A short note about a typeface (Caslon, specifically)

I just received my copy of the Commonweal Associates Newsletter, an occasional publication for supporters of Commonweal magazine. In amongst the other news items was the following:

After redesigning the magazine in 2005, we fielded a good deal of compliments--and complaints. Reader response was mostly positive, but even fans of the revised look wondered whether the new typeface wasn't a touch too light. Well, as Jesus taught, ask and you shall receive, within at least six years. Our new new typeface, which debuted in the fall, is Caslon. It replaces the thinner-cut Goudy in headlines and body copy. You may recognize it from a little-known periodical called the New Yorker. If you haven't noticed, don't panic--the change is subtle. But important. A magazine as weighty as Commonweal ought not be printed in too light a typeface.

This assertion--that a "weighty" magazine demands a "weighty" typeface--is likely one we don't often think too much about. It brought to my mind a wonderful little book by E.R. Wendland and J.P. Louw, Graphic Design and Bible Reading,wherein they remind us that, "in the end, format does have meaning and people will assign a certain sense to the lay-out of a text according to how they happen to perceive it and interpret it" [37].

A typeface communicates more than just the words for which it is employed. It communicates a character, added-to those words. Erik Spiekermann, in his foundational Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works,makes clear that this type-character is expected to be a good match for the genre and purpose of the printed text. "Just as business people are expected to wear a suit (plus, naturally, a shirt and tie), text set for business has to look fairly serious and go about its purpose in an inconspicuous, well-organized way" [65]. Following this logic, it is only natural that "weighty" magazines are expected to sport "weighty" fonts. Serious is as serious does, after all.

Needless to say, I found it quite delightful that a magazine staff would actually come out and admit the rationale for choosing one typeface over another. While these decisions are invariably made with deliberation and care, it is not so often we get a glimpse behind the scenes into the machinations.

New York Times features A.-J. Levine, Jewish Annotated New Testament

I just saw a New York Times article, published back in late November 2011, that features Amy-Jill Levine and focuses on the new Jewish Annotated New Testament:

This volume is thus for anybody interested in a Bible more attuned to Jewish sources. But it is of special interest to Jews who “may believe that any annotated New Testament is aimed at persuasion, if not conversion,” Drs. Levine and Brettler write in their preface. “This volume, edited and written by Jewish scholars, should not raise that suspicion.”

The article balances both commentary about Levine's lifelong interest in New Testament, as well as the current culture of Bible publication, with its preoccupation with "lifestyle" themed editions.

Make a wish...

The other day my friend Maria and I were discussing what she called the "Magic 8 Ball" approach to the Bible - basically where you express magical thinking by assuming that whenever you open a Bible randomly, it will answer your question and tell you what to do.

So I was very pleased to run across this cartoon by David Hayward this morning:














You can see this image in its original post, and see other works by Hayward, by clicking here.

Anjou Bible from Peeters

I just got an email about this, so I figured I would pass it on:

The Anjou Bible
NAPLES | 1340
A ROYAL MANUSCRIPT

The Anjou Bible, now kept in the Theology Faculty’s Maurits Sabbe Library of the University of Leuven (Belgium) is a superbly illuminated manuscript created at the Royal Court of Naples in the turbulent fourteenth century. At this time much of Central and Southern Europe was governed by the successful dynasty of Anjou, which continued to expand its territories and encouraged artists and writers like Giotto, Simone Martini, Boccaccio and Petrarch. In 1328, after the death of her father, Joanna of Anjou became the official heir to the prosperous Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. Several years later her grandfather, Robert I, gave Joanna and her young fiancé Andrew of Hungary a precious gift, which became known as the Anjou Bible, a manuscript that is priceless from a historical and art-historical point of view. In addition to Bible texts and splendid miniatures, it contains a wealth of historical information about the house of Anjou and the book’s origins. One of the artists responsible for the magnificent painting was Cristophorus Orimina, the leading illuminator in Naples, who signed the work. The Anjou Bible has now been carefully conserved and studied: the research findings are brought together in this book. Essays by some of the most noted experts in the field describe how the arts were promoted at the court of Robert I of Anjou and also shed light on the Bible’s genesis and on all the research methods and results. This book is richly illustrated and contains all the illuminated folios of the Anjou Bible.

