The 10,000 Year Explosion

Lacy, Tim. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.

Left Behind by [[Nancy Isenberg]]

This is of interest because Isenberg's White Trash came out in January 2016 just a five months before Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was released. As a result she didn't get to reference it in her book.

https://ali.org/news/articles/three-generations-no-imbeciles/

A tour in the United States of America : containing an account of the present situation of that country ... by Stuart, John Ferdinand Smyth, 1745-1814

https://archive.org/details/tourinunitedstat00stua_0/page/n5/mode/2up

Child, Sir Josiah. A new discourse of trade, ... 1693, 1693. http://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_a-new-discourse-of-trade_child-sir-josiah_1693.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. 1st ed. New York, New York: Viking, 2016.

annotation link: urn:x-pdf:417c67707ad8fbb5300140892c8666cc<br /> alternate annotation link: JH facet

https://victorianweb.org/

Dames, Nicholas. The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2023. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691135199/the-chapter.

Suggested by Eric Sinclair in Dan Allosso Book Club

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Jean_Martin

Henri-Jean Martin (16 January 1924 – 13 January 2007)

Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton. Translated by David Gerard. 1st ed. Foundations of History Library. 1958. Reprint, London: N.L.B., 1976.

Interesting to contemplate the evolution of the idea of evolution through the Darwin family.

Charles would obviously have read his grandfather's book, but it also bears noting that he also had access to his grandfather's commonplace book (and likely his other papers).

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/FmVxQuqJEey33Uu0UTcMlg

• for: Washington Irving, book - the History of New York, book - A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus

• comment

  • Irving was a American writer who wrote fiction for the intent of stoking nationalism. He bent the truth in many ways.
  • Among his most famous and impactful historical lies that Irving fabricated in his book on Columbus was that prior to Columbus, the majority of educated people thought the earth was flat. In fact, most educated people believed the earth to be round during the time of Columbus.

• interesting fact: knickerbocker

  • The term knickerbocker originated in the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker that Irving chose for his book "A History of New York"

Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.

ISBN: 978-0-300-11251-1 (cloth) Library of Congress Control Number: 2010024663

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Rank, Mark Robert, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock. Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Reading as part of Dan Allosso's Book Club

Mostly finished last week, though I managed to miss the last book club meeting for family reasons, but finished out the last few pages tonight.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIfH-iSGa5M

2021-05-12

Dr. Hanan Harif started out as a Geniza scholar but is now a biographer of Shlomo Dov Goitein.

In the 1920s Goitein published his only play Pulcellina about a Jewish woman who was burned at the stake in France in 1171.

Had a friendship with Levi Billig (1897-1936)

You know very well the verse on Tabari that says: 'You wrote history with such zeal that you have become history yourself.' Although in your modesty you would deny it, we suggest that his couplet applies to yourself as well." —Norman Stillman to S.D. Goitein in letter dated 1977-07-20

Norman Stillman was a student of Goitein.

What has Hanan Harif written on Goitein? Any material on his Geniza research and his note cards? He addressed some note card material in the Q&A, but nothing direct or specific.

Goitein's Mediterranean Society project was from 1967-1988 with the last volume published three years after his death. The entirety of the project was undertaken at University of Pennsylvania.

The India Book, India Traders was published in 2007 (posthumously) as a collaboration with M.A. Friedman.

Goitein wrote My Life as a Scholar in 1970, which may have some methodological clues about his work and his card index.

He also left his diaries to the National Library of Israel as well and these may also have some clues.

His bibliography is somewhere around 800 publications according to Harif, including his magnum opus.

Harif shows a small card index at 1:15:20 of one of Goitein's collaborators (and later rival) Professor Eliasto (unsure of this name, can't find direct reference?). Harif indicates that the boxes are in the archives where he's at (https://www.nli.org.il/en/discover/archives/archives-list ? though I don't see a reasonable name/materials there, so perhaps it's at his home at Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

https://daily.jstor.org/the-invention-of-the-archive/

https://www.levenger.com/reading-1140/bookends-and-bookstands-23025/tree-of-knowledge-book-stand-17300.aspx

Interesting piece of material culture hearkening back to an older analog era, but compatible with new digital technology (note the cut out for a power cord with use of a tablet or other digital reading/display device.)

