The Fellowship of the Book: Manutius & Bembo

The figure of Aldus Manutius, the “Michelangelo of the Book,” is inseparable from the city where he produced his most important innovations: Venice, the principal printing centre of the Renaissance. 

Aldus’ most notable relationship with Venice, though, emerges through his fellowship with the intellectual and polygraph Pietro Bembo. Whereas Manutius revolutionized printing and reading, Bembo revolutionized the Italian literary language and canon. 

Manutius and Bembo’s partnership was particularly successful mainly because it benefited both sides equally. Bembo owed Manutius his first steps in the literary arena, since Aldus published his first texts – the scientific treatise De Aetna and the dialogue Gli Asolani– and entrusted Bembo with the critical edition of Dante’s and Petrarch’s immortal masterpieces. For the De Aetna, Manutius decided to use a new italic typeface, and commissioned it to his trusted punchcutter Francesco Griffo: in 1495-96, thus, the Bembo typeface was born. 

read entire article - The Fellowship of the Book by Elisa Mondolo here @ SFU Library Special Collections & Rare Books

Books: Holocaust History

From History News Network, comes two books tackling controversial characters from modern history.

The Devil's Diary

New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Wittman is the author of The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich. As an FBI agent and then a private consultant specialized in recovering artifacts of historic significance, he first learned of the diary his new book is about in 2001, when the chief archivist for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum contacted him to say that someone was trying to sell it for upwards of a million dollars. 

The diary is as significant an artifact as any that Henry or I had found in our careers. It is a priceless historical artifact, and at a time when fewer and fewer witnesses to the Holocaust survive to tell their stories, it is a powerful reminder of the cataclysmic perils of a hateful and misguided ideology like Alfred Rosenberg’s.

read more here @ History News Network

The Pharmacist of Auschwitz?

Interview with author Patricia Posner whose book The Pharmacist of Auschwitz? details the life of Victor Capesius, the Nazi who was the chief pharmacist and co-worker of Dr Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

Capesius, on the other hand, is typical of many SS officers who were involved in terrible crimes at Auschwitz but sailed under the radar for a long time. He was one of the small cogs that allowed the Nazi killing machinery to work so efficiently.  Capesius is the quintessential ordinary man who becomes capable of extraordinary crimes, the concept that historian Hannah Arendt coined as the “banality of evil.”

read interview here @ History News Network

Tsundoku - Book Hoarding

Book hoarding is a well-documented habit.  In fact, most literary types are pretty proud of the practice, steadfast in their desire to stuff shelves to maximum capacity. They’re not looking to stop hoarding, because parting with pieces of carefully curated piles is hard and stopping yourself from buying the next Strand staff pick is even harder. 

The desire to buy more books than you can physically read in one human lifetime is actually so universal, there’s a specific word for it: tsundoku. Defined as the stockpiling of books that will never be consumed, the term is a Japanese portmanteau of sorts, combining the words “tsunde” (meaning “to stack things”), “oku” (meaning “to leave for a while”) and “doku” (meaning “to read”).

Speaking of addictions ― the term “bibliomania” emerged in England around the same time as “tsundoku.” Thomas Frognall Dibdin, an English cleric and bibliographer, wrote Bibliomania, or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance in the 1800s, outlining a fictional “neurosis” that prompted those suffering from it to obsessively collect books of all sorts. 

Bibliomania has a dark past, documented more as a pseudo-illness that inspired real fear than a harmless knack for acquiring books we won’t have time to read. “Some collectors spent their entire fortunes to build their personal libraries,” Lauren Young wrote for Atlas Obscura. “While it was never medically classified, people in the 1800s truly feared bibliomania.” 

Read entire article here @ Huffington Post

Movie: The Last Duel

One of my favourite books is set to become a movie - Eric Jager's The Last Duel.

From IF dot com dot au:

Shaun Grant has been set to adapt the Eric Jager novel The Last Duel for Jeff Robinov’s Studio 8. Francis Lawrence (Hunger Games: Mockingjay) is to direct with Erwin Stoff producing. Set in France,The Last Duel is the true story of a duel in 1386 between knights Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris. It was the final duel sanctioned by the French government, ruled at the time by King Charles VI.  Grant scripted the Justin Kurzel-directed Australian film Snowtown, a chronicle of the fact-based Snowtown murders. He also wrote Berlin Syndrome, an adaptation of the psychological thriller novel by Melanie Joosten that Cate Shortland will direct this summer.  

Read more @ Hroarr - What Really Happened at the Last Duel - Part 1 & Part 2 by Ariella Elema

Mongols in the Islamic World

Peter Jackson, emeritus professor of medieval history at Keele University, came out with his magisterial The Mongols and the West, 1221-1410 in 2005, detailing the epic clash between the forces of 13th century Christendom and the waves of Mongol invasion threatening to engulf it. The standard account of that invasion has been the stuff of films and historical melodrama for 600 years: the brutish Mongols slaughtered whole populations of city and countryside with comprehensive gusto, sparing an assortment of accountants and clerks to run the administrative tasks to which they themselves were indifferent. The signature of the great Mongol warlord, Genghis Khan, was one of ruthless bloodshed.

