Quality vs. Quantity

I have always been labeled a perfectionist throughout my life, and it has proved to be a blessing and a curse. With enough time I could create a beautifully bounded book with straight edges and even margins. A normal and less OCD person though could probably bind 4 decent books in the time it would take me to make my one. I seriously was the last one in the classroom because I couldn't get over the fact that my page edges were uneven and ragged. (Though that did mean that I got to spend a little more time in the "Forbidden Room of Cushing Library). For this reason, I would probably not have made a good book maker in the past. We were told in class that to be a good book maker you had to be efficient. That meant quantity could not be sacrificed for quality.



If I were a book maker though, I would not want to create just a decent book. Whoever wrote the contents of the book that was being published obviously spent time creating or compiling its contents. So much time and effort does not deserve being slapped together as quickly as possible into a book. In my opinion, a work  of art deserves a beautiful frame to match it and enhance its beauty. A beautifully written book deserves a binding and cover that will physically display that beauty to the human eye. Not only that, but a cover and binding must be of the quality that protects the contents of a book. A poorly done binding will most likely not withstand the test of time.

Of course, one has to take into consideration of what it costs to put a binding on a book that takes time and is of high quality. In some cases, the cost of putting the time and resources into a well bounded book was not worth the gain. If a certain publication was popular, then the demand for that book would be greater. Book makers would have benefited more from a production that favored quantity over quality. Keeping up with demand means that the workers had to create more book and could not take the time to make each and every one of them perfect. There were no machines back then that could cut a perfectly straight line, so it was up to those book makers of the past to cut a line that was more or less straight.



At the end of the day, I had come to really respect those who had made the paper and bound all those books. It's another part of life that I never appreciated until I took the time to really understand how it all works and how much work it really is.

You can read it, can't you?

Today we got to venture into the staff-only third floor of Cushing Library.  Luckily, none of us toppled over the low railing to our deaths.  I felt like Harry Potter sneaking into the restricted section. We walked into the book history laboratory to find a gentleman of the Dumbledore-type pouring over his work at a desk and we were surrounded by walls covered in various portraits and paintings. One of my favorite parts was seeing some of the University archives, including the jacket of Reveille I. 

I don't know about the rest of you, but today's hands-on activity proved rather challenging. I usually blame my lack of skill with crafts on the awkwardness associated with being left-handed, so maybe it was just me. (We truly live in a right-handed world!) We were doing simple tasks of folding papers, cutting the edges, and tying string. I may not be cut out for a career in paper-making because I could barely handle that! My edges were in tatters from my rough jabs with the envelope opener, the two holes I made in the whole packet didn't even include some of the folded pages, and then I couldn't even tie it all together because I managed to snip the string too short. For this reason, the library motto - You can read it, can't you? - resonated with me. This gets down to the fundamental purpose of a book. As discussed in last week's posts, the binding can certainly tell you a lot about a book, but the main point is what rests within the pages. 

Wrapping it Up

Christmas is my favorite holiday, always has been. There’s nothing better as a child than waking up and running over to the Christmas tree to see at the beautifully wrapped presents that Santa left the night before. While our class isn’t quite like Christmas, I know I experienced the same kind of feeling our last class when we looked at all the different packages books can come in.

The old saying goes “never judge a book by its cover,” but the truth is we do.  Just by looking at a book’s cover (without reading anything) our class was able to identify one book as a fantasy fiction novel and another as an important historical reference book. It turns out the medium of the book is just as important as its contents.  

How the book is constructed affects how we read it. For example, with a scroll, you can’t simply flip to a certain page. Instead, the entire thing must be unrolled in order to read from beginning to end. Likewise, a book cannot present the words, pictures, etc. as an entire entity all at once. Because of the pages, it is segmented and broken down.

How a book is constructed also affects how we perceive it. And just like the wrapping of a Christmas present, you never really know what you have until you open it. We looked at the ornately wrapped present-- the old French law book. This book had a cover made from wood and leather, its pages decorated with nice images and hand written words. There was a very elaborate dedication in the front, painting this image of grand importance and opulence. But then we opened the present. After a few pages, we discovered the book had actually been cut out to be used as a secret storage compartment. It was the gag gift, wrapped beautifully only to reveal the cheap (and probably inappropriate) gift that your brother bought for you.

