Paper or Plastic

The old scoundrel often disguises himself, but you won’t have any trouble recognizing him, because he has a gruff voice and black feet. – The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats

Image by Hermann Vogel

According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), from 2011 to 2012 the sale of hardcover books has gone down by 6.7%! The sale of ebooks has increased by 33.2% from 2011 to 2012, but don’t panic yet. The sale of paperback books has also increased from 2011 to 2012 and this increase was by 19.1%. People are still reading real actual paper-bound books, and the sales of actual books still exceeds that of ebooks by about 1500 million, give or take a 100 million. However, the question still remains, are we going to loose our precious books and book stores?

I would like to argue that ebooks will never fully replace paper books. I saw this first and foremost because I believe that people like books way too much. I read an article by Kane Hsieh in which he states that companies need to stop trying to make ebooks look like actual books. He argues that they are a different medium than books and should be treated as such. Ebooks can be used for more interactive reading experiences and should have different benefits that books cannot provide, but should not try and replace books. He jokes that he should be able to scroll down by double blinking, but in all honesty there could be some great innovations with ebooks that have special touch pads and holographic images. The question that he leaves unanswered however is something that appeared right away to me. Why are companies making ebooks that resemble actual books?

When Gutenberg printed his famous Bible, he did so using black letter, a typeface used to mimic actual handwritten manuscripts. Gutenberg wanted to produce more books using movable type, but created them to be familiar to something else that had existed for a longer time and which more people were familiar with. Ebooks are made to mimic actual books in order to be more familiar. Companies make the screens look like actual turning pages, and some add sound effects to sound like a page has been turned. One could argue that ebooks are going to replace actual books and are made to be similar so people will be more willing to try out something if it is more familiar to them. However, I believe they are made to be similar simply because people just love books. There have been other inventions that hint and suggest this. Perfumes and sprays have been made to smell like books, and many different and new modern book selves have been invented in order to accommodate to the home of a book lover and not an ebook lover.

Other more harder facts to note are that despite easy accessibility online to buy paper books and ebooks, studies show that readers usually do not use online bookstores to discover books. Typically they will find a book that they would want to buy somewhere else, namely a bookshop. Bookshops even have some power over online shops like Amazon. Bookshops have been known to boycott books sold on Amazon and so will not carry copies in their stores. Because of these boycotts, books that were projected to be big hits did not sell very well. People still check out bookstores and will not typically search for new books to read online.

With these things said, I just have to say that personally I will forever remain faithful to the book and will keep turning pages til my coffee cup runs dry. I love real books and it would truly break my heart if they were ever to be completely replaced by ebooks.

A house without books is like a body without a soul. – Cicero

And here is a fun video of something you cannot do with ebooks.

Edible Book Festival

On Tuesday April 9th, we had our Edible Book Festival for our Honors Seminar, The Book Beautiful. It was really a lot of fun, and as one of the two hosts, I really enjoyed the time I got to put in to make this event special. Our theme for the event was CMYK.

As a whole class, we worked on making the invitations, a few students worked on the design while the rest of us worked on cutting paper for the invitation.

The next step was to come up with a book that I was going to try and recreate with food. I decided to do the tale called The Three Feathers from the Grimm brother’s Children’s Stories and Household Tales. I thought it fit well, especially since it is the book that I have been studying all semester.

To fit the theme of the tale, I decided that I wanted to make a ground where underneath the grass I could put a toad. To do this I looked up how to make sugar glass, that way the toad could be viewed below the grass.

Here I am stirring the sugar mixture that would then harden and cool into the sugar glass that I need for my book.

For the toads, I made sugar cookies. To make them fit with the story, I decided to triple layer them and fill their insides with treats and surprises like pudding and sprinkles. In the tale, the toads gave the youngest brother the treasures that he needed to fulfill the tasks given by his father. So I wanted my toads to be filled with treasures that people would find as they ate the cookies.

Then finally for the ground part, I made monkey bread. I cut out the middle of the monkey bread in order to have enough room for a toad and covered that part with the sugar glass that I made.

This was my final product!

 

The other students had punny and stunning books as well! It was obvious that everyone put time and effort into their books. The event was fun and the atmosphere was made with nice piano music playing in the background was we drank tea and indulged ourselves on the many tasty books that had been made.

And here I am dressed for our theme!

A Book’s Hidden Treasures

A mist arose from the tree, and right in the middle of the mist a flame was burning, and from the flame a beautiful bird emerged and began singing gloriously.

