LUMINOUS THINGS ARE ALL AROUND

I linked to this in a post last week, but it’s so fantastic that I’d thought I should mention it specifically: The William Blake Archive. It’s a comprehensive digital archive where you can view and read multiple copies of Blake’s illuminated/printed books. Things like this are one reason why the Internet and other digital technology is good for books, and good for those of us who are interested in them.

Along with the works themselves there are also some informative essays about Blake’s life and about the process that he used to make the books. Here’s a brief passage (related to some other threads that have been running through this blog) from the essay about his process, “Illuminated Printing,” by Joseph Viscomi:

Blake realized very early that his new medium's autographic nature made the poem the only prerequisite for executing plates, that rewriting texts was also an act of visual invention, and thus that the medium could be used for production rather than reproduction. With no designs to transfer or reproduce, the placement and extent of text, letter size, line spacing, as well as placement and extent of illustration, were invented only during execution. This method of designing meant that Blake did not know what lines or stanza would go on what plate, or how many plates a poem/book would need. Working without models allowed each illuminated print and book to evolve through its production in ways impossible in conventional book-making. Blake could begin working on a book before it was completely written.

And of course you can also download Blake’s texts from Project Gutenberg.

Several worlds to get lost in.

MANUSCRIPT BOOK WEEK (4): SPACE TRAVEL

[First a quick note: This will be the last official post of “Manuscript Book Week,” but there will undoubtedly be more posts about manuscript books as research continues.]



One interesting visual aspect of many of these manuscript books is the amount of spatial depth articulated on and in the pages, particularly on the pages that are heavily decorated/illuminated. The diagram below shows the relative depth of the different components of the spread pictured above, with the lightest shapes (white) showing the areas depicting the most depth, moving to black, where whatever is on the page seems to sit directly on or above the page surface.



European manuscript books often mix “realistic” scenes that recede behind the picture plane, with abstract or trompe l'oeil decoration that stays on or above the picture plane. (For a quick comparison, scroll down to the post below and compare to the Qu’ran pages, with their more “modernist” use of geometric decoration.)The different colors of text and the actual surface of the page hover between those two poles, sometimes moving back and forth, depending on where the viewer/reader is looking. And of course the book itself is an object-in-space, on a table or in the reader’s hands, and participates actively in real space as well (as opposed to a painting, where the two-dimensionality seems fixed, because the painting is anchored to a wall).

It would be interesting to use the kind of spatial manipulations demonstrated in manuscript books with photographic reproduction available now. If depicted three-dimensionality is actively used within a book, in concert with the (seemingly) two-dimensional pages moving in literal 3 & 4D space/time, plus the n-dimensional space of a properly tuned text, that could create a hyper-object that would tear a hole in the space/time continuum, as well as tear your face off and blow your mind up.

MANUSCRIPT BOOK WEEK (3): READING THE OTHER WAY

“A 9th-century Qur’an, Near East, in horizontal format, written on parchment in kufic script, with red dots for vowels and green dots indicating the glottal stop. The large gold roundel marks the end of a tenth verse.” Or. 1397, ff. 18v-19. [1]

Speaking of the conventionality of written/printed language: one experience that can make the nature and limits of that conventionality immediately clear and palpable is the experience of a second language, an-other-language, especially if that language is rendered in a completely different alphabet.

While working on the Al-Mutanabbi broadside project I got to learn a small amount of Arabic and the basics of how the written language works. It’s interesting how the “idea” can be the same (a phonetic language) but the implementation can be completely different. Completely different but still able to be comprehended and used. An-other technology.

“An 11th- or 12th- century Qur’an, from Iraq or Persia, written on paper in the Qarmatian style of eastern kufic script. The older system of red dots indicating vowels is combined with black vowel signs still in use today.” Or. 6573, ff. 210v-211. [2]

The Arabic alphabet contains 29 letters, and each of those letters changes shape depending on where it falls in the word. Each character has a form for when it stands alone, when it begins a word, when it is in the middle of a word, and when it is at the end of a word. Like the “long s” that appears in old English, or the slight alterations that occur in English cursive letters to link them properly to the letter following them.


“Detail from the colophon page of volume three of Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an, 1305-6, with the signature of the master illuminator, Abu Bakr Sandal, inscribed in the ornamental semi-circles (right).” Add. 22408, f. 154v. [3]

The Arabic alphabet reads right-to-left. Apparently, this is a huge “problem” for design programs (like Adobe InDesign) but not so much for word processing programs, like Microsoft Word. Or maybe not a problem for the software but for the user who has to buy a second version of InDesign in order to properly set Arabic. But one can hack one’s way through the Arabic in the left-to-right version of InDesign using the “Glyphs” palette, much like setting metal type out of a case. An-other language.


“A 17th-century Qur’an from Persia written in nashki script, with an interlinear Persian translation in red nasta’liq script.” Or. 13371, ff. 313v-314. [4]

[…] [T]he Arabic language […] belongs to the Semitic family of scripts which includes among other Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac. A common feature of all these languages is the fact that their alphabets are composed almost entirely of consonants, vowel signs being added only later to facilitate reading. […] [5]


A detail of the previous image.

