of the astrolabe (Pic 1), the position of the stars (Pic 4), and the movement of the sun (Pic 6). The book was written and copied by the cartographer Jean du Temps of Blois (born 1555), about whom little appears to be known. The book contains a number of volvelles or wheel charts: revolving disks that the reader would turn to execute calculations. The strings seen in these images are another example of the “hands-on” kind of reading the book facilitates. Pulling the string tight and moving it from left to right, or all the way around, would connect different bits of data, like a modern computer: the string drew a temporary line between two or more values, highlighting their relationship. The tiny addition made the physical page as smart as its contents.

Pics: London, British Library, Harley MS 3263: more on this book here; and full digital reproduction here.

Norwich pattern books

This from erikkwakkel:

Norwich pattern books

These happy-looking books from the 18th century contain records. Not your regular historical records – who had died or was born, or how much was spent on bread and beer – but a record of cloth patterns available for purchase by customers. They survive from cloth producers in Norwich, England, and they are truly one of a kind: a showcase of cloth slips with handwritten numbers next to them for easy reference. The two lower images are from a pattern book of the Norwich cloth manufacturer John Kelly, who had such copies shipped to overseas customers in the 1760s. Hundreds of these beautiful objects must have circulated in 18th-century Europe, but they were almost all destroyed. The ones that do survive paint a colourful picture of a trade that made John and his colleagues very rich.

Pics: the top two images are from an 18th-century Norwich pattern book shown here; the lower ones are from a copy kept in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (item 67-1885), more here.

Love this. The swatches put me in mind of the colour stripes on resistors that tell you just how much resistance they put up in ohms.

Too, the cover of Christian Bök’s Eunoia, a sound-to-hue translation of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles.” Here’s the image.

Here’s the poem it translates.

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d’ombre ; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’ombelles;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;

U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides
Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;

O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
Silence traversés des Mondes et des Anges:
— O l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!

Bök translates each vowel in the poem according to the equivalences laid out in the first line. Consonants make the grey field. He calls perversely the sum of it “Of Yellow.”

Book as mitre

This from erikkwakkel:

A love story hidden in a hat

You are looking at a medieval book from c. 1270, but it has a most unusual shape – and a most ironic story. In fact, you are looking at fragments of a such a book, which form a research passion of mine. In the early-modern period bookbinders cut up medieval manuscripts because the handwritten objects had become old-fashioned after the invention of printing. As a result, we encounter snippets of manuscripts on the inside of bookbindings, as I explain in this blog about such beautiful destruction – a more recent discovery is presented in this blog.

Occasionally the recycled parchment sheets were used for other purposes: the pages in this image form the lining of a bishop’s mitre – onto which the cloth was subsequently pasted. What’s remarkable about the hat is not just that the poor bishop had a bunch of hidden medieval pages on his head, but that they were cut from a Norwegian translation of Old French love poetry (so-called lais). Lovers were chasing each other through dark corridors, maidens were frolicking in the fields, knights were butchering each other over nothing. All the while the oblivious bishop was performing the rites of the Holy Mass. It’s a wonderful historical clash; as well as the mother of all irony.

Pic: Copenhagen, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling, MS AM 666 b 4to (c. 1270,  Strengleikar, Norse translation of Old French love poems). More information about this wicked item here.

Still taking this one in. Jeez. Or should I say swounds. Which Urban Dictionary confirms is to “God’s wounds” as Jeez is to Jesus, darn to damn, frack to f**k. Language is the king of all compost piles.