Visit to Special Collections

Well I did a post earlier on about money and print and I have already done our field trip post as well as the annotated bibliography so I wasn't sure exactly what I would post on this week. After an enjoyable thanksgiving up in Canada with lots of great things that occurred, it was great to come back to calls on tuesday to such a great lecture. So I feel that it is appropriate and I would be amiss if I didn't focus on the things that Royal Skousen explained to us Tuesday morning.

Print in 16th to 17th Century Asia--

I took a little trip over to the library earlier this week. I didn't really realize how amazing the services were at the HBLL until finishing this assignment - there's really so much to look for, so many things to keep an eye out for. Google translate helped me out some also, as many of the books I found were not written in English. While I could kind of pick up what they said from cognates and the 3 languages I had exposure to shortly in school (French, Spanish, German), it was still nice to get a full picture through the modern wonders of the internet.

I chose to focus on non-European printing, specifically in the areas of China, Korea, and Japan.

Rabbi Dan Levin of Temple Beth El - Why we celebrate Chanukah

Since I have done a post on the Jewish equivalent to Thanksgiving it would be fitting if my next post was about Hanukkah which seems to be the Jewish equivalent of Christmas.

Hanukakah is also known as the Festival of the Lights, is an eight-day Jewish Holiday commemorating the rededication of the Holy Temple (the Second Temple) in Jersalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt of the 2nd century BCE. Hanukkah is observed for eight nights and days, starting on the 25th day of Kislev according to the Hebrew calender, which may occur at any time from late November to late December in the Gregorian calender.

The festival is observed by the kindling of the lights of a unique candelabrum, the nine-branched Menorah or Hanukiah, one additional light on each night of the holiday, progressing to eight on the final night. The typical Menorah consists of eight branches with an additional raised branch. The extra light is called a Shamash and is given a distinct location, usually above or below the rest. The purpose of the shamash is to have a light available for use, as using the Hanukkah lights themselves is forbidden.

This video clip is of a rabbi who very concisely explain the background of the holiday as well how it is celebrated now. I chuckled a bit when I found this clip because I think of a rabbi as an old, wise-looking man with a white beard. He looks like a bishop from the LDS church.

Acid Paper and Preservation

I decided I wanted to do a little more in the vein of preservation that I spoke about in my last post, so I decided to do my bibliography on the topic of paper history in general, and acid paper in specific. Wood pulp is naturally acidic, and if the pH of paper isn't neutralized, the paper will turn yellow when exposed to light. However, people only figured this out around 80 years ago, so everything printed before then was printed on acidic paper.

King James Bible Exhibit

When I went to the Bible exhibit the most interesting thing to me was the time-lines they had there. I love maps and graphs and I love to analyze them. the time-line was very illuminating. So much effort and time has gone into the publication of the Bible. It's crazy how many people have sacrificed everything including their lives for it. The devil has worked so hard to stop the Lord's work. I also enjoyed looking at the old Bibles. It's amazing to me how these very old artifacts have survived in such good condition.

That's really all I have to say. I really enjoyed the exhibit especially the time-lines. There have been blogs about the lighting and the way books are preserved so there really isn't a lot for me to talk about. It was definitely worth my while to go and I would recommend it to anyone to go.

Typography Bibliography

I wasn't planning to do my post on typography but I had a writing class on type and how it should be used I decided to do that. I always thought type was interesting. I mean, who as a little kid hasn't gone on to Microsoft Word or some equivalent and messed around with the font and size of the letters. I remember making very complicated titles for stories I never even started to write. I would just dream up an awesome sounding title and make it look cool. Now, all my brothers and sisters do this back home.

Roberts, W. Printers' marks : A chapter in the history of typography. London, England: George Bell & Sons,1893.

Gives some general aspects of printer's marks. Goes through the printer's marks of England, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Dutch and Flemish and then gives some modern examples. Has a lot of info. Sidenote: W. Roberts was nicknamed "the bookworm." [Found this on the BYU library website.]

Goudy, Frederick W. Typologia : studies in type design & type making with comments on the invention of typography, the first types, legibility and fine printing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940.

Typologia presents more or less graphically Frederic Goudy's work in type design and describes his own methods of type production. His remarks on type legibility and fine printing, as presented in the body of the book, present the conclusions of a craftsman intensely interested in every phase of typography. [Found this on the fifth floor of the library.]

Hoe, Richard March. The literature of printing. A catalogue of the library illustrative of the history and art of typography. London, England: Chiswick Press, 1877.

Richard Hoe was something of an expert in the world of printing. He invented the rotary printing press which could fold newsprint as fast as the eye could follow. The title basically explains the book: history and typography and a how-to type of instruction for it. [Found it near Typologia.]

Frederic Nelson Phillips, inc. (firm). Phillips' Old-fashioned type book : showings, alphabetical and otherwise, of approximately one thousand odd fonts of old-fashioned, exotic, ancient and antique type faces; old-time printers' ornaments, borders, cuts, &c.; many old specimens of printing, advertisements, bills, labels, &c.; old reprints of history & other interesting data on printing & typography of long ago. New York: Grederic Nelson Phillips, inc., 1945.

Are you out of breath from reading the title. I got out of breath and I was reading it in my mind! Goes through a lot of old fonts (about a thousand), what types were used with advertisements, bills etc. [I so the super long title and I pick it up and it turned out to be about typography.]

Reed, Talbot Baines. A history of the old English letter foundries; with notes, historical and bibliographical, on the rise and progress of English typography. London, England: Faber and Faber, 1952.

A History of the Old English Letter Foundries was first published in 1887. Writing as an enthusiastic amateur historian, and wholly incorporating Edward Rowe Mores' classic 1778 Dissertation on English Typographical Founders and Foundries, Reed inspected a multitude of type specimens to supplement the veracity of his mostly bibliographical presentation.

All of these books can be found on Amazon and Google Books.

Rosetta Project- Part 2 Eqyptian to Arabic

So this is what we needed to translate: Eqyptian Hieroglyphics. At first I thought that this would be pretty easy. Check out some books from the library, locate the glyphs, find the English meaning, then translate that in Hebrew and Arabic. Boy, was I wrong.

So my group reserved a room at the library and we checked out a bunch of books about Egyptian Hieroglyphics with their English meanings. No big, right? Well, it turns out Egyptian Hieroglyphics are way more complicated than that. It turns out there are several way to read them. You basically read them left to right, but then it gets tricky if there are some glyphs that are stacked. Some stacked glyphs equal a word or they could be a phrase.

It gets even harder because of the dynasties. I have never thought about it but the hieroglyphics changed over time, especially when new families or dynasties took over.