"By any definition, it is one of the supreme Bibles of the Gothic period."

Christopher de Hamel - Corpus Christi College, Cambridge



Table of Contents
The Anjou Bible. A Masterpiece Revealed
Essays
• The Anjou Bible in the Context of Illustrated Bibles
John Lowden
• The Anjou Bible. A Treasure from the Maurits Sabbe Library in Leuven
Frans Gistelinck
• Patronage, Art, and the Anjou Bible in Angevin Naples (1266–1350)
Cathleen A. Fleck
• Painting and Miniatures in Naples. Cavallini, Giotto and the Portraits of King Robert
Alessandro Tomei, Stefania Paone
• The Politics of Art. Imaging Sovereignty in the Anjou Bible
Michelle M. Duran
• A Kingdom in Stone. Angevin Sculpture in Naples
Nicolas Bock
• Cristoforo Orimina. An Illuminator at the Angevin Court of Naples
Alessandra Perriccioli Saggese
• The Anjou Bible and the Biblia Vulgata Lovaniensis, 1547 / 1574
Luc Dequeker
• Arras College Library Leuven. The Academic Habitat of the Anjou Bible for Three Centuries
Pierre Delsaerdt
• Illuminating with Pen and Brush.
The Techniques of a Fourteenth-Century Neapolitan Illuminator Explored
Lieve Watteeuw, Marina Vanbos
• Quantitative Hyperspectral Study of the Anjou Bible
Roberto Padoan, Marvin E. Klein, Gerrit De Bruin,
Barnard J. Aalderink, Ted. A.G. Steemers
• Codicology of the Anjou Bible
Lieve Watteeuw
• Illuminated folios of the Anjou Bible
• Identification of the Illuminated Folios of the Anjou Bible
• Biographies of Robert i of Anjou and Joanna i
• Bibliography
Partners
About the Authors
Photo Credits
Colophon

For orders outside of North America

http://www.peeters-leuven.be/boekoverz.asp?nr=8927


To view our complete leaflet on this title, and to print and mail in an order form, please click here:

http://www.oxbowbooks.com/pdfs/leaflets/Leaflet%20Anjou%20Bible.pdf

To order this title directly through our secure website, please click here:

http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ID/157274/location/DBBC

Discussion of "Novelty Bibles" over at Amanda Mac's"Cheese-Wearing Theology" Blog

Amanda Mac is a Canadian pastor and theologian. She recently posted a couple of articles on her blog, Cheese-Wearing Theology (I know - I wondered too. It's a Buffy reference). In the posts she takes a brief look at the American Patriot's Bible, the Poverty and Justice Bible, and a C.S. Lewis-themed Bible.

Her analysis is somewhat cursory, and exploration of her blog showed evidence of a preoccupation with authorial intent with which I take some exceptions, but still, her posts are worth a look.

(Many thanks to Jennifer Harris Dault for spotting this)

The Book: The Bible Illuminated discussion at 2010 SBL

There will be a discussion of the Bible Illuminated series at this November's Society of Biblical Literature conference in Atlanta.

Ideology, Culture, and Translation/Bible and Visual Art (S22-321)
Monday, Nov 22, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Room: A701 - Marriott Marquis
This session will focus on the recently published Bible Illuminated (2008). Additional information and a sample chapter are available at http://illuminatedworld.com . Bible Illuminated is a bright, dynamic and evocative interpretation of the Bible. Intermixed with the text are vivid images, all meant to inspire discussion and instigate the interchange of perspectives.