-The Juniper Tree

Image by Warwick Goble

Cut into a tree and look at its rings. From them you can learn about its whole journey and life. With each year comes a new ring, the thick rings tell you of years with plenty of rain and lots of growth, the thin rings speak of drought.

Have you ever thought of books in this way? You can find out how old a book is from its publication

Provenance comes from the French ‘provenir’ meaning to come from. Provenance of a book refers to the history of the ownership of the book. Anything that is left in a book can become provenace. date and you can tell about its contents by the summaries on the back or on the inside folds of the dust jacket. But do you know where it has been? What readers sat in a large chair with a cup of tea flipping through the pages to pass the time on a rainy afternoon?

Ever given a book as a present? Notes written in books can tell us of their previous ownership and how someone has come to own that particular book. My high school teacher gave me this book at the end of my senior year for working hard and receiving the highest grade in her Criminal Justice class. She knew how much I liked law and knew of my future desires to become a forensic scientist. Her note in this book means quite a lot to me.

Books can be used to press flowers and leaves in order to preserve their beauty for ages to come. The avid reader before you may have left a daisy or two in their books before passing them on to friends and family. I like to press leaves and flowers myself, the book below is one that I am using to store some of nature’s treasures.

From the 16th century to the 19th century in Mexico, it wasn’t uncommon to see a book with a brand of fire. The edges of books were charred with a hot metal brand in order to show ownership of individuals or institutions.

When searching in Morrow Library for a book with provenance, I was able to discover a photo that had been left behind before it was given to Marshall University.

Now what are you doing!?! Get up out of your chair, turn off your computer, and go to your local used book shop and see what you can find in the books there!

Art by Book

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,

Who’s the fairest of them all?

– Snow White

You might think that your books are the most beautiful with their splendid bindings, magnificent covers, and detailed illustrations, but you might just be mistaken. Elements of a book can make it beautiful, but books themselves can be made into beautiful objects in several other ways.

First off, there are books called Artist books that are essentially works of contemporary art. Artist books tell a story not just by what is printed on the pages but also by the way the book is designed. These books can have the traditional bound pages of a regular book, but many of the creators use scrolls, fold outs, and accordion folds to hold the pages of the book. These books are a unique way for one to show off their talents as both an artist and a writer.

Artists can also re-purpose old books in order to create a new work of art. There are many ways to make a book sculpture. Artists have taken pages to make shapes and features to add on to a currently existing book. Multiple books can be glued together to make a work of art, and the pages of books can be carved in order to depict a new scene from the pages. Book art can even be purchased for those individuals who want to own their own piece.

Work by Courtney Adam Martin

I am particularly fond of a book carving made by paper artist Cheong-ah Hwang. Hwang made a carving depicting a scene from Little Red Riding Hood. This scene was scanned and was used as the cover for Grimm Tales by Philip Pullman. Designer Matthew Young then used Hwang’s art to make a short animated video. It is really nifty how these artists came together in order to contribute and add to each other’s works.

To learn more about the beautiful cover, there is a you can visit this website where you can learn more about these artists and see the short video by Pullman. More work by Hwang can be viewed his own personal website and can be purchased on Esty. More animations and covers by Pullman can be viewed on his personal website as well.

Other References:

Lorenz, A. (2002) Artist’s Books – For Lack of a Better Name. Retrieved from: http://www.angelalorenzartistsbooks.com/whatis.htm

Oh, what thick skin you have, the better to bind with.

“Oh, Grandmother, what a big scary mouth you have!”

“The better to eat you with!”

~ Little Red Riding Hood

Illustration by Arthur Rackham

The 1812 edition of Children’s Stories and Household Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm was not bound in any particular unique style or fashion. Their book was bound in a red stained leather and had a simple design with the title and authors put on the cover using gold tooling. It is unfortunate that their book was not bound later in the 1800s in England, for that was when a particular practice in binding started to become more popular. This technique is called anthropodermic bibliopegy, which might be better understood when called by it’s alternative name, human-skin binding. Their violent tales may have been well placed in a book bound in human-skin.

One of the first to bind in human-skin was Anthony Askew (1722-1774), a physician and bibliophile, who had Traité d’anatomie bound using anthropodermic bibliopegy. However, it did not become popular to bind in human-skin until it was adopted by people of the medical profession in the nineteenth century. It is believed that this practice had come out of the use of tanned human-skin in Meudon during the French Revolution.

