he history of the index, it turns out in Duncan’s equally excellent and entertaining historical survey, has much to tell us about the history of how texts were used between the thirteenth century and the present day, and how producers of books have aimed to answer the demands of those developing uses within the confines of the available technologies of their times.
Tag: print culture
Under Your Skin: A History of the Necronomicon and Skin-Bound Books
The absence of evil books in real life hasn’t stopped us from imagining them in all manner of genres both past and present. And we love a good evil book, don’t we? Whether it’s Mister Babadook demanding entry into your home, the King in Yellow bringing carnage and ruin to the stage, or the Spirit grimoire manipulating a young magician in The Care Bears Movie, our fascination with malevolent tomes and nefarious publications continues to thrive. One of the more popular, if not the most popular, versions of this trope is the Necronomicon, a book as notorious as it is fictitious.
Gutenberg. Designed by Katarzyna Cioch and Wojciech Wiśniewski. Published by Granna and Portal Games, 2021.
A Gutenberg board game?! “So I guess the audience for this is basically the entire membership of SHARP,” someone tweeted when it came out late last year. Yes and no.
Georgina Colby, Kaja Marczewska, and Leigh Wilson, eds. The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible.
Publishing industry news has been rife recently with announcements of mergers and acquisitions instigated by The Big Five publishing companies. As such, industry and arts news outlets are giving attention to the legalities surrounding some of these deals, including articles in Quill and Quire and Publishers Weekly. With multinational conglomerates continuing to increase the gap between themselves and independent publishers—both small and mid-size—it is important to pay tribute to and appreciate the work that smaller independent publishers do for their communities of authors and readers. This multi-authored collection about small presses does just that.
Benito Rial Costas (ed.), Aldo Manuzio en la España del Renacimiento. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (csic), 2019. Nueva Roma, Bibliotheca Graeca et Latina Aevi Posterioris 50.
This collective volume is the result of the work of a research seminar assembled in 2015, under the auspices of the Complutense University of Madrid (ucm), commemorating the fifth centenary of the death of the humanist and printer Aldus Manutius the Elder (c. 1450-1515). The overall objective of the text is to reexamine the impact of Manutius in Renaissance Spain by covering different areas and avoiding common places broadly accepted in the traditional historiography, such as the devotion, fame, and prestige around the paradigmatic yet idealized figure of Manutius the Elder.