Rare Books Collection Visit Opens Ideas of Publishing, Multimedia, Hypertext, and Materiality

Last Wednesday I went on a field trip (how old am I) to the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill McLennan Library.

I was visiting with a class on the “Materiality and Sociology of Text” so we mainly focused on the process of making printed books. We looked at the library’s collection of printing presses from the 18th and 19th century, including a black and gold American-made Columbia Press, with a giant eagle gracing its pinnacle.

They have an extensive collection of plays and theatre books which would fall under the category of lesser known works that our guide described as the “tabloids and b-films of the 18th century”. They also have lots of Canadiana, maps, old dolls, westerns, tons of cool stuff.

Our guide stressed the importance of people using the resources of the Rare Books library, since what value does writing have kept on the temperature-maintained fourth floor of a university library tower if people aren’t climbing the stairs to use the books for research and study?

He also explained that not everything that’s housed in the library can be found on Muse (McGill’s online catalogue of research materials: books, films, audio, journals, magazines, newspapers, etc.) but encouraged people to ask about particular interests because all their materials are recorded dewey-decimal style and can be found pretty easily.

Here are a few things that I’ve been thinking about since my visit:

-According to Mr. Tour Guide, text is printed on large sheets that are folded and cut to form a “signature” of which it takes many to bind a single book. Nowadays (an expression I can rightfully use in this context) the edges of the signatures are cut to make for a clean seam, but in the oldendays (hehe) they left them unopened and readers would cut the pages as they went through the book. mmmm

-The word “stereotyping” comes from the method of taking an impression of the “forme” (the blocks of letters arranged in order to be stamped) to save for future printings.

-Upper case and lower case letters are so named from having been placed in two alphabetized cases, one upper and one lower, to organize them and allow the text setter to find the right symbol more easily.

-All of the words we have that reference older technologies but have become so normal that we don’t often think about the quaintness of using them. Almost all operations used in word processing programs are a metaphorical link to past printing methods (cut and paste is the only example I can think of right now, but there are more…computer programmers in general seem to like using terms from our experience, like when your computer “goes to sleep” and that little light engages in r.e.m. Donna Harraway would probably have something to say about all this.) I’m reminded of “movies” (from moving pictures) which lead to the term “talkies” when sound was introduced but was maintained even after talking films became standard and the term was dropped. John recently told me that “car” comes from “carriage”. crazy.

Another McGill Library that’s worth checking out is the Religious Studies Reading Room in the Birks Building on University Ave. Take off your shoes before going in and have a seat at one of the long oak tables that stretch the length of this beautiful space. Turn on one of the green glass shaded desk lamps and do your reading in the aura of an 18th century estate collection. The layout reminds me of the library in Buffy. (Collect your own). Don’t forget to grab a Wether’s Original from the librarian’s jar on your way out.

Studying the development of text and textual production made me think of our friends at Lulu who work in print-on-demand books, cds, and dvds. The major problem of distribution, even with large printing firms, is having to anticipate the popularity of a book to determine the size of each run. Back when printing a second edition meant re-setting all the letter blocks, this estimate was profoundly important. Now that we use computers to perform most of the type-setting jobs, it just means a stranger (and stronger) connection between writing and marketing and promotion on the one hand, and a huge amount of waste on the other. Print-on-demand uses the internet’s unlimited storage space to log printing information and only makes physical copies of a book when they’re ordered by a customer. It’s like limited or deluxe editions only they’re available to everyone. Those who may never have thought they could publish can, and those who never had access to buying independent work do. (more info on Lulu’s recent visit and audio workshop during Puces Pop here)

Along the lines of text and the print revolution….Anyone intersted in the development of hypertext and the cultural implications of online media?? I know there’s a few of you… Peter Greenaway (director of the films, “The cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover” and “8 1/2 Women”) put out a massive 3 film project a few years ago, called “The Tulse Luper Suitcases“. The films themselves I haven’t seen, but the project is an encyclopaedic collection of the 3 films, plus a TV series and 92 DVDs, books, and cd-roms (remember cd-roms? I once saved 60,000 popsicle sticks at summer camp to cash in my dinosaur points for a jurassic park cd-rom game. My mom wouldn’t let me take a giant box of popsicle sticks back in the car)…uhh right, a collection of those types of media that seems both overwhelming in its detail and microscopic in its scope. It tells the story of Tulse Luper by documenting 92 suitcases found around the world (92 being the atomic number of Uranium). Potentially awesome.

If you’re into e-books and transferring already exising texts onto the web while creating a distinctly new form of communication (just as much as writing differs from speaking) through code, multimedia art, and structures of online search methods, Project Gutenburg (the “first producer of free electronic books”) works with Distributed Proofreaders who outsource their proofreading to the public and tout themselves as “preserving history one page at a time”. You can sign up to help get more literary works on the web by proofreading the material they send you. Apparently you can work as quickly or as slowly as you choose, and they offer reading one page a day as their standard example.

Lots to study in the way of media and communication. Heck, I made a degree out of it. So this’ll probably be a continuing look at some writing tools on the web and around town. Over the summer we hosted a workshop in free and open source writing and drawing tools during our Indyish Arts Weekend. I’d be curious to know if anyone’s been to a local hand-press book printing studio. I heard about a type-setting collective in Vancouver but can’t remember the details and I’m sure there’s something in this city that is equally as cool…? I know across the street from me there’s a hand-made paper store called Au Papier Japonais that offers courses in paper-making and book-binding. Anything else you guys have heard about?

Look! Indyish publishing! Some of these use Lulu.com and others are just plain cool. And locally made too!

Hey! Indyish writing and drawing games and generally wordy activites. Here.

Photos of the Rare Book Collection’s incredible shelves of uniquely crafted book-spines to come…