Fact to fiction to fact

Step 1: Write a first novel - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - woven around a series of found photographs. Step 2: Publish said novel to great acclaim. Step 3: Travel with an urban explorer in Europe to find and document abandoned houses like the one described in the pages of his novel (VIDEO HERE).

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Book biology

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin and the University of York have just tapped a new resource for tracing the breding history of sheep and other livestock over time. By analyzing DNA and collagen obtained from the parchment of books printed in the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists can establish the type of animals from which the parchment was made, compare their genomes with modern equivalents, and reveal how animal husbandry shaped their genetic diversity. Now vital historical information comes not only from the text, but the material on which it is written – provided librarians are willing to part with a .79" square (2x2cm) sample of a page. Geneticist Daniel Bradley of Trinity College Dublin remarks, “This pilot project suggests that parchments are an amazing resource for genetic studies that consider agricultural development over the centuries. There must be millions stored away in libraries, archives, solicitors’ offices and even in our own attics. After all, parchment was the writing material of choice for thousands of years, going back to the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

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Mark Twain moving

The only existing footage of 19th c. American author Mark Twain has just been digitally restored by TFG Film & Tape. He is shown circumnavigating his house in Redding, Connecticut, U.S., and sitting inside with his daughters Clara and Jean. The film (COMPARE BEFORE AND AFTER HERE) was made by Thomas Edison's company in 1909, just a year before Twain died. We think we know the author so well from portrayals by Hal Holbrook and others that Josh Jones writes in Open Culture, "[The restoration] does wonders for the watchability of this priceless silent artifact, so vividly capturing the writer/contrarian/raconteur’s essence that you’ll find yourself reaching to turn the volume up, expecting to hear that familiar curmudgeonly drawl."

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B.O.

In this instance, B.O. stands for book odor rather than body odor, but you will learn that the two can be synonymous. The strangely intoxicating aroma that haunts libraries and used bookstores has been studied by chemists because it can indicate the "health" of antique books. The website Compound Interest notes that "benzaldehyde adds an almond-like scent; vanillin adds a vanilla-like scent; ethyl benzene and toluene impart sweet odours; and 2-ethyl hexanol has a ‘slightly floral’ contribution. Scientists are less able to generalize about "new book smell" because of the hundreds of compounds that can be used during the manufacture of the paper, in the inks used to print the book, and in the adhesives used in the book-binding process. But if, in fact, you want to smell like a newly printed tome, you are in luck. Wallpaper* magazine commissioned master perfumer Geza Schoen to create a fragrance based on the smell of books. The descriptive copy about the scent (AVAILABLE HERE) reads, "This is an opportunity to celebrate all the glorious sensuality of books....The idea is that it should relax you, like when you read a book, to a level of meditation and concentration. Paper Passion has evolved into something quite beautiful and unique. To wear the smell of a book is something very chic. Books are players in the intellectual world, but also in the world of luxury. "

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Natural selection

"Considering the limited disposable space in so very small a ship, we contrived to carry more instruments and books than one would readily suppose could be stowed away in dry and secure places," wrote Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle. A young Charles Darwin shared his cabin with 404 volumes for their landmark expedition around the world from 1831 to 1836. After the voyage, the then state-of-the-art library was dispersed. Now senior lecturer John van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore has collected and digitized the books – all195,000 pages containing more than 5,000 illustrations (GALLERY HERE) – and made the collection freely available as part of the Darwin Online website. The library includes books in English, French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek. The subjects span travel, natural history, geology, history, literature, and atlases and nautical maps. Sums up van Wyhe, "The Beagle library reveals the sources and inspirations that Darwin read day after day as he swung in his hammock during long sea crossings, or as he worked on his specimens at the chart table or under the microscope. For a long time this was lost to us, but this reconstructed library provides us an unprecedented insight into the journey that changed science and our understanding of the world."

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Bradbury abode

American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury died in 2012 and now the home he lived in for more than 50 years is on the market. The 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom, 2,500 square-foot (762 m²) house sits on a 9,500 square-foot (2896 m²) lot in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, and is listed for $1.495 million (€1.093 million). Bradberry and his wife, who predeceased him, raised their 4 daughters there. The author of 27 novels and 600 short stories writes in his most famous work, Fahrenheit 451, "Everyone must leave something behind when he dies. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there."

