Cheap and Common

[N.B.: This post is a collaboration between myself and Marissa Nicosia (UPenn) and is cross-posted (with a few variants) both here at anchora and at the Penn libraries blog Unique at Penn. This started as another post in my "Breaking Apart" series, which has recently focused on leaf books (see here, here, and here). As you'll see below, our collaboration started when we began comparing our libraries' respective copies of the same leaf book. Marissa's post can be found here]

Adam's Wicked Heart

[N.B.: Here's the next in my "Breaking Apart" series, which has recently focused on leaf books -- including entries on Gutenberg and Shakespeare]

Because it is impolitic--at least generally speaking, and at least now--to break apart copies of rare and valuable books in order to sell them off in pieces (or to incorporate them in a luxurious leaf book) the copies chosen to be broken apart are often imperfect, or damaged, or simply and visibly used, and hence far from pristine. And so it is with this leaf from a 1535 Coverdale bible, which is covered in manicules. (And to see those manicules in action, in one of the better GIFs you're apt to come across, see this post from the UI Special Collections tumblr). No, really -- dancing manicules!

click to embiggen!

SHARP @ RSA 2014

Sarah Werner (aka Wynken de Worde) and I will be organizing the SHARP panels at next year's RSA conference. The theme we've chosen -- which is unsurprising if you've, say, visited the main page of my blog, or seen Sarah's recent online musings -- is fragmentation and collection. Share this CFP with anyone and everyone -- and come join us in NYC next year!

"Fragments and Gatherings"

Call for Papers: SHARP @ RSA 2014

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) will sponsor a series of panels at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting in New York City, 27-29 March 2014. SHARP @ RSA brings together scholars working on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, and reception of manuscript and print and their digital mediation.

For the 2014 conference, we are soliciting papers that address the issues of fragmentation and gathering, broadly conceived, in early modern English and/or Continental books and manuscripts. We invite submissions that consider one or more of the following topics:

1) Fragments: How does the production and survival of texts as discrete material objects shape our understanding and use of them? We might think of fragments in terms of how texts were made (pieces of type, leaves of paper) or in terms of how they are experienced today (surviving fragments).

2) Gatherings: How does the grouping of discrete objects into collections of more or less coherence shape our understanding and use of textual objects? Gathering might take the form of the minute to large scale (quires of paper, sammelband, libraries). 

3) Fragments and Gatherings: How do fragments turn into gatherings? When do gatherings break down into fragments? What sort of study of book history and material textuality is engendered by these moves?

Please send a 150-word abstract and a one-page CV to

Adam Hooks and Sarah Werner

by June 7th (note that this is earlier than the RSA’s own deadline).

All participants must be current members of both RSA and SHARP.

For details of RSA 2014, see here.

For more information on SHARP, see here.

Breaking Gutenberg Apart

N.B.: This post is part of my "Breaking ... Apart" series. For the companion post, "Breaking Shakespeare Apart (Part 2)" go here.

In the previous post I quoted a statement from a book dealer that justified the sale of leaves from the Shakespeare First Folio through recourse to the trade in individual leaves taken from the Gutenberg Bible. I also mentioned a number of copies of a First Folio leaf book called A Noble Fragment -- and that Iowa had a leaf book by that name, featuring a single leaf from the Gutenberg Bible. These leaf books provide a chance to come into contact with -- to actually touch -- books that are culturally and financially invaluabke; they also show that these books (or "books") are just as often encountered as disassembled fragments, however noble they might be.

Breaking Shakespeare Apart (Part 2)

N.B.: This is part of a series on "breaking apart" the cherished books of canonical authors, so you may want to revisit the earlier posts in the series: Breaking Shakespeare, Breaking Shakespeare Apart, and Breaking Jonson Apart.

As I discussed at length in the previous posts linked to above, the Shakespeare Second Folio is one of the highlights in our Special Collections library here at Iowa, and indeed in some ways it symbolizes the presence and importance of Shakespeare on campus (as you can see in this photo and article featuring our renowned Shakespeare-in-performance expert Miriam Gilbert, who is shown holding it). The library doesn't own a copy of the coveted First Folio, let alone a copy of all four seventeenth-century editions of the folio (as some libraries do, a fact which they inevitably advertise and exploit) -- but as it turns out, we do own a piece of all four folios, as I recently (and accidentally) discovered.

Donne's Body

Last week, thanks to the English department, the UI Center for the Book, and Philological Quarterly, we were fortunate to host David Scott Kastan from Yale University. Kastan's formal lecture, called "The Body of the Text," traced the presence of early modern authors (or the lack thereof) in their published works, using evidence from title-pages, paratexts, and, punning on the title, the body of the text itself. His central case study was John Donne, whose body was, and has continued to be, an object of fascination to audiences, readers, scholars, and admirers. The flyer for the event featured this well-known image, which Kastan examined in his talk: the haunting portrait of Donne in his funeral shroud which served as the frontispiece to his final sermon, Deaths Duell.

Loving and Glorie

In a previous post I discussed how a book could serve merely as a container that houses and protects a piece of paper entirely unrelated to the actual content of the book (in that case, some biblical notes and math problems). In this example we have something altogether more pleasing than math problems -- a pressed and preserved flower.

Marginal Math

This semester I've been teaching a large Shakespeare lecture course in one of the precious few auditorium classrooms on campus. The class that meets immediately before ours couldn't be more different: an Engineering course called "Dynamics" which is described with phrases I haven't thought about in years (vector calculus? multiparticle systems?)  The instructor of that course always leaves cryptic formulas on the chalkboard, which, of course, we often promptly transform into a symbolic trajectory of the play we happen to be reading (we can plot Hamlet's trajectory on this axis; Ophelia, unfortunately, remains static...). More to my immediate purpose, though, it's reminded me of the intersection of early modern reading practices and math problems -- or, to put it more prosaically, the penchant of readers to scribble math problems in the  margins of their books, utilizing the valuable real estate of the page as a piece of proverbial scrap paper. Here are three examples I've come across in our Special Collections library.

Carnivalesque #90

Welcome to the newest edition of the early modern Carnivalesque -- Anchora is especially pleased to be hosting this month, since I've lately been emphasizing the "slowly" in this blog's motto.

Jael & Sisera, via Rachel Clark (see below)

How to Read like a Renaissance Reader

[N.B. : This is an extended version of a handout I've been using in my classes in recent semesters. It is meant to give an overview of Renaissance reading practices--something that is obviously central to the courses I teach--and, of equal if not greater importance, to give students some practical advice on how to go about reading (often difficult) texts from the past. Much of this material will be familiar to early modern experts -- or to anyone who has read William Sherman's excellent Used Books -- but I thought it worthwhile to collect some of the most useful images and instructions all in one place.]


In the Renaissance, reading always demanded writing. Readers were trained to encounter a text with a pen in hand, in order to mark up--and hence actively engage with--the text. Simple reading alone was not sufficient; the proper scholarly reader needed to actively use the text, taking the time and expending the effort to fully comprehend its meanings and implications. Reading was also aimed at some practical or intellectual goal: a used text was inevitably incorporated into one's own writing.