The Magisterium, delivered right to your door

In the May 7, 2010 issue of Commonweal, Kenneth Woodward offers an extended reflection, "Church of the 'Times': A Dissent," in which he examines the weltanschauung of the editors and staff of the New York Times. I will leave it to my readers to judge for themselves the legitimacy of his overall claims about the newspaper's purported allergy to religions (particularly the Roman Catholic Church). I think that is a worthy conversation to have, though I am not sure this is the forum in which to have it.

However, this one paragraph caught my attention and I wanted to take a few minutes here to make a comment or two about the issue he raises (since I think this is the proper forum for such an issue):

...like the Church of Rome, the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board. There is no issue, local or global, on which these (usually anonymous) writers do not pronounce with a papal-like editorial “we.” Like the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the editorial board is there to defend received truth as well as advance the paper’s political, social, and cultural agendas. One can no more imagine a Times editorial opposing any form of abortion—to take just one of that magisterium’s articles of faith—than imagine a papal encyclical in favor.

In my doctoral dissertation, The Covert Magisterium: Theology, Textuality and the Question of Scripture, I make the suggestion that Bible publishers (and the larger corporations of which many of them are now a part) exercise a de facto magisterial authority over the shape and form of printed Bibles. That, in itself, is a relatively uncontroversial claim.

What interests me about Woodward's assertion above is the ideological power that is brought to bear when these magisterial effects are wedded with certain types of material objects. That editors and corporations control the content (and therefore, to an arguable extent, the possible readings) of books and newspapers is plain. But the Bible is not an ordinary book, just as the Times is no ordinary newspaper, in terms of the relative cultural power wielded by both.

By virtue (is this the proper word?) of their respective material presentations, the editorial decisions that go into the construction of an imprint of a Bible version or an issue of the Times are of an elevated ideological nature. Words in the New York Times are different, in their weight and influence, than similar words found in the Chattanooga Times, for example.

Similarly, though I bemoan the fact, I can cite numerous instances when my students (undergraduate and masters level, both) have pointed to a footnote, chapter heading, or editorial introduction in their various "study Bibles" and quoted it with the authority of Scripture itself. These aspects of printed Scripture that (arguably) are not Scripture perform as a sort of "blurred space" at the margins of scriptural authority. Gerard Genette calls these sorts of additionals the "paratext," and he (along with Phillipe Lejeune) argues that these paratextual elements shape and control how a given reader reads the text.

The "editorial shape" of a printed object is an artifact of larger ideological positionings within a set of cultural disputations. Ancillary to this claim, it is important to distinguish the claim that certain printed objects will have (within a given set of contexts) greater ideological forcefulness than others. This is why, while it might be appropriate to examine the ideologies involved in the editing and printing of an edition of The Joy of Cooking, I would be hesitant (at least in the current set of contexts) to interrogate that object as an example of a (covert) magisterial artifact.

Both the many (and multiplying) imprints of Holy Bibles and The New York Times, however, are currently situated within our culture such that the interrogation of their editorial and paratextual shaping can yield good critical fruit.

For example, Woodward later quotes Times editor Daniel Okrent, who says, “If you are among the groups the Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.”

I interpret this to mean that the editorial position of the Times does not exist in isolation, but rather as a part of a larger set of overlapping ideologies and communities within our cultural landscape. Certain "types" of readers identify with the editorial positions of the Times, and others will feel alienated by them. They are influenced by the Times. But these various groups are also influencing the Times through their economic power (whether or not they purchase the paper, for example, or whether or not they patronize the advertisers within), their reaction to the Times in the wider cultural discourse (articles like Woodward's, for example, as well as the blogosphere). Additionally (but not finally), the Times also exists as an abstracted totem, a crumb that is gnawed as a morsel or hurled as an insult within the over-simplified posturings that pass for political discourse currently (a totem of "Eastern elitism" or "informed journalism," alternately).