Not all the “wrappings” on the books were deceiving though. There was the classic sentimental gift, the vellum-bound book, that wasn’t too expensive, but probably took a long time to make. Likewise, there was the well-intended gift, the scroll about the ancient Greeks, where the idea of it was nice, but in actual practice it isn’t too practical. Finally, there was also the what-on-Earth-is-this gift, the scroll about a boxing match, where the wrapping is just as strange or unique as the gift itself.

While the wrapping of a Christmas doesn’t affect the gift itself too much, how we “wrap” or bind our books greatly influences them in the way of function and aesthetic appeal. There are so many ways to construct a book, some of them being equally unique and important as the stories within them. When it comes to books, you can’t just rip the wrapping paper off as fast as your little kid hands can move. Instead, we must take time to appreciate just how important it is as the gift itself.

Happy 3/4ths Christmas everyone!

-Amy

The Material that Binds or Judging a book by it's cover

There is an old saying that everyone knows, "You can't judge a book by it's cover." While that may be true for humans, for books it's not entirely true. You can tell many things from the cover and binding of a book, like what the book is going to be about, the expected quality of the book (not necessarily the story but the quality of pages and writing), and who might have bought the book.

Even in Ancient times you could judge some things. Let's look at a scroll for example. If it were held together by two pieces of wood, you could guess that it was important or had some value. If it wasn't held together by anything, it might be something completely unimportant (to them), like a note or list. However, for some forms of writing material, it would be hard to determine what they were for. One example would be stone or clay tablets. Since they don't have any form of binding or cover, it's hard to determine. However, the size of the table might help determine what it was used for.

When books started to be used, then this became much easier. The quality of the binding used on a book allows for people to make early judgements about a book. If the book has tons of detail with high quality material used to bind it, you could assume these things. It either belongs/belonged to a very rich person and might be very old. It would probably be a serious book, possibly a scientific book or a great work of literature. If the binding is like the multiple sci-fi and fantasy books that are on shelves today, then you would expect it to be of lesser quality then the former. However, this is where the problem comes in.

Like we saw last Monday, one book that appeared to be of very high quality turned out to have half of the pages missing, torn out for a safe hiding spot. Also, some modern books, despite being in the smaller portable format, may still contain high quality work. One example I can think of would be the "Game of Thrones" series, which many people consider to be one the greatest pieces of fantasy of all time. So while it's true you can't judge a book by it's cover, you can still make good judgements from it's binding.

More Than Words

When I was little I knew that scrolls were used in ancient times. To me, scrolls were used because they looked cool and sophisticated, and they held the notes of Aristotle and Galileo. I never actually realized that they were only used because they were all that were available, or at least because they were the most readily available.

Of course, I had learned better before this class, but it was still interesting to think and talk about the disadvantages of scrolls that I never thought about as a kid. However, in this class, I've already gotten used to looking at the advantages and disadvantages of all types of record-keeping. It wasn't until the scrolls that I again looked at the materials we handled with a kid-like wonder.

The modern scroll we looked at, the artist's "book" (still not sure if we call it a book or not), was legitimately beautiful. For some reason I loved how tightly it was rolled and the color of the paper. Obviously as an artist the writer knows quite a bit about aesthetics. It made me wonder if the ancient scrolls once looked like that. They didn't have anything like the machines we have today for producing things like that, and I can't remember if that book was hand-made or not, but I like to think that some of their literature looked very similar. I think it's cool to imagine kings' decrees written in calligraphy on beautiful, long scrolls that wound up tightly and hopefully had two spool-things for convenience. Even the boxing match illustration, though much older, was pretty. Maybe, in the future, if paper books aren't even used except in private collections, they'll look at our books in the same way.

