How a book is made

A beautiful little film by Glen Milner. Enjoy.

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.

Adventures in Letterpress, part 1

Last December I had a chance to visit briefly with Kyle Durrie, proprietrix of Portland's Power and Light Press, who is currently on a multi-month adventure, traveling from city to city and state to state in a tricked-out delivery truck that houses two medium-weight letterpresses. Durrie was visiting Memphis, and the graphic arts professor here at CBU arranged for her to come to campus and talk and give a demonstration of the truck and the project.

The project, dubbed "Moveable Type," is the realization of a vision Durrie had while visiting her musician boyfriend on the road during a cross-country tour. "Two of my favorite things in the world are printing and road trips," Durrie says. "I wanted to figure out a way to do both things at the same time." She then set a plan in motion to get the project off the ground:

The plan was hatched last year while on a cross country band tour, studying maps and staring out car windows and exploring new towns. It was furthered along by listening to lots of songs about cowboys and truckers. In November 2010, I launched a fundraising campaign through Kickstarter.com, which was met with surprising and overwhelming support and success. I more than doubled my original financial goal, which turned out to be a good thing, because it turns out I had a very poor understanding of the costs involved in pulling something like this off.

Durrie's success with Kickstarter allowed her to buy and retrofit a 1982 Chevy step van into a fully functional letterpress print shop. "I’ve outfitted the back of the truck with built-in cabinets and workspace, a sign press from the mid 20th century, and an 1873 Golding Official No. 3 tabletop platen press," Durrie writes on her website.

The result is a compact, functional, and very beautiful work space. The trip has consisted of Durrie pulling into towns on prearranged visits, parking her van and setting up shop. She invites people into the truck to try their hand at the press, to learn what printing is and what it feels like to make something with your worn hands and effort.

I got a chance to use the sign press, and was amazed. Despite all my research into printing and the publishing of Bibles, I realized I had never thought much about the actual process of printing of physical pages. Just the little time I spent in the Type Truck was eye-opening. Printing has a feel, and a sound, and a smell to it that is unique. I never would have known this if it hadn't been for Durrie and her vision of bringing letterpress to the masses.

You can contribute to Kyle Durrie's continuing travels here, and you can make arrangements for her to visit your town here.

"A Bible with an Appendix": Christophe Plantin's 1573 Polyglot Bible

Over the past couple of weeks my wife and I have been watching the much loved Connections series, put together by James Burke for the BBC in the 1970s and 1990s. The whole series is now available for free online, and I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it. Burke reads historical events thematically, instead of chronologically, leading to some truly fascinating leaps and threads that start one place and, by the end of the program, pull together across cultures and centuries in surprising and very satisfying ways.

The episode we watched last night had this little section about the Belgian printer Christophe Plantin, who is famous for his ambitious work producing a "Polyglot Bible" - eight volumes that incorporated five languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and Syriac), with the last two volumes comprised entirely of grammars, lexicographic aids, charts, lists, and maps. It is an absolutely amazing piece of work, and garnered Plantin much praise (and a little bit of trouble) for his efforts.

Here is the video. Enjoy!

APHA Conference deadlines approaching

For folks who might be interested in attending the 2011 American Printing History Association conference in San Diego this fall, the deadline for Early Bird registration is this Thursday, September 15th.



The theme this year is "Printing from the Edge":

What have been the transformative moments in printing history that have changed the direction of printing, typography, papermaking, bookbinding, or book design, and moved us to a new edge? What are today’s frontiers? Where is tomorrow’s edge?

The conference takes place October 14-15 at UC San Diego. More information can be found here at the APHA website.

Stumbling into the goldmine

When I was writing my dissertation, my third chapter was devoted to trying to develop a set of definitions and a methodology for examining "the Bible" as both a "linguistic" object (what often gets referred to as the "text" - meaning the intangible ideas "contained" in a book) as well as a physical object (the other, conflated meaning for the word "text").

It took me over eighty pages, and the apparatus was unwieldy at best. Part of the problem was that I was trying to develop, and import, a whole mode of analysis that is very alien to the weltanschauung of contemporary theological studies. In previous generations, theologians were as much text critics as they were proto-philosophers [1]. A survey of the works of Calvin, Luther, Barth and other notables shows as much biblical commentary and exegesis as it does attempts at systematic theologies (and often more so). In the last thirty years, however, a divide has opened between the practice of Christian theology and the practices of exegesis and textual criticism. My chapter was an attempt to "work backward" through this divide, and even beyond and beneath it, to recover a sense (if, indeed, it ever existed) of the importance of the "book-ness" of the Bible. The physical presence of the printed object was and is, I argued, theologically relevant and indispensable.

But I didn't know how to talk about that insight in a simple or straightforward way. Indeed, in many ways I am still working on that very problem (hence attempts, such as the postings on this blog, to address the issue repeatedly in the hopes of improvement).

So I am happy to report a discovery that is going to help this quest considerably.

During a recent visit to the University of Virginia, I had the pleasure of meeting professor of English and book historian David Vander Meulen, and of being introduced to the UVA Rare Book School, housed in the basement of their library [2]. I cannot put into adequate words what has now become available to my scholarship.