So the Times, so the Bible. Or, that is to say, so the many Bibles available as objects within the retail sphere (which, today, is the only sphere that matters). Just as certain readers will not feel at home reading the Times, we might easily be able to think of certain classes of readers made very uncomfortable the The Patriot's Bible, and other classes equally uncomfortable with The Green Bible. The editorial decisions that shape these objects are part of a much larger milieu of cultural and ideological disputes that are not one-way in their influences. The differentiation of Bibles creates hospitable (and inhospitable) ideological and theological space for differing classes of readers. These classes, moreover, are themselves complex and overlapping. In fact, it is the negotiation of publishers, wrestling with demographic data, with as many of these overlapping groups as possible that leads to the multiplicity of Bible imprints currently available.

All this is to say that I think Wooward's observation that the New York Times exists as a type of magisterial entity is right on the money (quite literally). Within the wider ideological landscape we are navigating with this analysis, it is an insight well worth exploring.

Racer Darrell Waltrip endorsing the NASCAR themed Bible

A few posts ago I mentioned my new favorite Bible, the Stock Car Racing Edition. Here's a video endorsement from one of its "contributors." Just remember, you can't go wrong with Jesus on your pit crew.

Information about upcoming Glasgow Conference, "Re-Writing the Bible"

The following is available online here

Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue

14th-15th June 2010


University of Glasgow


Keynote panellists include Michael Schmidt, Michael Symmons-Roberts,
Kei Miller, Sara Maitland and Michelene Wandor.



“…there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’.”

- Terry Eagleton



A recent exhibition at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art consisted of a bible, laid open alongside a supply of pens, with the invitation, “If you feel you’ve been excluded from the Bible, please feel free to find a way to write yourself back in.” The comments scribbled in the margins—and the very notion of ‘writing in the Bible’—became the subject of a widespread controversy, resulting in the gallery’s decision to place this bible inside a perspex cube, effectively sealing it off and protecting it from what might be deemed ‘undesirable’ commentary. Visitors were still invited to write comments, but now they were written on sheets of paper that were then selected by gallery staff and inserted between the bible’s pages.


In light of this very present debate, Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue invites poets, writers, and scholars to engage with interdisciplinary questions surrounding the phenomena of retellings or revisions of Bible in creative writing. These retellings have a heritage that, arguably, starts within the books of the Bible itself and stretches across many literatures and traditions; poets and writers in every age filter biblical themes and images through the
focus of their own period and practice. Dante, Milton, Bunyan, Blake, Yeats, Owen, H.D, Plath, Kinsella, Hill; the list is long, diverse, and continues to grow.


This symposium asks why contemporary writers have chosen to rework this particular source text, and what stances they have taken towards it: faithful, using creative writing as a means of prayerful reflection or theological exegesis? Or furious, a railing against the Bible’s injustices and absences? Or a mixture of both, a sometimes difficult, sometimes delightful kind of dialogue? If every reading is also a re-writing, then it follows that every re-writing is also a reading, and for this reason many biblical scholars are fascinated by the literary ‘afterlives’ of the scriptures, the ways in which the Bible is sustained by creative imaginations in cultural settings and times very distant from its own writing and compilation.


We are seeking 20-minute papers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including but not limited to: literature, theology, biblical studies, critical and cultural theory, history, politics, and so on. We will consider papers on all forms of ‘creative writing’: poetry, novel, short story, sermon, liturgy, prayers, songs, political writing, theatre, and so on. Our emphasis is on twentieth and twenty-first century works, but we will also consider abstracts on rewritings from other periods. We would be particularly interested in papers looking at spaces that often go unexplored by research in retelling and revisioning, such as biblical romance novels, evangelical speculative fiction, biblical archetypes in autobiography, contemporary liturgy, or popular music. There is the possibility that proceedings will be published.


Please send abstracts (approx. 200 words) to rewritingbible2010@gmail.com, by no later than 19th April 2010.