More than Parchment

The history of literature and the idea that a story is so much more than just some paper and binding has always fascinated me. What I enjoy most about our class is how we go so much deeper than just the outer surface. What is a book? What makes a novel a novel? Is this piece of clay considered a book? It is questions like these that make an individual rethink all he has ever known about literature and perhaps even change the way they look at books today. Everything we touch has a story so much more than just what is engraved or written. Ironically, when you look at a 16th century piece of literature, often times one truly has no intention of gathering information the way the book was intended. Rather, one touches, feels, smells the piece; delving into a whole new world of mystery and creativity. What was the man doing while writing this? How long did it take to carve this? Who was it for? It is a mindset such as this that keeps me optimistic and excited for future explorations into the fascinating world of ancient literature.

My Tears Are Vatman Tears

Probably the best part about completely forgetting about the assignment for this course was that it has provided me with an opportunity to not only talk about the process of the paper making, but also the result of our work. You've already heard that the work required to make the paper like we did was significantly harder than it seemed. While the steps seemed simple enough, there numerous instances where it could have, and did in my case, gone wrong. It was a wonder any of my sheets turned out halfway decent. I don't know what it was, but how anyone is able to create paper without "vatman's tears" is completely beyond my realm of understanding. Also, I became a master of ripping the paper as I tried to stick it to the lambskin -- I'm not much cut out for labor-heavy papercraft, clearly.
Regardless of my anxiety of the turnout though, the pages were, in my opinion, impressive. Mine were satisfactory -- they actually looked like paper, which is more than I could have hoped for a week ago. Mine were all very lopsided, and one could only arguably be considered half a page, but still, I had created paper, and it had not been impossible. Rather, it had been a lot of fun.

Pictured: What my paper doesn't look like.

I can't imagine this is a particularly economical process. A person has to be paid to work all day, and the resulting product may or may not form a complete book's worth of paper, but it sure is an exciting learning opportunity. Undergoing the process made me really appreciate the meaning of the rarity of books when this was the only process available to make paper. So, even though I learned it's not something I'll ever master, I'm glad we got to make paper.

Nana nana nana nana nana nana nana nana VATMAN!

     I think I can speak for everyone when I say that I had a blast making paper and wished we could do it all semester. I can also speak for everyone when I say that it was much more difficult than we all expected. It seemed like a simple process just watching it. One just dips the mould and deckle into the vat of water and cotton pulp, removes the deckle, and then just takes the paper off. Simple right? Wrong. There were numerous possibilities of error. One could get too much or little cotton pulp on the mould, drip water onto the mould while removing the deckle, or tear your sheet in half while removing the paper from the mould. I can see how it could take many years of practice (and some luck) to master the process. The whole paper making process was a very fun experience. It was fun to do something hands on in a class instead of listening to a professor lecture.

     The texture of the cotton pulp was very different. It was nothing like I have ever experienced. It cling to anything and everything including my arm hair. I kept picking off pieces of cotton the remainder of the day. It's interesting how all the strands of cotton just come together to form a piece of paper. I am excited to see the results after the paper dries. It amazes me that this paper making process has been used for so long and is still being used today.

Problems of a Vat Man (Erin Zebrowski)

          The paper making workshop that we did on Monday was awesome!  It was so cool that we were able to make out own paper out of nothing more than a sieve, a wooden frame, and a lot of stuff.  I was very interested in how complicated the whole process actually is.  Originally I thought that making paper would be a breeze, all you need to do is dip the mold in the vat of stuff, shake it a bit, then remove the paper that had formed.  (Seriously, children were doing it!)  

 

          Unfortunately, actually making a perfect piece of paper is a lot harder than that because of the infinite things that could go wrong.  Personally, I had a few sheets of paper that were less than perfect because when I removed the deckle from the mold, some drops fell on the still wet paper.  Even before I tried to remove the deckle, my paper was sometimes uneven and patchy in places, forcing me to scrap the unmade paper and try again.  The few times when I was able to remove the deckle without causing drops to fall on the paper,  something would go wrong when I went to remove the paper from the mold and the outside of the paper would get pushed in when I tried to separate them, causing the edges to be ragged and lumpy.  Bottom line is, I was never able to create the perfect paper.  Although the experience was amazing, I can now understand why people apprenticed to be a vat man for four years before they actually go to work: getting the perfect piece of paper every time is hard!  

