We cannot verify your location
Browse Book and Journal Content on Project MUSE
OR

Blind Impressions

Methods and Mythologies in Book History

By Joseph A. Dane

Publication Year: 2013

What is a book in the study of print culture? For the scholar of material texts, it is not only a singular copy carrying the unique traces of printing and preservation efforts, or an edition, repeated and repeatable, or a vehicle for ideas to be abstracted from the physical copy. But when the bibliographer situates a book copy within the methods of book history, Joseph A. Dane contends, it is the known set of assumptions which govern the discipline that bibliographic arguments privilege, repeat, or challenge. "Book history," he writes, "is us."

In Blind Impressions, Dane reexamines the field of material book history by questioning its most basic assumptions and definitions. How is print defined? What are the limits of printing history? What constitutes evidence? His concluding section takes form as a series of short studies in theme and variation, considering such matters as two-color printing, the composing stick used by hand-press printers, the bibliographical status of book fragments, and the function of scholarly illustration in the Digital Age. Meticulously detailed, deeply learned, and often contrarian, Blind Impressions is a bracing critique of the way scholars define and solve problems.

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

pdf iconDownload PDF (225.4 KB)
pp. 2-7

Contents

pdf iconDownload PDF (151.3 KB)
pp. vii-viii

read more

Introduction

pdf iconDownload PDF (224.1 KB)
pp. 1-8

To write on print culture, one might start by selecting a monumental book from the presumed history of that culture: it might be the Gutenberg Bible; it might be an edition of Aldus Manutius, Shakespeare’s First Folio, the French Encyclopédie. We might choose less grand things as well: a run-of-the-mill edition of an Elizabethan play, ...

Part I. What is Print?

read more

Chapter 1. Paleography Versus Typography

pdf iconDownload PDF (374.8 KB)
pp. 11-36

In 2011, in an introductory section entitled “No Leaners,” I made a simple observation regarding the distinction between type and script. However we define type, it is distinguished from script by the discrete nature of the typecase: a typesort either is or is not in a type compartment of a typecase; ...

read more

Chapter 2. "Ca. 1800": What's in a Date?

pdf iconDownload PDF (264.7 KB)
pp. 37-57

When Rabelais and others characterized their own period as involved in “la restitution des bonnes lettres,”1 they created what we now know as the Middle Ages, a period between two points of interest, Roman classical times and contemporary times, with both periods romanticized through a Renaissance or Early Modern perspective. ...

read more

Chapter 3. Bibliographers of the Mind

pdf iconDownload PDF (231.2 KB)
pp. 58-72

One of the most influential articles written on bibliography in the past half century is D. F. McKenzie’s “Printers of the Mind.”1 It is likely the compelling nature of the title and the implied thesis that have prevented me from reading or re-reading it as closely as I should, and I assume I am not alone in this. ...

Part II. On The Making of Lists

read more

Chapter 4. Herman R. Mead's Incunabula in the Huntington Library and the Notion of "Typographical Value"

pdf iconDownload PDF (290.7 KB)
pp. 75-91

The Huntington Library catalogue of fifteenth-century books was produced by Herman R. Mead in 1937.1 The catalogue and collection were to be organized according to the Proctor system, also the basis for a number of contemporary incunable catalogues; items are organized under country, town, printer, and date of printing within each printer, ...

read more

Chapter 5. Catchtitles in English Books to 1550

pdf iconDownload PDF (330.5 KB)
pp. 92-105

A little-noted feature of early sixteenth-century English books is what Victor Scholderer refers to, in reference to fifteenth-century Italian books, as the “catch-title.”1 Catchtitles are abbreviated forms of the book title printed on the direction line, that is, the line used for printed signatures and catchwords just below the text block. ...

read more

Chapter 6. An Editorial Propaedeutic

pdf iconDownload PDF (242.3 KB)
pp. 106-124

Bibliography as understood or defined by Anglo-American bibliographers has always been closely associated with editing, and the following chapter focuses on what appears to be the most basic function of traditional editing—organizing and evaluating extant variants (a set of facts) in such a way as to indicate an original reading, ...