Jesus Built my Hot Rod, Redux

A couple of years ago, when I got started analyzing the material aspects of Scripture, it was as a fun continuation of my work in my doctoral dissertation. I wrote the dissertation, in part, as a meditation on The Golfer's Bible, from Holman Christian Bible Publishers. I was intrigued then, as I am today, with the blatant (crass?) melding of American consumer recreation and lifestyle activities with the physical objects we call Bibles.

Now this is not the place to launch into a tirade about these practices. Maybe, in fact, these actions by publishers to make the Bible "more accessible" are not so bad. I have my opinions, obviously, but I will also admit that those opinions have shifted back and forth as I continue this research. So I will let the reader, ultimately, be her own judge on these matters.

But sometimes it gets hard to restrain myself.

So in earlier posts I have also alluded to the Mossy Oak Personal Size Giant Print Bible from Thomas Nelson. I also quoted a little from its introduction in the previous post. I will have more to say, in the coming months, about this particular Bible (it forms part of a chapter in my forthcoming book). For now, I will simply gesture to it again, saying it was a stranger find for me, at first, than the Golfer's Bible. For a long time, it was my favorite example of this phenomenon of "designer Scripture." Moreover, when I tell people what I do, they often respond by asking me, "So what's the best Bible?" or some variant of that question. Because I think that might be the wrong question to ask, for several months the Mossy Oak has been the Bible I recommended [1].

Let us thrust all that to the side, however. Ladies and gentlemen, do not doubt for a moment we cannot push the envelope. We can. Do not doubt for a moment that a Bible can become weirder, more absurd. It can. We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better. Stronger. Faster.

Ladies and gentleman, start your engines. I give you... The NASCAR Stock Car Racing Edition of the Holy Bible, from Zondervan publishers.

I first saw this Bible in the Memphis BookStar a few weeks before Christmas, and was going to write about it then, but I got distracted by the holidays and then the birth of my daughter. Now Hugh Pyper has written a really good piece analyzing the NASCAR Bible for the SBL Forum.

Read the full text of his column here.

One of the things you notice about the Bible, when leafing through it, is that the "inspirational" portions (which highlight various celebrities on the stock car racing circuit, along with some bromides about the role of various Gospel passages in inspiring them to greatness) are sort of randomly spaced throughout the book, leading to some interesting ideological juxtapositions.

Pyper then points out how these sections, printed as they are on a different paper stock from the "rest" of the Bible, give the Bible a strange tactile feel. He surmises that the publishers did not give much thought to the overall effect of these juxtapositions:

In the end, however, what is most striking about the SCR version is how little interaction there is between the inserts and the text. The full-color glossy inserts contrast with the plain printed texts and tend to be the points at which the Bible falls open. The distribution of the articles appears to be random and mechanical, spaced equally throughout the Old and New Testaments. Although the inserts include some, but surprisingly few, biblical references, they seldom urge the reader to refer to wider passages in the Bible and certainly give no advice on how to tackle the more difficult texts that surround them.

This observation about the materiality of the product is exactly right, as far as I am concerned. When we examine these sorts of Bibles, we should be asking precisely these questions. How does the overall effect, visual, tactile, and ideological, influence the reader's possible reading sof the "bare text"?

At the end, Pyper offers a scathing conclusion: "What this version represents, almost in spite of itself, then, is the relevance of the Bible as symbol in the continuing debate over the nature of American identity, and the irrelevance of much of the Bible as text in that debate."

While I am quite certain, trends being what they are, that this will by no means be the weirdest Bible we shall ever see, it is the current reigning champion. In their race to reach all manner of audiences among the "unchurched," I am waiting for the publishers to come out with versions of Scripture targeted on other popular lifestyle demographics, like the readers of Soldier of Fortune and Penthouse. Though I am usually not one for slippery slopes, given what is on offer already on the bookshelves, I fear we will not have all that long to wait.