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Book brigade

In advance of the opening of their new library, the residents of Stanton, Iowa, U.S., formed a human chain to transfer 3,000 of the 8,000 volumes from the old building to the new one. More than 400 community members participated, many of them schoolchildren. The old library used to be a bank, and the vault housed the children's books. In addition to the library, the new facility will also include a wellness center, walking track, gym, multipurpose room, and preschool. But even the old library had more than one purpose. As 73-year-old library board member Harriet Olson remembers, “This was cool in the summer. We didn't have air conditioning in our house.”

 

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Bard's book

Following the purchase of a book on eBay for $4,050 (€2,931). New York antiquarian booksellers Daniel Wechsler and George Koppelman have become convinced that they have found the annotated dictionary belonging to none other than William Shakespeare. John Baret's An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie (IMAGE OF TITLE PAGE ABOVE) was published in 1580 and this particular copy contains thousands of annotations in a contemporary handwriting. Wechsler and Koppelman have spent the past 6 years linking the marginalia directly to the composition of some of Shakespeare's best known works, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and many of the sonnets. Although he has not yet had time to weigh the evidence, Shakespeare biographer and scholar Stephen Greenblatt comments, "It would reinforce, in a fascinating way, Shakespeare's passion for language. We know that Shakespeare had an eye out for unusual words – but we have only limited knowledge of where he went to find them."

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Wish You Were Here

My friend Loren Rhoads (IMAGE ABOVE) has published a book entitled Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. "It's good to be a card-carrying member of the Association for Gravestone Studies," she writes, having used hers to gain entry to the pioneer cemetery at Yosemite National Park in California, U.S. I agree, having flashed mine to get into Brooklyn, New York's famous Green-Wood Cemetery. At the age of 4, a family vacation took her to Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, US; At the age of 12, she was biking to the cemetery with her family to do tombstone rubbings. She didn't make it to the Paris Catacombs until she was an adult and accompanied by her husband Mason, who asked, "Imagine the dreams you would have if your parents brought you here as a child."

After half a lifetime of guided and self-guided tours, Loren observes, "Cold, hard, unfeeling stone strives for immortality by its presence. In truth, what I've learned from cemeteries is that limestone melts, marble breaks, slate slivers, and sandstone cracks." But that is part of what draws some of us to graveyards. I know exactly what Mason means when he hopes that the then recently launched maintenance of Highgate Cemetery in London hasn't completely ruined the ambience, I have been on tours myself during which I had to hurry to photograph gravestones before others plucked off clinging ivy. And neither Loren nor I are admirers of those bronze grave markers set flush to the ground to facilitate mowing, aomething standardized by the designer of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, U.S.

Loren has also visited memorials throughout the world, from Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, U.S., to Hiroshima in Japan. She has seen her share of cenotaphs, including markers for men lost at sea, and observes, "I feel that the spirit of the person enlivens the grave. An empty tomb has lost something that a rock never owned." She has researched and seen grave sculptures across the globe, and has noted international influences in American cemeteries. She was amused at Metairie Cemetery by "the juxtaposition of the German drug magnate retiring into eternity with a Greek maiden inside an Egyptian Revival tomb decorated with a Roman urn beneath the humid Louisiana sky."

After years of morbid study, Loren has decided she wants to be cremated. So did I, until I learned how many greenhouse gases it adds to the atmosphere. Maybe her next book will be about green burial.

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Timbuktu tomes

Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls institutionally conserved in Israel, the ancient texts from Africa's center of scholarship – Timbuktu – have been kept safe throughout the centuries by virtue of remaining in private hands. Generations of private owners have kept the books from being ruined or stolen by French colonists since the late 19th c. and, more recently, by an Al Qaeda-affiliated group who invaded the storied city last year, destroying tombs and burning any ancient manuscripts they found. Abdel Kader Haidara founded the Safeguard and Valorization of Manuscripts for the Defense of Islamic Culture in 1996 to gather and protect the books and make them available to scholars for the first time. The texts, bound in camel skin, goat skin, and calf leather, have been packed in nondescript trunks (IMAGE ABOVE), loaded onto donkey carts, and taken to an unidentified location in Bamako, Mali's capital. Hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscript dating from the 13th c. to the 17th c. have been collected, with subjects that include religion, philosophy, law, and astronomy. In addition, the ancient scholars wrote about medicine, and Haidara hopes that his efforts – funded by private donations, crowd-sourcing, and a grant from the Ford foundation – will stave off age, moisture, insects, and fungi long enough for modern scholars to uncover traditional medicine for maladies that continue to devastate populations, such as malaria. Doctor and epidemiologist Badara Cisse of the University of Dakar in Senegal warns against counting on cures that are not based on evidential science: "In Africa, we are well behind because we love living with our past.” But it is living with the past that has preserved these books, and it is unknown yet what secrets they hold.

