Happy 400th, KJB!

    Let me tell you about my experience at The Life and Legacy of the King James Bible exhibit in the HBLL!



Latin Bible (Vulgate).

Vellum manuscript from France, 13th century

     Can I just say that of ALL the ways you can use a book, perhaps the oddest is to put it on display? I like art museums, but art is specifically designed to be viewed. Looking at paintings and sculptures isn't weird to me, but as we begin our study of print knowledge and as I thought about books and went to this exhibit, I thought about how funny it was to look at an exhibit of books. Libraries facilitate the discovery of books by making them available to the public, but sometimes when I'm in the HBLL I see some books that make me wonder if anyone has even opened them before! Putting books on display certainly makes them visible, but the book also becomes inaccessible to someone who may want to reference it. After all, you can only open up a book so  that two pages are displayed (when they are in their original form, of course). The "interactive tool" we talk about in lecture that is a book becomes a piece of sculpture when you put it on diplay like that!
       So I guess I want to address the value of putting books on display, especially these ones. A library would have to have good reason to take books out of circulation and exhibit them (though I doubt these books have been accessible to the public for a long time, if they ever were.)

Books: Tools for Providing Historical Framework
     As I went through this exhibit, it was easier for me to put what we were studying into context. I couldn't help but think about how this transition period from written to print media is very similar to our transition period from print knowledge to digital knowledge. Just as these printed bibles try their hardest to mimic handwritten bibles, our digital media tries to mimic print media (the Amazon Kindle being a prime example). It demonstrates to me that this point in the transition is fairly early on in the process, because eventually printing technology embraced different fonts and an image completely different from that of written books. I think eventually our technology will abandon ties to print media and embrace its own style (and, of course, a lot of digital media already does that).

            Let me just show some examples of what I'm talking about from the exhibit:


Wycliffe Bible (1600): Copied cursive transcript, written knowledge at its finest.



William Tyndale's translation of the Bible (1525): Printed, but font mimics written hand.





The Obedience of a Christian Man by William Tyndale (1572): Printed, but both main text and notes mimic written hand,



Geneva Bible (1594): Main text mimics written hand, but the notes are their own font all together!



The History of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of King James the First by Arthur Wilson (1653): no more of this mimicking handwriting--Print media has its own look now.

      So, as I looked at these books, and was able to mark the steps in this transition from written to print knowledge, I was able to construct a sort of narrative, using these books as exemplars and evidence. Putting these books on display facilitated that opportunity. Library exhibitions seem to foster new ways of using and thinking about books. Just the fact that these books were not in their natural habitat almost forced me to look at them differently, because my attention was directed toward the physical object. I doubt anyone came away from this exhibit discussing the powerful verses they chose to open up to-- the text was not the important part, though everything displayed revolved around a similar theme. Looking at these books in this way prompted reflection, I was able to observe the physical features of the book and seee distinctions, rather than read them.

Books: Transformers of Language Use
    Finally, one last thing that I observed as I was at this exhibit was the important role printed books seemed to play in shaping the use of language (and by language I mean the tool by which we transmit knowledge). It seems to me that between 1500 and 1700 (just because that's basically the time frame this exhibit covered), printers seemed to figure out how to exploit text layout, titles, those little margin notes, and even their little graphics to make books better at reflecting the writer's/printer's purpose. In the pictures I put above, I noticed that the first book is just the text: no extra energy was wasted in adding pictures or making the page a little cleaner or more organized. The next three books demonstrate the printers' discovered ability to exploit physical features (size, page layout, pictures, sidenotes). Print technology brought about these changes, and these physical charactistics/textual features support different uses of books among readers (for example, the printed margin notes support a new way of reading, a searching technique).

    So, that's all! Just some things I learned/noticed as I toured The Life and Legacy of the King James Bible.