[1] I should, and probably will, devote a post in the near future to this phenomenon. I hang out a lot in the Bible sections of bookstores, and it makes sense that the people I run into might be looking for guidance from knowledgeable folks like me or the bookstore clearks to help them choose. But this question also comes up in some stranger settings (like my dissertation defense, for example). I'd like to explore the desire that lives at the heart of readers to have the "right" Bible or the "best" Bible. My short answer, then as now as always, comes back to where I consistently find authority and "rightness" to dwell: not in any Bible itself, but in the institutions and interpretations that surround a given Bible. So, kids, if you want to know the best Bible to read, go ask your priest.


Note: Material Scripture blog is an Amazon Marketplace Affiliate. If you choose to purchase an item through the links in this post, we will receive a modest commission.

The King James Bible: If It Was Good Enough for Jesus, It's Good Enough for CBS

I was skimming the web for references to "black bonded Bibles" just now -- you know, those staid, traditional, non-flashy and quite sober behemoths of days gone by. Heirloom Bibles of stitched and fragrant Genuine Moroccan Leather. Gift Bibles given and given and given from year to everlasting year. What the President gets sworn in with. You know, those kind of Bibles

I had originally intended this to be a short post about the video I came across, which I have embedded below, where Denzel Washington is discussing his involvement in the 2007 audio Bible, The Bible Experience, which apparently has been a runaway bestseller.



After watching the video, however, I began to read the article, from CBS News Online, accompanying it. And, well. suddenly this post became a little more pointed.

The article is largely about the increasing trend of recent years to publish "designer Bibles," something that I certainly enjoy seeing reported. My trouble with the article, though, concerns several grossly misleading and inaccurate statements made by its author, Caitlin A. Johnson.

Let's take this one, for example, from right at the start of the piece:

In the beginning, there was the King James Bible: 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,173 verses — usually bound in sober black leather. The King James Bible was the English language standard for more than 400 years.

Okay. Hold on. Never mind the versions in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, used by the Church for over a millennium. A statement like this also manages to erase the long (and thorny) history of Tyndale, Huss, Luther, the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and a host of other lesser-known, but no less influential, predecessors to the King James Version in English.

Now yes, Johnson is partially correct in her characterization of the influence and importance of the King James. If this were the only such statement in the article, and if the article otherwise had carefully-researched claims, I might have let it slide. Not so. Johnson later makes the statement, "For more than 400 years, the King James version was the first — and for many, the only — Bible. "

The first alternative noted in the article does not occur until "September 1966, [when] an alternative was created with today's English version, known as 'Good News for Modern Man,' published by the non-profit American Bible society."

These statements reflect the popular misconceptions surrounding Bible "origins." The notion, as the article asserts, that the Bible has been available for sale "year after year...for 2,000 years" (as Sara Nelson, of Publishers Weekly, claims) is patently untrue. While you can say that commodities that begin to look like what we call a Bible have been part of commerce since before the invention of the movable type press, it is really not until the late 17th century that you can locate the beginnings of "book trade," in the manner that Nelson means.

The last bone of contention I have with the piece comes in response to this:

"It's the best seller of all times," Abyssinian Baptist pastor Dr. Calvin Butts said. "It has to be. It's got everything you would want in a book: sex, violence, intrigue, mystery, the supernatural — it's all here."

The "it has to be" that Dr. Butts asserts is a pretty common sentiment among laypeople in the West. We assume the hegemony of the Bible to be a worldwide phenomenon that simply cannot be touched by any other book.

However, while the Bible is definitely high up there on the list of bestsellers of all time (and the list is, admittedly, a hard one to tabulate - after all, are we talking sales, or copies in print, or...) there is a good chance that another book written in response to a charismatic individual, Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, actually holds the title.

Unfortunately, the historical, exegetical, and political complexities that arise in the wake of this tension between Jesus and Mao seem far beyond the ken of the writers and "newspeople" associated with CBS, who cannot even seem to get the facts about the King James right. Shame.