Performance and Image Cycles. How the Middle Ages use the 'Popular Style' (2022) (original) (raw)
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Mirabili visioni": from movable books to movable text
JLIS.it, 2016
This contribution reconstructs the history of movable books, books created for a wide range of different purposes (teaching, mnemonics, play, divining, etc.) including mechanical or paratextual devices demanding or soliciting the interaction of the reader. The investigation runs from hand-written books to the most courageous paper-engineering experiments of the 20th century Avant-Garde, considering some specific editorial genres, including calendars, “libri di sorti”, anatomical books, navigation handbooks etc., and animated children's books. In particular, it demonstrates how the happy season for animated paper production and publishing of the 19th century would not have been possible without the scientific inheritance of optical studies and vision sciences, precursors a short time before the invention of the Lumiere brothers (1895). The study also examines some literary works using combinatorial mechanisms, experimenting the semiotic potential of expressive codes and very diff...
“Mirabili visioni”: from movable books to movable texts [English Text]
2016
This contribution reconstructs the history of movable books, books created for a wide range of different purposes (teaching, mnemonics, play, divining, etc.) including mechanical or paratextual devices demanding or soliciting the interaction of the reader. The investigation runs from hand-written books to the most courageous paper-engineering experiments of the 20th century Avant-Garde, considering some specific editorial genres, including calendars, “libri di sorti”, anatomical books, navigation handbooks etc., and animated children’s books. In particular, it demonstrates how the happy season for animated paper production and publishing of the 19th century would not have been possible without the scientific inheritance of optical studies and vision sciences, precursors a short time before the invention of the Lumière brothers (1895). The study also examines some literary works using combinatorial mechanisms, experimenting the semiotic potential of expressive codes and very different techniques and materials: the reference is to books of Futurism and Dadaism, the “artists’ book”, and other avant-garde texts from the second half of the 20th century.
The primacy of the physical artefact; some thoughts on the future of book design history
Proceedings, ICDHS 10th+1, University of Barcelona , 2018
As the printed book is challenged by the various digital mutations of texts, it seems that the time is ripe for mapping the state of book design history and for discussing some thoughts about what its future could possibly be. In the first part of the paper I will concentrate on the following questions: a) Where can the history of book design be found? And b) how has the design of books historically been studied? My intention is to focus on contributions to the design history of the printed book made by design and book historians, bibliographers as well as typographers and book designers. The study will encompass works published in the 20th and the first decades of the 21st centuries. Nevertheless, my presentation would make a limited contribution to the main theme of the conference without addressing the potential future of book design history in a world where books are stripped from their traditional material characteristics, design features and typographic standards. In the second part of the paper I will discuss some initial thoughts about how design history could response to the new forms of text which also imply a reconfiguration of the reading experience.
Erna Fiorentini, „Popularity Despite Anti-Popularization Thinking of Optical Drawing Devices in the Early 19th Century,” in: Jesús Muñoz Morcillo / Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha (eds.), Genealogy of Popular Science. From Ancient Ecphrasis to Virtual Reality (2020), 367-390, 2020
Also available as PDF at http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4835-5 Optical aids for drawing were a topic in many artistic manuals of the early 19th century. These publications, however, propagated an academic depreciation of the optical drawing aids and mostly advised against their use. This theoretical skepticism is a negative form of popularization, but it seems not to have affected the popularity of these instruments in the practice of drawing, as their sales figures show. There is, in fact, a glaring gap between the position of the manuals on the one hand and that of the market and drawing practitioners on the other. In this paper, I consider the paths of a rising popularity that was not backed by intentional efforts of popularization. In the artistic practice of drawing, rather, this popularity developed out of its own logic, which belied all theoretical anti-popularization
This text takes the form of a conversation between Danné Ojeda and Mathieu Lommen with a preliminary introduction by Danné referring to book history and the history of reading. The talk took place on 14 May 2014, in the Special Collections (Bijzondere Collecties), that house medieval manuscripts, books, prints, among other heritage materials in the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Through the introduction and the following conversation, we will examine books’ materiality and form as they define both the history of the book from its infancy and that of reading. The former will help us to understand how books have influenced not only thinking but also human ergonomic behavior towards these artifacts. The text also highlights the development of book forms by examining why certain transformations or deviations to the traditional book form took place and their impact on the history of book development and reading. This is in order to ascertain the consequences of the book’s physical transformation on the reader’s use and appreciation of it as a basic object of knowledge. In this regard, first the introductory text offers a succinct overview of the changes and transformations of the book’s physical forms. Second, the conversation focuses on the Special Collection of the University of Amsterdam in order to expose the criteria, guidelines, and parameters which classify a book as a “collectable object”, to be archived for the preservation of a record of the history of books and their forms.