Minds in the Margins: Annotators Bringing Books to Life
“We recently had a remarkable copy of Apianus’s Cosmographicus liber (1533), a treatise on geography and astronomy. Its value lies in the extensive annotations, especially in the one on leaf XXXIV, shown below. The note corrects the text by adding the name of Columbus as one of America’s discoverers alongside Vespucci, and reports a learned tradition that America was known to Augustan Rome by quoting two lines from the Aeneid.”
I find this so unsettling, yet condensed #books and things like CliffsNotes have been around for years. I think this enables people with ADHD and those with the attention span of fleas, yet, maybe it can be useful for some. At least this isn't all AI.
Question: Has the use of quotation marks for dialogue in fiction fallen out of favour, or has this always been a thing and haven't I picked up on it before?
I'm now reading the third book in a row (currently The Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, before that The Promise by Damon Galgut and No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy) and all three don't have dialogue marks.
Is this a stylistic choice on the author's part? Is this to make the pages seem calmer? Is this to save ink on pages? And is this really a new thing or haven't I just woken up to it before?
Book 21: Jamaica Inn, by Daphne du Maurier. A re-read of this atmospheric classic. Desolate landscapes, unsavoury characters, good story, well written!
Now #reading Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. Love the emphasis on how subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation are largely independent of one another.
An interesting piece about #writing, #reading, and a bit on collecting #firstEditions. There’s some irony in owning a first edition of #greatGatsby owned earlier by Dorothy Scarritt, Oppenheimer’s secretary at Los Alamos. And I had only a little twinge reading that one who just turned 40 might expect to read only 480 more books carefully if one manages to read one book a month.
53% of UK Parents Don’t Buy Books for Their Children
“The survey found that 28% of parents cited affordability as a barrier to purchasing books for their children. For many families, budgeting for essential needs takes precedence over buying books, which might be seen as a non-essential expense.”
“The fakes created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us another story, one of the rediscovery of the ancient Near East within the Orientalism movement. This fascination about the Orient and the past led certain individuals to create some fantastic stories and theories, such as those published by the writer Zecharia Stichin (1920–2010) who took the mythological battles of gods related in the authentic Babylonian Epic of Creation to be real astronomic phenomena.”
Michel, C. 2020. Cuneiform Fakes: A Long History from Antiquity to the Present Day. In: Michel, C. and Friedrich, M. ed. Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 25-60. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714333-002
“The fakes created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us another story, one of the rediscovery of the ancient Near East within the Orientalism movement. This fascination about the Orient and the past led certain individuals to create some fantastic stories and theories, such as those published by the writer Zecharia Stichin (1920–2010) who took the mythological battles of gods related in the authentic Babylonian Epic of Creation to be real astronomic phenomena.”
Michel, C. 2020. Cuneiform Fakes: A Long History from Antiquity to the Present Day. In: Michel, C. and Friedrich, M. ed. Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 25-60. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714333-002
I sometimes thought my father thought he could't die while he still had books on his pending pile (a stab at immortality I seem to be replicating)... so, it was strangely touching to see Tom Gauld has had similar thoughts.
From the manuscript to you: How Old Norse manuscripts are read and edited
"A case-study in how a page from an Old Norse manuscript (in this case the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda) is edited for publication in a modern-day book. Manuscript images from the Árni Magnússon Institute at the University of Iceland (handrit.is)."
#Video length: Thirty minutes and fifteen seconds.
I've just started reading Kathleen Hanna's autobiography, 'Rebel Girl'. I'm 5% in and it's enthralling, in a few different ways, as you can tell from the quotes.