Part III. Ironies of History and Representation: Theme and Variation

read more

Playing Bibliography

pdf iconDownload PDF (159.9 KB)
pp. 127-129

Most of the scholars I know settled into their fields by accident. As a would-be medievalist, I found myself, through no doing of my own, in Los Angeles. Medieval resources there, primary and secondary, could not compete with those of New York or large European libraries, but materials in book history and bibliography were abundant. ...

read more

III.1. Book History and Book Histories: On the Making of Lists

pdf iconDownload PDF (294.6 KB)
pp. 130-138

Most of us have at some point been commissioned or required to compose a “Survey of Scholarship,” perhaps as a free-standing monograph, perhaps as an introduction to a scholarly article, or even in the opening meetings of a class. On the one hand, the allure is irresistible: that perfectly designed lecture or schema, ...

read more

III.2. Meditation on the Composing Stick

pdf iconDownload PDF (407.1 KB)
pp. 139-148

The composing stick is an essential piece of equipment in traditional printing. It is the basis for most of what Moxon says about the “Compositor,” who in turn is the basis for much of modern bibliographical discussion, both in analytical bibliography and in the textual criticism related to it. ...

read more

III.3. The Red and the Black

pdf iconDownload PDF (197.8 KB)
pp. 149-155

With that, I am pretending to concede that I have given up methodological strictures and shifted to the personal. In fact, that concession is a gambit. I am conceding this in order to enforce the argument I have made all along: that bibliographical arguments must be made in the context of particular problems, particular settings, ...

read more

III.4. Fragments

pdf iconDownload PDF (371.5 KB)
pp. 156-164

Bowdoin College Library has what I call a run-of-the-mill early sixteenth-century psalter in a cheap contemporary binding.1 Bound in as an endpaper is an equally routine sheet of another nearly contemporary psalter or breviary. ...

read more

III.5. The Nature and Function of Scholarly Illustration in a Digital World

pdf iconDownload PDF (186.9 KB)
pp. 165-173

A recent scholarly book I reviewed has a number of illustrations, twenty-eight by my count.1 Of these, most have the requisite permissions, all written in formulaic phrases, “Reproduced with the permission of the President and Fellows of Saint John Baptist College in the University of Oxford.” ...

read more

III.6. Art of the Mind

pdf iconDownload PDF (227.0 KB)
pp. 174-182

A recent Getty Museum project involves the restoration of a Roy Lichtenstein piece, reported in the Los Angeles Times in “Lichtenstein’s Three Brush Strokes gets a Brush Up.” 1 The project is a poster-child for restoration. The artist/restorer is James DePasquale, “a longtime Lichtenstein assistant who manages the late artist’s studio in Southampton, NY.” ...

Notes

pdf iconDownload PDF (348.6 KB)
pp. 183-208

Principal Sources

pdf iconDownload PDF (202.8 KB)
pp. 209-214

Index

pdf iconDownload PDF (184.3 KB)
pp. 215-218

read more

Acknowledgments

pdf iconDownload PDF (151.4 KB)
pp. 219-228

An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Herman R. Mead’s Incunabula at the Huntington Library and the Notion of ‘Typographical Value’.” I thank the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand for permission to reprint the revised version here. ...


E-ISBN-13: 9780812208696
E-ISBN-10: 0812208692
Print-ISBN-13: 9780812245493
Print-ISBN-10: 0812245490

Page Count: 232
Illustrations: 9 illus.
Publication Year: 2013

Series Title: Material Texts
Series Editor Byline: Series Editors: Roger Chartier, Joseph Farrell, Anthony Grafton, Leah Price, Peter Stallybrass, Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

Research Areas

Recommend

Subject Headings

  • Bibliography -- Methodology.
  • Bibliography -- Methodology -- History.
  • Printing -- History.
  • Printing -- Historiography.
  • Type and type-founding -- History.
  • Type and type-founding -- Historiography.
  • You have access to this content
  • Free sample
  • Open Access
  • Restricted Access
http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780812208696
muse.jhu.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-35
49970
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:EFIEL6UL7X6DYDIKSSTV3RVCOXP2TYQU
<urn:uuid:5974df66-8132-4473-82fc-b2e60602ee5d>
2014-08-21T18:01:10Z
128.220.160.198
sha1:QUMLYGTT25PXLKVL2NN34QPN276K3J3M
<urn:uuid:83abf3bf-4224-4232-862d-90c7c93de27d>
http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780812208696
length
response
<urn:uuid:938e0989-ebd3-48f1-b877-94f91922aaec>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-136-8.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for August 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf