Month: February 2017

Speaking broadly, we, as a species, seem to have placed great value on making our mark on the world. There are relics from nearly every culture that have been preserved and that are now displayed for people to learn from and sit in awe over. This truth not only illustrates our efforts as humans to create and make known our cultures through the arts, but also the notion that such efforts are appreciated by those who come after us. Listening to the presentation this morning on the history of booking making and illuminated manuscripts only furthered my appreciation for such a rich human history. Being able to touch and look through books from centuries ago was both fascinating and thought provoking. After learning about the process of book making and the various mediums on which books have printed over time, I found myself wondering what the next medium for this process will be. Have we already found the answer? In the digital age, are kindles, nooks and iPads the new medium? If so, what will come in next? If not, and paper is still king, what will eventually take its place?

I was fascinated by all of the books and manuscripts we got the chance to look at today, but the one that most absorbed me was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge with engravings by Gustave Doré. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt this way, not just because I saw a bunch of other people sitting down to read it, but because the engravings were such an engaging mix of beautiful and grotesque.

More importantly, they let me experience the poem in a way I hadn’t before. I have seen it before, I’m pretty sure– I know a couple famous lines from it– but I didn’t remember what actually happened in it, and I probably found the antiquated language a little distancing. The intricate engravings closed this distance for me. Interestingly, they seemed like the illustrations were more central to the volume than the text, which was printed small beneath full-page spreads of Doré’s illustrations. I think I could have gotten as accurate an impression of the prom from the illustrations alone as the text alone, and that has to speak to a job well done.

Zooming out a little, I can’t decide if this kind of book is a step closer to an illuminated manuscript (in that the pictures successfully illuminate the message of the text) than, say Diderot’s encyclopedia, or a step further (since the text is actually de-emhpasized in a way, in favor of spelling out events in illustrations). What I’m pretty sure of is that these illustrations weren’t really metapictures. The scenes and characters are contained in their frames, without any apparent awareness either that they are acting out a poem or that they have an audience. It’s funny, because the poem is really a poem about someone telling a story. It’s a meta text without meta pictures.

What do you think?

The revolution of papermaking experienced a long progress starting from 105 CE in ancient China. Cai Lun mixed mulberry and other bast fibres along with fishnets, old rags and hemp waste to invite the first sheet of paper. Around 6 CE, paper was widely used as toilet paper and tea bags. Later in 9 CE, paper-printed money was officially applied all around China.

Before the invention of paper, writing materials in China, different from the western world, included bamboo slips, wooden boards and tortoise shells, while the parchment paper was the luxurious raw material for the Bible and praying books.

The difference of the selections of materials before paper is mostly due to what the region is suitable for planting and what people used to make a living for. For example, in Europe, farming and animal caring were the two main sources of food and shelters, but in Asian, especially before the invention of paper, the source was from the harvests of crops and rice. Not only the region differences, but the influence of religions is crucial. Christianity was built on the bright colors such as gold, silver, blue and red and the architectural style tended to be overly ornate, while, for Buddhism, simplicity was the core of the dogmas. The tortoise’s shells were the representation of nature and longevity as well as the bamboo slips were symbols of peace.

What do you think  are the other factors of the differences of the selection of raw materials before the invention of paper?

I loved the illuminated forest scenes in The Secret of Kells because of the bright colors and juxtaposition between sharp geometric shapes and lines, and the movement of the watercolor-like animation. As we mentioned in class, the forest resembled a place of wonderment outside the walled-in community of Kells. While watching the film I distinctly remember noting the interesting wall-like appearance of forest from the outside view. I paused the scene and looked at the following image:

