I've been looking at traces left by objects in seventeenth-century books. Here's one: the rust marks from a once-present pair of scissors, left between the pages of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, in his First Folio (1623). I like this image for all kinds of reasons. The scissors perhaps once belonged to a binder, and so this image suggests the material production of the First Folio – the labour that is behind the book, any book, a labour that is largely effaced by that familiar myth of disembodied artistic creation. I also like the image because it vividly conveys a sense of something that is no longer there – and illustrates that, for a thing to be felt as lost, a trace needs to remain. I also like the way that the scissor marks suggest other shapes: a swinging pendulum, for example. Perhaps, more than anything, it's a compelling image because it records a potentially destructive instrument resting within early modern literature’s most valued book.
Access to Heritage Project at Speke Hall mentioned in Access by Design Page
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Open publication - Free publishing
13 years ago
Hello Adam, love that image, do you have more?
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in traces been using slow shutter speed to document dancers movement creating shape of hexagon from Borges description of the Library of Babel. You can find image here on the 19th step blog.
http://step19.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-04-04T23%3A51%3A00%2B01%3A00&max-results=10
Been using the smell of old books for as part of a project at Speke Hall Liverpool.http://accesstoheritageproject.blogspot.com/
Have never been able to come to the meetings as I don't work in Reading on Tuesdays so glad for this blog to see whats being discussed.
Thanks for this, Kate. I _love_ the smell-inserts in Mrs Beeton's cookbook: for a while I've been tracking forms of marginalia in c16-17 books, initially handwritten notes but also scraps of paper pinned in, early business cards, book lists, and even dried flowers.
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