           The stuff that clung to my arms was also a weird experience, I can't even imagine how strange it must be to go to work every day knowing that your arms were going to get covered with little bits of cotton pulp.  One thing confused me though.  I noticed that the stuff seemed to stick on everything, except when it was in water.  Once I stuck my arms in the water, the stuff practically floated off without any encouragement from me.  It even dissipated from my woven bandana bracelet, which surprised me because the bracelet was made of cotton or some other woven fabric.  I still can't figure out why the stuff was so ready to stick to anything it touched, but as soon as it was submerged in water it was so ready to release us from its cottony grip.  Anyone have any suggestions?  Although the experience was amazing, I can now understand why people apprenticed to be a vat man for four years before they actually go to work: getting the perfect piece of paper every time is hard!

The Value of a Book

By: Alex Payne

It's interesting how an abundance of anything can make a population take it for granted. In this society, we take clean water, abundant food, and so many other things for granted because they have always been readily available to us throughout our lives. Books can be something that falls into this category as well. We've seen hundreds of books throughout our lives, and we each have owned quite a few ourselves. Books don't have much value to us (except to college kids who have to pay ridiculous prices for textbooks). A paperback book can cost a few dollars at Half Price ooks, and it's not hard at all to find the book you are looking for if you look online or go to a library. It's so amazing to think that there was a time that owning a collection of books made you a person of high class and wealth.

How we view books today

I had known before that making books hundreds of years ago was a long and expensive process, but it just hit me in class that each individual book was like its own individual being with its own fingerprint. Before the printing press, each book was handwritten by scribes who painstakingly wrote out each individual book. If they messed up, they gave that specific book a characteristic that no other book like it would have. The long process of making the book and all the money that went into making it made it a thing of wealth to own. This is evident when you see that some books are even gilded (as mentioned by Madeline). No one would put gold on anything that was not of extreme worth. I was so interested by the 24 carat gold that graced some of  the pages of the books we saw in class. Some of it had lost its luster and was fading away, but the gold pieces that still shone were absolutely beautiful. I doubt there is any book made nowadays (besides maybe a very important religious book) that would have so much worth in it.

Gold gilded page

Books do not have the same value they used to have in the past. With the increase in online sources, books are becoming outdated. With the invention of the Kindle and Nook, people are looking more to reading material online instead of having paper in their hands. For some reason I've always preferred the old fashioned way of reading, but seeing the video of how each individual piece of paper in a book was made and the hard work that so many people put into books production has has made me want to stick to the old fashioned way even more. I know that books published now will never have the same value that books in the past had, but I just hope that we will continue to have books being published in the future.

Kindle and Nook

Making Paper (Emily Drastata)

It was interesting to look at papyrus and scrolls written on animal skin before looking at later developed techniques for making paper. We found papyrus to be more brittle, and both papyrus and vellum are more easily rolled up instead of folded. As far as making paper goes, I was surprised to learn that it was often produced from rags that were broken down and that child labor was commonly used to fulfill this task. Of particular interest to me were some new words I learned. For example, the mould and deckle are used in the papermaking process. The mould is a wire screen used to transfer and shape some of the water and fiber mixture from the vat. The deckle is the removable frame that surrounds the mould.  

Papermaking is usually a three-man process. It includes a vatman, a coucher, and a felt man. The toughest job belongs to the vatman who may work for years to develop his skill for dipping the mould into the vat. Next the paper is passed to the coucher who removes it from the mould and sandwiches it between felt.  After more water is removed and it is further compacted, the felt man removes the paper from the felt and replaces it with dry felt. This process was like a forerunner for the assembly line!

You can really tell a lot by closely looking at the paper.  If the paper has a watermark, you may be able to easily determine when and where it was made. Putting paper up to the light allows us to see some other features. We may see lines caused by the wires on the mould, or vatman’s tears, which are water drops from the vatman’s arms, or even more distinct blemishes like thumbprints. Hopefully the paper we make next week will not expose our inexperience so easily! 