This image could be interpreted in a variety of ways. At first glance I did not even notice the path or the entryway of the forest, I just saw a barrier of trees, but now looking at the image the entrance seems obvious. The trees were illustrated in a way that gave life beyond the walled in community a meaning of wonder and intrigue. As mentioned in class, illustrators actively make decisions on what to include, what to leave out, and how to style things in a way that articulates the right meaning. Viewing the forest entry as only slightly emphasized, I’m led to believe that the animators wanted to send a message about the characters’ relationship with nature and exploring outside of the norm. In the movie, Uncle viewed going into the forest as unacceptable because it seemed dangerous, but exploration of the forest was encouraged by Aiden and fascinated Brendan. I think the animators decided to present the forest as this barrier to show the Uncle’s feelings, but intentionally included beams of sunlight over the subtle entryway to represent Brendan’s underlying curiosity. The illustration of the exterior line of trees are all uniform and symmetrical, which represents order, and I though this was interesting because usually when one thinks of a forest it’s typically irregular and disorganized. Do you think this has any significance? I think the trees could have been illustrated in a totally different way that still invoked a place of wonderment, but it might have missed the forbidden forest symbolism. The animators were extremely thoughtful in creating scenes, like this one, that would represent important ideas surrounding The Book of Kells. What do you think this image represents?

Today’s class in the library was quite interesting. I particularly enjoyed at the conclusion of our period when we were able to walk around and peruse everything that was presented. In particular, I enjoyed looking at adaptations of Coleridge’s The Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner and Milton’s Paradise lost. These two epic poems were both presented with images pertaining to their story line. However, seeing as images within the epic poems were displayed in contrasting manners, I found it interesting to compare the two.

With The Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner, only a few lines of the poem were shown on the page below a massive picture. This shifts the focus of the reader to be more interested with the picture rather than the text. In contrast, this adaptation of Paradise Lost only displayed an image every 8-10 pages or so. Because of this, the images are much more complimentary to the poem rather than becoming the main focus.

By comparing these two epic poems, we can see the challenge and methods individuals take of balancing images and text within a book or pamphlet. While it was pleasant experience looking at the images within The Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner, I found it took away from the actual poem. In contrast, this version of Paradise Lost found a better balance of text and images with only displaying a photo every few page to break up the dense subject matter.

Nowadays, books have become such a ubiquitous and almost obsolete object, that it is interesting to re-trace the evolution of books and the impact it has begotten upon societies throughout the centuries. Books, particularly before the invention of the internet, have played a major role in the transmission of information between generations and the spread of new ideas. Without books, history is silent, knowledge does not get passed down, and science never evolves. Like author Barbara W. Tuchman claimed, “Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. […] Books are humanity in print.”

I found Mr. Goodwillie’s explanations of how various civilizations invented their own idea of how a book should be created and what information it should contain fascinating. Although starting with the desire to spread the truths found in the Bible, written contents slowly deviated from religion and Christianity to share practical knowledge (seen, for instance, in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie) and/or knowledge about the world (Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry). It’s interesting to think that without book innovation and the constant improvement civilizations added to it, our current society would know nothing about history. It makes me question if the digital age we now live in is going to play a similar role in protecting history, or destroy what books had been accomplishing for centuries.

During our class in the 24 hour reading room, one of the books we looked at was Denis Diderot’s “Encylopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers”. Published in France between 1751 and 1752, it was a general encyclopedia that also gave instruction on how to perform almost any task. We studied a long excerpt from this text in my French Literature class, and found that certain entries were infused with specific philosophy instead of simply unbiased disseminations of information.

This Encyclopedia provided thoughts that were considered to be controversial at the time, reflecting theories of the Enlightenment. According to Diderot, its aim was to “change the way people think.” The excerpt from my French class argued a concept that was widely debated at the time and still is today: if animals have souls. It also explicated René Descartes’s theory of animals being machines due to the way in which they live their lives by ‘mindlessly’ performing actions to sustain their survival – actions that could be dictated to a machine in steps.

Looking at one of the volumes in class today, I was fascinated by the versatile nature of this text. Not only do its in-depth instructions for certain tasks give us a window into what was valued at the time, but the philosophy also provides us with the emerging schools of thought. These, at the time, were all provided in an encyclopedia, which probably wouldn’t have been considered a cultural artifact. It raises the question of how or in what ways could our modern encyclopedia be deemed as antiquated in another 200 years from now?