Thanks, Chase!

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Dodgson's dodo

As with Dürer's rhinoceros, historians know exactly which specific animal inspired the character of the dodo in Alice in Wonderland. The species, Raphus cucullatus, had long since gone extinct, but one of the last of the birds – and the only documented specimen to have been brought alive from its native Mauritius to Europe – died after display in London and its remains were added to a cabinet of curiosity prior to 1656. From there the specimen passed to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, but was incinerated either accidentally in a fire or deliberately due to disrepair. When the collections of the Ashmolean were transferred to the newly built Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 1860, all that remained of the bird were the skull and a few bones. These remnants (IMAGE ABOVE) were seen by British author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, and are now kept under lock and key by the collections manager. Author Henry Nicholls was given a rare glimpse of the Oxford dodo recently and writes, "[Malgosia] Novak-Kemp lifts the lid and there in the shoe-box-like container, nestled on a bed of tissue paper, are the grizzled remains of a remarkable old bird, a specimen whose story can be traced back to the early 17th century."

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Impermanent press

With the advent of electronic books, there was concern among publishers that the traditional book would disappear. That of course hasn't happened, but an independent Argentinian publisher has produced books with words that disappear. To make sure first-time authors get read, Eterna Cadencia* initiated a new concept of printing books with specially-developed ink that, as it comes into contact with light and air, gradually fades away over the course of 2 months (VIDEO HERE). The first in the series was a 2010 anthology of new Latin American writers. Titled El Libro que no Puede Esperar [The Book that Can't Wait], the volume sold out in the first day. The disappearing ink does not allow readers and reviewers to procrastinate, thereby giving the authors a chance at continuing their careers. As the promo points out, "If people don't read their first books, they'll never make it to a second."

* This link won't work for me, but it's the official publisher website.

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Big-ass atlas

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is the book I dreamed about before I knew it existed. The Klencke atlas, as it is known, measures 5' 10" (1.78m) high by 3' 5" (1.05m) wide by 4" (11cm) thick. It had never been publicly displayed with its pages open until 2010, when the British Library featured it in an exhibition about cartography. The book, containing 42 maps, is so heavy that it requires 6 people to lift. The Library's head of antiquarian maps Tom Harper notes, "Even standing beside it is quite unnerving." Its reputation as the world's largest atlas – superseded only in 2012 – stood for 352 years. The Klencke Atlas was bound in Amsterdam in 1660 and presented by a consortium of Dutch merchants to King Charles II of England (1630-1685) to mark his restoration to the throne. It was kept in the king's cabinet of curiosities during his lifetime, donated to the British Library by a successor in 1828, and restored and rebound in the 1950s.

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Archimedes uncovered

Several years ago now, I invited a friend to my "museum" and as we were talking, a curious coincidence arose. I happened to ask her what her favorite word was, and she replied "palimpsest" - which just so happens to be my favorite word, too! So when long time reader Chase linked me to a BBC documentary about Archimedes' palimpsest, I knew it had to be added to the Cabinet. The story is incredible:

"The trail begins in the tenth century, when a scribe made a unique copy of the most important mathematics that Archimedes ever developed. For 200 years the document survived, but the mathematics in it was so complex that no one paid it any attention. So when one day a monk was looking for some new parchment - an expensive commodity at the time - to write a new prayer book, the answer seemed obvious. He used the Archimedes manuscript. He washed the Greek text off the pages, cut them in half, rebound them, and turned the Archimedes manuscript into an everyday prayer book. As he piously wrote out his prayers, he had no idea of the genius he was obliterating."