Lima, Manuel. The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, 2014. https://papress.com/products/the-book-of-trees-visualizing-branches-of-knowledge.

https://soranews24.com/2022/07/10/japanese-bookstore-dares-to-be-different-with-common-sense-fix-to-weird-industry-hassle/

Apparently many Japanese bookstores sort and arrange their books by Publisher rather than by author name!

While this may make some esthetic sense on behalf of publishers in a commercial space, it isn't necessarily easy for customers to find books this way.

Something interesting here about a "gossipy collaboration" of an address book that crystallized a "sexual memory...told by spaces".

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:33585/

See also Wiki created in combination with this course: https://digitalbookhistory.com/culturesofthebook/Main_Page

The course Marginalia in Books from Christopher Ohge is just crying out to have an annotated syllabus.

Wish I could follow along directly, but there's some excellent reference material hiding in the brief outline of the course.

Perhaps a list of interesting people here too for speaking at https://iannotate.org/ 2022 hiding in here? A session on the history of annotation and marginalia could be cool there.

https://archaeologyofreading.org/

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.

Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

1. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstra ß e, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98 – 140, at 103.

Does Walter Benjamin prefigure the idea of card indexes conversing with themselves in a communicative method similar to that of Vannevar Bush's Memex?

This definitely sounds like the sort of digital garden inter-communication afforded by the Anagora as suggested by @Flancian.

https://scolarcardiff.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/birthday-book/

Leaf numbering was seen in the Middle Ages, but printing in the Renaissance greatly increased the number of books with page numbers.

Downloadable τομοι ιστορικων βιβλίων.

catalog, until a successor card catalog comes along in 1848. Only the<br /> absence of a bound repertory allows the paper slip aggregate to answer all inquiries about a book ’ s whereabouts after 1781. Thus, a failed undertaking tacitly turns into a success story.

The Josephinian card index was created, in part on the ideas of Konrad Gessner's slip method, by accumulating slips which could be rearranged and then copied down permanently. While there was the chance that the original cards could be disordered, the fact that the approximately 300,000 cards in 205 small boxes were estimated to fill 50 to 60 folio volumes with time and expense to print it dissuaded the creation of a long desired compiled book of books. These problems along with the fact that new books being added later was sure to only compound problems of having a single reference. This failure to have a bound catalog of books unwittingly resulted in the success of the index card catalog.

This looks interesting with respect to the flows of the history of commonplace books.

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England by Megan Heffernan

https://infohist.fas.harvard.edu/news/information-cultures-series-john-hopkins-university-press

This looks like a fascinating series and who could go wrong with Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Earle Havens?

Also interesting to see what sorts of things they will find interesting at the cutting edge of all these disciplines.

I've been wanting to read Zinn, so perhaps this is a good place to follow along? A sort of pseudo book club perhaps?

It's interesting to see Dan struggle with an obvious listicle article in Forbes as an authoritative source. This example is a great indicator that Forbes online has created far too much of a content farm to be taken seriously anymore. From what I've seen of it over the past several years it's followed the business model of The Huffington Post before Huffington sold it and cashed out. My supposition is that Forbes is providing a platform for people to get reach and isn't actually paying those writers to create their content.

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States

• Covering a chapter a week
• companion edition, Voices of People's History of United States by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnov
• Erik Foner's article about Zinn
• Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism by E. P. Thompson *
• cultural theorist Raymond Williams' idea of resources of hope
  • Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism by Raymond Williams
• An Indigenous People's History of the United States

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlnYt9NOUAw

This is a great list of book types, genres, etc.

This looks like a fun read to track down.

Yeah, this is what I hope our readings of Melville do: make the act of reading, in all its materiality, move to the foreground.

Okay, so the piece shows its age a bit here, but the broad point about the "liquid text" that can be poured into different formats/containers is still quite relevant. I note, though, that the author slips between medium and material support here. An audiobook is a medium that can be materialized various ways (as we discussed last week, wax cylinder, LP, cassette, smartphone), whereas the Kindle is a piece of plastic, a "material support" in the book history lingo.

I'm curious why the organizers chose 1836 as the end date for this symposium. Any thoughts?