Bookselling and Publishing

Bookselling and publishing address the main points of the economy of the printed book.  This bibliography lists some books that cover these two topics.

Of Printing Presses and the Publishers who use them...

Knight, Death and the Devil by Durer

I had the opportunity Monday to spend a few hours sitting between the bookshelves of the library and in researching some of the topics I found myself getting lost just taking in all the knowledge around me! In creating my bibliography, the first thing that I learned is that five hundred years is too much time to have only a handful of authoritative sources for research purposes. Many of the books that I perused contained the same information, maybe with an emphasis on one part of the story over another, or explaining how it related to their perspective. I learned to love the fact that books are grouped by subject and finding one good source usually means you've found two or three others next to it on the shelves! This isn't necessarily the case with search engines that return a search based on your input.

Many of the texts that I looked through were surrounded by older sources written in Italian, a point that we have an amazing library at BYU. I served as a missionary in Rome for two years and my Italian definitely was helpful for more than a few of the books that would reference a quote by Aldo Manuzio the way he said it, or even the Latin which I could sort of make out. In all, I actually enjoyed looking through the books and in its own way I felt immersed in the research.

Life and Legacy of the King James Bible

What do hard core drugs, stolen diamonds, and the Bible have in common? Smuggling! That's just one of cool facts I learned when I visited the Life and Legacy of the King James Bible exhibit in the library last Saturday. Besides featuring genuine Bibles dating back to the pre-Renissance era, the exhibit gave a brief history of how the King James version of the Bible came into existence as well as provided an interactive section where vistors could compare different versions of the Bible. Since Catherine's post on the exhibit focused mainly on her experience with examining the fonts of the different Bibles, I wanted to focus my visit (and my post) more on the history of the King James Bible itself and the process through which it came to be. 

The coming about of the King James Bible was an evolutionary process, nearly 1600 years in the making. Its creation stemmed from the desires of  John Wycliffe to provide the Bible to the masses. He wanted the book to be published in more than just Latin. As it contained several "inerrant truths," Wycliffe wanted the common man to be able to acess, read, and understand the Bible (lib.byu.edu). Thus, a miraculous spin of events began which eventually led to the coming forth of the King James Bible.

Artisan for a Day

The Greek Rosetta Stone!

I belonged to the Greek group who was responsible for creating an authentic text in Greek for another group to struggle with. Since other methods of writing such as papyrus weren't readily available, our group met a fair Wednesday night and took a trip to the local hobby shop. We found good oven baking clay that would work for molding and went to work. Driving together in Brett's car we all returned to the Wilk. We found text that we wanted to use, from the Odyssey, outlined how it would all fit onto the miniature clay tablet and went to work carving. Using the ancient mechanical pencil, we each took a turn inscribing the greek symbols into the tablet. I've taken many math and physics classes so for me the characters were all familiar although I couldn't understand the phrase without help. I noticed that each group member preferred a different amount of depth to each line. I liked a dark thick engraving while others preferred a lighter more brush on method.

The Bible Exhibit

I went down to BYU's special collections exhibit "The Life and Legacy of the King James Bible" and noticed some things by looking at the different editions of the Bible.

The font the Bible is printed in has become more legible over time.  This occurred in correlation with the with the Bible being printed.  As more people had access to Bible's and gained the ability to read, the beauty of the Bible became less important than the words themselves.

The shapes of letters has changed over the last 500 years.  We no longer use elongated "s"s which are easy to confuse with "f"s.  Also, "u"s were shaped like "v"s, so the word fun would look like fvn.

The spelling of words became more standard as printed material became more popular.  "The Great Bible," which was handwritten, has the full title "The Byble in Englishe that is the Olde and New Testament, after the translacion appointed to bee read in the churches."  The Geneva Bible published in 1594 contains the message "translated according to the Ebrew and Greeke and conferred with the best translations in diuers languages."  By the time the King James Bible was first printed, most of the spellings of words was more like what we see today.  The full title of the King James Bible is the King James Bible (The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments.

Interesting fact: Robert Barker, who had a monopoly on the printing of the King James Bible, continued to print the Geneva Bible while printing the King James Bible because the Geneva Bible still brought in a lot of revenue.

The printing of the Bible was highly influential, as it led to the average person having greater access to the word of God.  Poets and prose writers was often alluded to the book which continues to be the most read book in the world.

Lost in Translation

In my previous post about the midterm assignment, I talked about the difficulties my group and I faced in trying to create our artifact. Now, I would like to discuss the difficulties we faced in trying to translate another group's artifact. Our assigned group was the Africa group, otherwise known as the Egypt group, otherwise known as the group with the language that seems impossibly difficult to interpret. In a word, trying to figure out the Egyptian was hard. In many words it was infuriatingly difficult.

Within our group, each of us was assigned different tasks. My assigned task was to figure out how to translate the message from English to Arabic once we had translated the Egyptian to English. Unfortunately our group couldn't really make it even that far. Whether or not there is a specialist in Egyptian at BYU or not we either chose not to meet with that person or could not meet with them for whatever reason. In any case, we found ourselves in the library pouring over books about the Egyptian language for hours trying to find some sort of meaning in the assigned artifact. Here's the difficulty we discovered: there's too many meanings to each symbol!

In Egyptian, there are a multitude of different symbols, all of which can stand for individual letters or even complete words. Additionally different arrangements of different symbols can completely change the individual meaning of each symbol. In the assortment of different books we used (there were about six) we found some of the symbols used by the Egypt group, but a large majority of their symbols were no where to be found.

Eventually, we created a sentence that may or may not have had the intended meaning of the Egypt group's original message. From the group, we found out that each symbol was suppose to be a word in itself. So we wrote down a line of blanks (one for each word in the sentence) and started filling in each blank with the different meanings of each symbol that we could identify. From there we had to do a little bit of guess work. Altogether, we came up with a sentence that basically stated that a man from a city identified by a river  traveled to a different city (a city of strength?) where he was killed. We think perhaps the sentence is suppose to be talking about Christ's crucifixion, but without actually talking to the source of the sentence, it's hard to say.

Because of this, I am really starting to relate to the frustrations that interpreters must have felt in trying to translate Egyptian hundreds of years ago. And really, with all the double meanings and ever changing use of each symbol it's a wonder that any one actually could translate Egyptian with out divine assistance. I know I certainly couldn't!

Midterm

For our midterm assignment, we created a Rosetta Artifact. Since only three of our civilizations had a written language to choose from, we decided to encode our message in the ancient written language of Ogham. Finding something in Brythonic proved to be the real difficulty: when we met at my apartment last Wednesday, we spent the first few hours google-ing up a storm trying to find something authentic we could write. We finally found a book with some authentic Brythonic words. I quickly wrote out the Ogham on a sheet of loose paper, which we then transferred to a sheet of news print (which I thankfully had just lying in my car) so we could draw it to scale before transferring it to stone. That's when the fun part began: chiseling our midterm into rock.

We didn't want to run out of stone before we finished what we had to say, so we wrote it out on news print and followed the spacing very closely.

 

See the three horizontal lines that are not very evenly spaced? I carved them :)
Being able to look at that stone and know that I made my mark on it is kind of cool.