It’s interesting to compare these manuscript Qur’ans to the European manuscript books, to see how they are similar and how they are different. How the rules of each culture (like the fact that illustration was forbidden in the Qur’an) helped to determine how the conventions of the written language developed. Paying attention to the conventions of various other languages can help us deconstruct our own, to pay attention to it, to dwell in it more fully, and to utilize it more incisively.

1. Colin F. Baker, Qur’an Manuscripts: Calligraphy, Illumination, Design, (London: The British Libray, 2007), 20-1. The numbers after each caption designate which manuscript and pages the images are from. All of the manuscripts are currently held at the British Library.

2. Ibid., 24-5.

3. Ibid., 46.

4. Ibid., 78-9.

5. Ibid., 13.

MANUSCRIPT BOOK WEEK (2): SCRIBAL PRACTICE

The first draft of this post started as a dull procession of facts about manuscript books—a natural danger, perhaps, of research based work. But the point of this is to generate new ideas. Here’s a not new idea that seems appropriate:

“Production not reproduction.” [Phillip Zimmerman]

How is scribal production (essentially the slow, embodied, re-production of a text) an act of production? Does the copying out of a text allow a reader to participate in it differently? Beyond copying and staying within the text, how does rendering it visually (incorporating images and “decorated” letters, designing/typesetting) and threading it through the structure of a book (a reproducible time-structure) change the way in which we read? Is the term “read” even appropriate anymore?

The hand-mechanical activity of the scribe is devotional, meditative. But the content matters less (to me) than the action itself. It’s about understanding a text physically, bodily, experientially. Not moving through a building as a temporary occupant, but actively participating in its construction, living and working in it, becoming a shaper of space and time, of knowledge and experience.

If possible (and it’s usually just a matter of time) I like to completely retype a text that I am working with (if I didn’t write it in the first place). Is this a waste of time? An obsessive habit? An invitation to “scribal error?” In my experience, the re-production of a text letter by letter allows me to understand it more thoroughly, more minutely, than “simply” reading. It’s like studying a text on an atomic level, like taking apart and rebuilding a machine in order to understand how it works. Hand typesetting provides the same kind of experience. It is a kind of reading that does not posit the text as before the reading, but a kind of reading that actively creates the text here and now, as an immanent, ongoing construction. Not eternal and unchanging, but experienced always in the present through constant change and repetition.

MANUSCRIPT BOOK WEEK (1)

Mainly because I want to share all of the beautiful things I’ve been seeing. Last week I began doing some research on manuscript books. “Manuscript books” are books made entirely by hand. They are generally unique, usually (but not always) dating from the time before movable type, and are sometimes called “illuminated manuscripts.” The research up to this point has been general at best, just a few simple, well-illustrated books about medieval European books and early Qu’rans, just to provide a broad story and sample of what exists. But already they are pointing to new directions.

Modern printed books attempt to convey some of the rhythms and emphasis of speech by a whole series of typographical conventions, including indented paragraphs, spaces between sentences, capital letters, italics, and a large repertoire of punctuation marks […]. Medieval punctuation was haphazard at best. Mostly, scribes made use of what we now call decoration. A big initial marks a major opening or division of the text. A slightly smaller initial may indicate a chapter or a paragraph of somewhat lesser significance. A small illuminated initial marks a break in the text less weighty than a larger initial but more important than a simple capital letter.

The hierarchy depended not on any standard size as such but on the scale of any initial in relation to another in the same manuscript. […] Once the relative hierarchy is put in context […] we have a whole new tool for interpreting medieval texts. In that sense, decoration is a device for reading a text as sophisticated as punctuation is today. […] [1]

[emphasis added]

I would add to that series of “typographical conventions” the spacing between individual words and standardized spelling. The conventional nature of written and printed language is important for two reasons: 1) These conventions developed over time in many different circumstances, conditioned by different languages, technologies, cultures, economies, etc. and that points to the fact that our “laws” of grammar, usage, definitions, and spellings are not natural truths that accurately represent a pure language. 2) These conventions that we have internalized play a major role in that way that we read, in the way that we experience written and printed language. Reading as a practice has changed over time, and it continues to change, especially now, as we stand in the chaos of another transformation of the technology of writing. And thus it is possible to imagine and construct new ways of reading, new legibilities of text, by interrogating the conventional nature of written and printed language.

This is certainly not a new idea, but it’s one that seems particularly critical now, again. The space of our new technologies of reading and writing has opened up new avenues of contestation. The only thing at stake is meaning. These old books were made during a period of massive flux and expansion, and looking at them closely might yield new ways for us to participate in our own astonishing flux.

So I am imagining these posts (theoretically confined to this week but probably continuing anyway) as looking closely at different examples from manuscript books and breaking them down visually/functionally, hopefully generating some ideas in the process. As always, we’ll see what happens, where we end up.


1. Christopher de Hamel, The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illumination: History and Techniques, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 21-4. The image at the start of this post was taken from that same book (p. 46) and is from a “tenth-century English manuscript of the works of St. Aldhelm.”