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 invaluable; 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.