At Meudon, there was a tannery of human skins – such of the guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made, for breeches and other uses.” ~ Jean Gabriel Maurice Rocques, comte de Montgaillard

It was most popular in England, where the bodies of executed criminals would be given to surgeons for dissection. The skins of these individuals were sometimes taken for binding, and it was not uncommon for a volume concerning details of the crime, trial, execution, and dissection to be bound in the skin of the convict. The skin of William Burke, executed 1829, was used to bind a collection of papers about the murders committed by Burke and Hare. Many medical books were also bound in human skin, which seems appropriate for the contents that they would hold. It is reported that an edition of Mercier de Compiègne’s Éloge Du Sein Des Femmes (Praise for the Breast of Women) was bound with the skin of female breasts. There are some cases in which individuals asked for their skin to be used in binding upon their death. The astronomer, Camille Flammarion received from a countess (after she had died of tuberculous) a piece of skin from her back to be used in binding a copy of his Terres du Ciel in 1882.

Human-skin can closely resemble the skin of animals, and it can be hard to identify a book bound in human-skin unless there are obvious markers on the cover like tattoos, brandings, or nibbles from the previous individual. Binders were not ashamed of using human-skin, and it was usually stamped on the binding that it was made of human-skin, and in some cases the individual that “donated” their skin was named.

This practice is no longer in fashion, but books can still be purchased that were bound in human-skin, and several libraries do have human-skin bindings in their collections.

References:

Carlyle, T. (1871). The French Revolution: A History. London: Chapman and Hall.

Thompson, L. (1946). Tanned human skin. Bulletin Of The Medical Library Association, 3493-102.

Thompson, L. (1949). Religatum de Pelle Human. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky.

Printing Probs

“Whoever marries my daughter is going to have to go to hell and bring back three hairs from the devil’s head.”

~The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs

The invention of printing is credited to Johannes Gutenberg, even though printing had actually been invented in China before his invention of movable type in 1440. Like most inventions, printing was met with some hostility and fear, because it was able to do that which had previously believed to be impossible. When Gutenberg printed his famous forty-two lined Bible in 1452, he sent his financial partner Joachim Furst to Paris with twelve copies to sell. Furst was chased out by the book trade guild, because the only way that he could have had so many identical copies was with the help of the devil. Books were written by hand before the invention of printing, therefore it was almost impossible to have an identical copy of a book, let alone twelve identical copies. The Grimm brothers also had some printing problems of their own, but theirs was not nearly as bad as being accused of working with the devil.

In 1805, Ludwig Achim von Armin and Clemens Brentano published their 1st volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which is a collection of folk songs.

This work was actually what first sparked Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm’s interest in fairy tales, which they began collecting in 1806. They shared their tales with von Armin and Brentano and even contributed folk songs to the second and third volumes of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Brentano was most enthusiastic about their collection of tales, and the brothers had sent him an early manuscript of their tales in 1810 before it was published in 1812. The brothers main interest was in local tales, legends, and traditions. They rejected any tales that were made up or too embellished in their search for genuine material. The original purpose of their book was to preserve the oral story telling tradition of Germany, and not to entertain. Brentano did not like their “scientific” approach and lost interest in helping them find a publisher. Armin felt sympathetic towards the brothers, and visited them in January of 1812 to read their collection. He was thoroughly impressed and was able to interest Georg Andreas Reimer of the Realschulbuchhandlung in Berlin to publish their collection.

References:

Davies, J. P. (2003). DOA: Education in the Electronic Culture, pg. 4-5. Lanham, Maryland: ScarecrowEducation.

Jacoby, P. R. (1998). From Fact to Virtual Fact: The Gutenberg Paradox Redux? Canadian Journal of Communications, 23, 3.

Michaelis-Jena, R. (1970). The Brothers Grimm. New York, New York: Praeger Publishers.

The start of a Grimm adventure

The book that I will be studying this semester is the Brothers Grimm Fairy tales. I personally have the Bicentennial Edition of The Annotated Brothers Grimm. The original authors of the book are Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This version that I have acquired was translated from the original German by Maria Tatar. This edition was published in 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company.

I chose this book, because when I was first searching for a book to study, I knew that I wanted to actually possess the book. I didn’t want to have to look at it online and I did not want to have to constantly make trips to Morrow Library to study it. I was thinking about older books that might have nicer new editions when the Brothers Grimm tales popped into my head. I have never had the chance to read the tales and this gave me a great excuse to get the book.

This edition is very nice and the publisher tried to replicate some older features found in earlier printed books with this edition.With the dust jacket, the printers tried to mimic an older pressed cover. The actually book cover itself has a mimicked gold press. This edition includes many colorful and detailed illustrations for each tale. Versals are used in the text to take the reader back to a time when the tales were new. This edition includes annotations that refer to the original history of the tales which will be very helpful in research, and the introduction also includes a history of the original tales.