Paper-making and Parchment (Madeline Schulz)

9-4-12

Yesterday I was actually quite fascinated by the parchment that had the illuminated text - which refers to the pictures or fancy letters that the scribes used to write.  My favorite was actually the gold leaf example of this, and I was wondering how the scribes managed to do this; I've handled a type of gold leaf before, and from the best of my knowledge, it is a very, very thin material; it is easily torn, and even holding it between your fingers can tear it if it sticks to the sweat or oil on your hands.

Therefore I decided to look up the completion of this process, which is called "gilding." I assume that putting gold on any surface is labelled similarly, considering it's the same process.  Anyway, the act of gilding actually involves a surprising number of materials, which includes but is not limited to, gold leaf, scissors, tweezers, Glassine, sewing pins, a drinking straw, gum ammoniac, propyl alcohol, a burnisher, Q-tips, egg cups, gesso, scraps of fine silk... And the list goes on.



The effects, however, are stunning.  So though the process takes a tremendous amount of time (I'm sure it took scribes longer, seeing as how our modern appliances and tools weren't available at the time) the results are beautiful.  Something that also interested me yesterday was how paper was made.  I was unaware that some paper actually used cotton fibers as its basis.  However, the paper-making industry as a whole isn't necessarily new to me, because in sixth grade my class actually attempted to make some paper and ink during our Medieval studies.  We made use of sifters, as is the general practice, but instead of using some plant product, as the paper makers do, we used... construction paper. I thought that we were cheating, making paper out of paper, but nevertheless I went with it.  Our class ripped up the papers into tiny bits and put them into a huge bucket of water.  Then, we took our sifters and gathered up the paper particles, moved the sifter around to evenly spread the paper, and then let it dry.



The effect was cute, and our paper looked similar to that shown above, mostly because we were too lazy to rip the paper up into small enough pieces to make smooth paper.  The methods we saw yesterday, including the chopping, hacking, and overall destructive tendencies of that machine certainly looked to be more effective. Hopefully when we make paper as a class we'll be close to achieving the smooth paper like the movie displayed!

the magic of parchment

 

As I talk to classes about the history of books and writing, I frequently introduce parchment and vellum -- that is, animal skins which have been treated to produce smooth, permanent surfaces for writing or printing.  When the topic comes up, I've been interested to hear that many students were first introduced to the idea of parchment through literature.  Even more interesting is the series which many of them associate with this historical and still-produced writing surface: J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books.

One of only 500 copies of the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, held in Cushing Library.

As much as I've enjoyed reading the series with my children, I have a bit of a quarrel with J. K. Rowling's depiction of libraries and librarians.  Have you ever noticed how useless the students' time in the library is?  Even when Hermione Granger is spending all her free time scouring the books, Harry never seems able to find answers to his questions.  Things are barely more productive when he gains permission to enter the Forbidden Section (and really, when you think about it, Cushing Library is nothing but the Forbidden Section of Texas A&M's Libraries). Maybe Madame Pince isn't much of a librarian.

In the magical world of Harry Potter, parchment appears as a standard replacement for paper.  While Harry and his friends use quills to take notes and submit class assignments on parchment, the material seems much more paper-like than like the examples we examined in class yesterday.    One of the issues that appears with parchment as it is depicted in Rowling's books is that it can be easily torn.  The first appearance of the substance is in the mysterious letter which Harry receives (which will eventually include his invitation to Hogwarts).  It is described as "thick and heavy, made of yellowish parchment."

Later, Harry's Uncle Vernon is able to tear multiple letters up at once, and throughout the series, students tear strips off of their homework for other uses.  I know that I risk being pedantic, but it's clear that this material doesn't bear much resemblance to the surface we felt in class.  One of the interesting features of parchment is that while it can be cut, even the most delicate vellums (including examples which have been split, making the sheets very thin and almost translucent) resist being torn.  Even though I didn't encourage you to try with the twelfth and fifteenth-century manuscript leaves we were looking at yesterday, I'm confident in saying that it can't easily be done.

 

So while I'm pleased that so many students recall their introduction to parchment from reading Harry's use of it, I wish that more would come into Cushing to examine some real, non-magical examples.  I think the quality of the surface, the telltale pores which mark the hair side, and the many uses to which it has been put are wonderful enough on their own.