In the first place, Dr. Vander Meulen made me aware that the methodologies and vocabulary I have been struggling to invent and grapple with already, to large extent, exist. In the work of bibliographers and book historians, the "grammar" for reading books as physical objects exists and can be learned. The hour I spent speaking with Dr. Vander Meulen was an absolute revelation. Not only was I ecstatic to discover another scholar who was as as excited about the "archaeology of printing" as I was, but I was also shown a series of syllabi and monographs that point the direction to the answers I need.

These monographs were written by Dr. Vander Meulen's mentor, G. Thomas Tanselle - widely recognized as the preeminent American scholar of bibliography and book history.

The Rare Book School has available a wide selection of these works by Tanselle. Upon my return from Charlottesville I ordered several (as well as two DVD's on book production - because I am a total nerd), and the box arrived a few days ago.

I just finished reading Tanselle's "Sol M. Malkin Lecture in Bibliography," entitled Libraries, Museums and Reading, delivered in 1990 to the Columbia University School of Library Science. I am absolutely blown away. In thirty-one pages he clarifies several of the questions with which I spent all those chapter pages wrestling and grappling. Though his focus is not on biblical interpretation, I can easily see how many of his insights will be directly applicable to the project of Material Scripture and my research. I am absolutely ecstatic.

I need to read the lecture again, and study it more closely, before I can adequately express to you the connections I see. I hope, as the summer progresses, to bring several of these insights into the blog and talk about the lecture piece by piece. I think that would be the most profitable approach.

For now, however, let me lift out this one quotation:

Scholars who concentrate on the transmission of texts - that is, textual critics and editors - have often been misunderstood by other scholars, their work greeted condescendingly as if, however basic, it lacks the intellectual challenges of supposedly more creative historical and critical scholarship. What editors actually do is to read the documents (what else could they do?), trying to read all the evidence these objects have to offer and assessing it critically. The process of criticism does not begin when a literary critic or a philosopher takes up a text provided by an editor; it begins with the editor's own work, which reflects an attitude toward all the issues that critics confront. But editors' work suffers in the eyes of many scholars from the taint of the physical: work involving physical evidence is thought to be mechanical and objective, in contrast to the higher critical powers required to deal with the intangible intellectual product. The body has been chosen rather than the soul [pp. 27-28, underlined emphasis mine].

I could not agree more with this analysis. Translating it into my own project, let me gloss the quotation thus: "The process of [biblical and theological] criticism does not begin when a [theologian] takes up a text provided by an editor [and a publishing staff]; it begins with the editor [and publisher]'s own work, which reflects an attitude [and a set of theological and community commitments] toward all the issues that [theologians] confront."

Nearly all the 340 pages of the dissertation were trying to build toward an insight such as this. Here, in Tanselle's work, I find a scholar who has done much of the methodological development (with which I have been fumbling these past several years) to help me more elegantly frame and ground these suspicious intuitions I have had about Bibles and theology.

Though Tanselle and I are ultimately interested in a different set of questions, I am very encouraged that this overlap exists where we have come upon a problem with a similar trajectory. I have no doubt that Tanselle's insights (and indeed, the work of book historians like David Vander Meulen and others) will prove invaluable not only to Material Scripture, but to related projects such as the Syracuse Iconic Books center.

I feel like it's my birthday. I can't wait to read more.


[1] For an excellent example of this, consider D. Moody Smith's The Composition and Order of the Fourth Gospel: Bultmann's Literary Theory, in which Smith demonstrates how Bultmann reconstructed and re-edited the Johannine text to fit a trajectory of theological assumptions that he considered to be more "original" than the textual evidence currently available in ancient manuscripts and fragments, in effect creating a "new" and heretofore unseen Gospel of John. My thanks to my colleague Jimmy Barker for bringing this example to my attention.

[2] My thanks to Rebecca Rine, Ben Maton, Scott Yakimow, and Luke S.H. Wright for these introductions.

"Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to Gutenburg" coming to JPII High School in Nashville area

John Paul II Catholic High School in Hendersonville, TN will host a traveling exhibition about incunabular (first-generation movable type) printing and ancient manuscripts this Spring.

The exhibit, entitled Ink & Blood, runs from February 15th through March 4th, 2010. The hours are somewhat erratically arranged, and you will need to purchase the $15 tickets in advance (information about both hours and tickets available here)

As the promoters of the exhibit describe:

Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to Gutenberg is the largest collection ever assembled chronicling Western Civilization as seen through one of its most prominent and carefully preserved objets d’art—the Hebrew, Latin and English Bible.

The collection includes authentic Dead Sea Scrolls, 5,000-year-old clay tablets, Hebrew Torahs, ancient Greek texts, Medieval Latin manuscripts, pages from Gutenberg’s Bible, and rare English printed Bibles.

In addition to the more than one-hundred authentic artifacts, the exhibition includes a working replica of Gutenberg’s printing press featuring live demonstrations of incunabular printing.

From the information and pictures available on the website, it looks to be a pretty interesting exhibit. I, for one, will be making the pilgrimage to Nashville to explore it. I will have a more detailed review to post then. Meanwhile, if you are in the Nashville area, I highly recommend checking it out for yourself.