The text, painstakingly uncovered over the past 12 years, proves that Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 B.C.E. – c. 212 B.C.E.) had come to grips with the idea of infinity and was beginning to develop calculus more than 1,000 years before these concepts were understood. The point of the documentary (well worth watching if you have an hour, see it here) is that the world would be a much different place had Archimedes' ideas been understood and disseminated.

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Manuscript moggy*

The government worker had this papers set in front of him, ready for his task. Along came his friendly yet intrusive feline, leaving pawprints across his work. Sound familiar? Except that this happened on March 11, 1445 and the proof was discovered on the pages of the 568-year-old manuscript by a medievalist!

*A moggy is British informal for a cat.

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Recovered codex

Santiago de Compostela is the capital of Galicia, Spain, and the site of a Roman Catholic cathedral to which many have made a pilgrimage.* Inside that cathedral is a historic text, a 12th c. illuminated manuscript considered one of the country's cultural treasures. The Codex Calixtinus (2nd image), believed to be the 1st guide for those making the pilgrimage, includes practical advice for pilgrims, descriptions of the route and the local customs, and a set of polyphonic musical pieces. But the 225-page book on display in a glass case (1st image) is only a replica. The original - brought out for special occasions - was stored in a safe in the archive room, under the protection of an alarm, a fire-prevention system, and 5 security cameras. That is why, with no signs of a break-in, police knew it had to be an inside job when the cathedral's dean Jose Maria Diaz realized it had been missing for possibly a year. On Tuesday of last week, the theft was discovered and the authorities were contacted. On Wednesday, a man with a grievance who had worked as a caretaker and electrician for the cathedral for more than 25 years was arrested with 3 others, including his wife and son. And on Thursday, a raid of the former employee's property nearby found €1.2 million ($1.5 million/£950,000) in cash, keys to various church buildings, church documents, a Book of Hours, 8 copies of the Codex, and - at last - the priceless original.

*Including my friend Jody, by bike.

__________

Previous posts set in the Middle Ages:

Rat bastard

Ars moriendi

A woman, a cow, and a chatelaine

Middle age vampires!

St. Catherine of Siena

Medieval Novgorod

Treasure trove

Look!

Pictured above are "Linford" and "Christie," 6-week-old owlets on the bookshelves of zookeeper Jimmy Robinson. He is raising the incubator-born burrowing owls (listen to them here) at his home, after which they will reside (and perform) at Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire, U.K. Their time snuggling up in Robinson's teacups in the evenings and commuting with him to the zoo in a large lunch box during the day will soon be over: "They will be fully fledged within the next month, their feathers are coming through nicely and they are already getting used to flapping their wings."

In other news about books:

• A cache of banned books - thousands dating from the 1920s to the 1980s - has been uncovered in the subbasement of the National Archives of Australia building in Sydney. Literary historian Nicole Moore has found 793 boxes filled with books Australians were never allowed to read. Why they were banned by the authorities is discussed in her book The Censor's Library. Moore says the books were confiscated for a range of reasons "[M]ore than 90% of titles were banned for obscenity and the rest were banned for sedition or blasphemy." Books that customs officials and a panel of literary experts thought had no claim to literary, artistic, or scholarly merit were seized and remained stored and unread for decades.
• Locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany, for over 150 years was a trove of new fairytales, in the form of 500 stories, myths, and legends that were compiled in the mid-19th c. by local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. Contemporary of the Brothers Grimm, he published Aus der Oberpfalz – Sitten und Sagen, in 3 volumes (1857, 1858, and 1859), but it never gained the same prominence and faded into obscurity. Now recognized as a new canon of fables peopled with magic animals, brave young princes, and evil witches, "Schönwerth's legacy counts as the most significant collection in the German-speaking world in the 19th century," says Daniel Drascek of the University of Regensburg.

If you are not sated, please continue reading my posts about books, including Big book, little book, Marginiala, Bookmobile!, Book reviews in the news, Itty bitty books, Library jumpers, Overdue, Library leavings, Brian's books, "The whole of Egypt is crying," and Retiring holy books.