In his earlier book, Jackson sought to add nuance to that standard account, using a wide array of sources to reinforce a more balanced picture of what might at first seem the least-reclaimable item in all of human history – the conquering Mongol horde. And his deeply impressive new book, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion, continues that reclamation process, following the forces of Genghis Khan as they enter and overrun Central Asia in the early 13th century, quickly conquering virtually all Muslim territories east of Syria. Present-day Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan – huge tracts of Western Asia fell under Mongol domination in the years that followed.

Read entire review of Mongols & the Islamic World

Read also review of Mongols & the West

Death of a She Devil by Fay Weldon

When Fay Weldon introduced Ruth Patchett in The Life and Loves of a She Devil, 34 years ago, she created one of literature’s greatest monsters. Deserted by callous husband Bobbo for the simpering romance novelist Mary Fisher, ugly doormat Ruth remakes herself as the She Devil and has her revenge on the adulterers. Her punisher’s progress takes her through every circle of society, from underclass to judiciary, from family to clergy, until finally she is surgically transformed into “an impossible male fantasy made flesh” – even losing six inches of leg to become desirably petite. At the close of the book, with Bobbo broken and Mary dead, Ruth’s triumph is complete.

In Death of a She Devil, Bobbo is in effect Ruth’s prisoner, ancient and confined to bed, from where he rants his misogyny and sexually assaults his nurse. Meanwhile, Mary haunts the lighthouse, indulging in some light poltergeist activities and narrating the political machinations within the institute. An ambitious young woman named Valerie Valeria has plans to replace the She Devil, and Ruth’s freakishly beautiful grandson Tyler seems like the perfect vehicle for her schemes.

read more here @ the Guardian

New Fiction: The City Of Brass

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles. 

S.A. Chakraborty's debut novel, The City of Brass, is an epic historical fantasy about con-artist, Nahri, who strikes up a friendship with “a fiery djinn prince who dreams of revolutionizing his father’s corrupt regime. But, in a world where loyalty is a magical bond and grievances last for millennia, she soon learns that working with the enemy – even to make peace – can have deadly consequences.”

read an excerpt here @ Gizmondo Australia or visit S.A Chakraborty's website

How real books have trumped ebooks

The title says it all - the popularity of the e-book has slowly diminished since 2014 and the physical book has made a resurgence.  I, myself, have always favoured the physical book - whether hardback, paperback, softcover - over the e-book. I just find them more user-friendly.  I don't have an e-reader, I use my laptop - so for me, holding the book in my hand is more convenient and more conducive to reading.

Here's what Alex Preston has to say on the issue in the Guardian:

Books have always had a fetishistic quality to them, with their dusty secretiveness. Now, though, it feels like we’re living through a special moment in the history of book design and beautiful books are everywhere.

The latest figures from the Publishing Association showed ebook sales falling 17% in 2016, with an 8% rise in their physical counterparts. At the same time, publishers’ production values have soared and bookshops have begun to fill up with books with covers of jewel-like beauty, often with gorgeously textured pages.

Whether the physical book goes the way of the hand-illuminated manuscript, an object of merely historical interest for all its beauty, or whether this ancient piece of technology is here to stay, we should all be celebrating the work of the designers and publishers who have responded to the gauntlet thrown down by ebooks with such aplomb.

We should also recognise that the most beautiful books of the last few years have also been some of the most brilliant and inspired. The care and attention lavished on those intricately illuminated medieval volumes said something important about what was written inside them, the value of the words within, and this is no less true today.

read entire article here @ the Guardian

Once upon a time: a brief history of children's literature

Shockheaded Peter c.1917

Adults have been writing for children (a broad definition of what we might call children’s literature) in many forms for centuries. Little of it looks much fun to us now. Works aimed at children were primarily concerned with their moral and spiritual progress. Medieval children were taught to read on parchment-covered wooden tablets containing the alphabet and a basic prayer, usually the Pater Noster. Later versions are known as “hornbooks”, because they were covered by a protective sheet of transparent horn.

Children’s books still contain moral lessons – they continue to acculturate the next generation to society’s beliefs and values. That’s not to say that we want our children to be wizards, but we do want them to be brave, to stand up for each other and to develop a particular set of values.

We tend to see children’s literature as providing imaginative spaces for children, but are often short-sighted about the long and didactic history of the genre. And as historians, we continue to seek out more about the autonomy and agency of pre-modern children in order to understand how they might also have found spaces in which to exercise their imagination beyond books that taught them how to pray.

read entire article here @ the Conversation