Thanks to Claire (Mokrauer-Madden) another CCW graduate school meeting about documentation took place today. Claire circulated a few questions which were useful as a starting point for discussion:
Ligatus news
I spoke to the students from the MA Graphics Design and Communication course as I am looking for student volunteers to test any Artivity tools (when they are ready) and collect some data.
I think the obstacle with students is switching away from Adobe. Adobe dominates the graphics design world and students feel that anything else will exclude them from the post-degree market.
Had a good discussion with Sebastian and Moritz from Semiodesk today and we progressed with the plans for the project:
Dirk de Bray, in his manuscript description of the binding of books of 1658, A Short Instruction in the Binding of Books followed by a note on the gilding of edges by Ambrosius Vermerck, describes in detail how to make a typical ‘Dutch vellum binding’ or a parchment-covered laced-case binding with boards, in which the boards were added to the cover after the latter had been attached to the bookblock by lacing the sewing-support and endband slips through its joints.
On the 16th of February 2015 Ligatus held a CCW workshop at Chelsea College of Arts to discuss documenting practice in art and design. This was in preparation for the "Research Data Spring" JISC sandpit. Participants included:
I joined several researchers today at a special session of the 10th International Digital Curation Conference about the JISC data spring call. Many interesting ideas and presentations including a proposed project by Ximena Alarcon on sound and audio spaces.
I have just learned that Jan Szirmai died at his home on 2 December, at the age of 89. After a career in medical research in which he became a Professor of Medecine, he learned bookbinding and book conservation and subsequently built up an extraordinary knowledge of the history of the craft, bringing to it a scientifically analytical mind. He is perhaps best known for his book The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (Ashgate, 1999), which became immediately an invaluable work of reference, covering some 1500 years of bookbinding across Europe and the Middle East.
Giles Mandelbrote & Willem de Brujn, eds, The Arcadian Library : bindings and provenance, Oxford: Arcadian Library in Association with the Oxford University Press, 2014
This large and weighty volume is finally available. Containing 7 papers from a conference held in the Arcadian Library in 2008, is only now on sale - at £120. The essays are:
The use of quire tackets to hold the bifolia within individual gatherings together while they were written in is well known from the medieval period, but the discovery 18 months ago of quire tackets in a fifteenth-century printed book in the library at the Wellcome Institute in London, which I was examining with a Japanese student, Yuri Nomura, came as a surprise. The book is a copy of Peter Lombard, Glossa in epistolas Pauli, Esslingen: C.
It is with great sadness that we record the death on Saturday morning, 13 July, of Anthony Hobson, at the age of 92. The leading bookbinding historian of his, and indeed successive generations, his work, especially on Italian bindings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was outstanding and will remain a monument to a long and very active life. He was completing work on a new book when he died.