Dissection on display

My book has been published! Dissection on Display: Cadavers, Anatomists and Public Spectacle is a good read, if I don't say so myself. Here is the last paragraph of the Preface:

"The dissectors of earlier times and today have had the ability to mold bodies into anatomical marvels curated for future generations in medical museums, or to hold an audience spellbound by cutting cadavers apart. What these bodies symbolized for the anatomists and those who
saw their work—during their lifetimes or long afterward—had much to do with the age in which they lived. During the Renaissance, Europeans crowded into newly-built anatomy theaters to see for themselves how the hand of God manifested itself in the internal workings of the human body. The revolutionary anatomist Andreas Vesalius was teaching those who watched in such an engrossing way that knowledge of anatomy came firsthand, not at arm’s length through the published mistakes of predecessors. As the history of anatomy unfolded in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, throngs of commoners clamored after an execution to ensure that the sentence to be hanged and publicly dissected was carried out to its ignominious end. The lesson to the audience, as depicted in William Hogarth’s famous illustration, was that crime does not pay. The moral took the form of the undraped corpse picked apart in front of friends and neighbors—and perhaps skinned to make manifest the metaphorical book of the body. For Victorians watching the much-anticipated unwrapping and examination of an Egyptian mummy, Thomas Pettigrew was dissecting another culture for his well-heeled audience, not merely pulling apart an ancient and exotic human corpse. But early in the twentieth century, public dissection went underground. The cadaver came to signify privileged knowledge as witnessing and participating in dissection became the prerogative of doctors and doctors-to-be as part of their professional development. To revisit how the doors of the anatomy theater were opened to the public, closed to those without credentials, and then thrown open again, let us take a seat as the anatomist takes the stage..."

If this piques your interest - morbid, medical, historical, or otherwise - the book can be ordered (like my previous 5) directly from McFarland. It is also available from Amazon. Those of you who have followed along during my 3-year research and writing process* know my inspiration and the dedication it took to bring the project to fruition. I can now say I am pleased with, and proud of, the result!

*during which the blog byproducts included posts about career and artistic anatomists, an anatomy theater, the dissection of animals (an elephant and a squid), notorious bodysnatcher William Burke and what was done to his body, anatomical paintings by Rembrandt and modern artists, and dreams about dissection by Freud and a French scholar.

Book reviews in the news

A number of stories about book reviews have cropped up in the news recently:

• Early this month on Salon.com, Jeanette Demain surveyed the one-star reviews of classic books on Amazon. She found negative reviews of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Anne Frank's Diary, among countless others. She even found a review of the Bible, slamming it as "boring" and "badly written."
• In Examiner.com, Michelle Kerns digs up the 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time. These include Mark Twain's opinion of Jane Austen: "...her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
• On the History News Network site, Donal O'Sullivan catches us up on a scandal in which Amazon reviews by someone with the screen name "Historian" ruthlessly cut down the books about Russian history by every author whose work competed with that of Orlando Figes: "In an email issued by his attorney late last week, Figes conceded that the poison reviews had been written by his own wife."
• In LATimesblogs.com, Carolyn Kellogg responds to the stories about negative Amazon reviews, mentioning that some authors plump up their own books by asking friends to weigh in: "Some of the reviews on Amazon seem more like notes left in a friend's yearbook than anything else."
• In Techcrunch.com in March, Paul Carr encourages Amazon to change its policy, noting that authors reputations can be damaged by on-line reviews that are nothing more than complaints about the lack of an electronic edition or libelous personal put-downs: "Too often, especially with controversial authors, the most negative reviews come from people who haven’t even read the book in question."

I haven't looked at the reviews of my books on Amazon in a while. I think I'll hold off for now...

Big book, little book

A few years ago, when I was researching anthropodermic books for a course called "Technologies of the Text," I dreamt of a book that I asked to see at a used bookstore. It took two men to position it on a low table and turn the pages for me, because it was about 7' tall. I had no idea such a thing really existed! But soon afterward I happened upon a photograph of a man standing next to a book that was taller than he was. The image has not surfaced on the web, but photos of the similarly-sized Bhutan serve the purpose. And being a girl of extremes, I then went in search of the smallest book in the world and chose among the many candidates. The largest book I own is Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, which is sometimes heavier than I can lift and lives periodically on my dictionary stand (since I can consult the OED online). In fact, I'm resigned to reading books on stands any more - they try to fall out of my hands no matter their size, and the pages get harder and harder to turn without wrinkling...