Come and hear Dr Hazel Wilkinson describe her work on “The Digital Life of Decorated Books” at 5.30 p.m. on Wednesday 28 March in Burns 5 on the ground floor of the Arts Building.

Dr Wilkinson, from the Department of English, University of Birmingham, is a scholar of eighteenth-century literature and print history and Principal Investigator on Fleuron. Fleuron (@Fleuronweb) is an open access database of eighteenth-century printers’ ornaments. It allows users to explore the history of print and publishing through the decorative elements used to adorn books of this period.

She has kindly provided the following summary and abstract:

Summary: This talk is about printers’ ornaments, the images made from inked wood- or metal-cut designs that regularly decorated printed books in the hand-press period. The talk will introduce an online database of printers’ ornaments, and discuss the growing importance of printers’ ornaments in literary studies and related fields.

Abstract: In 2016, ‘Fleuron’, a database of c.1.5 million eighteenth-century printers’ ornaments and related images, was launched online at fleuron.lib.cam.ac.uk. This talk will begin by describing how ‘Fleuron’ was created, with an introduction to the digital methods behind the database (accessible to non-specialists). ‘Fleuron’ was originally built as a tool for bibliographers, particularly those working in the field of printer identification. The talk will show how printers’ ornaments can be used to identify unknown printers, and will address the advantages and pitfalls of doing this kind of work digitally. It will outline plans for the project’s future, including the use of computer vision and machine learning. Beyond its bibliographical applications, ‘Fleuron’ is an exciting tool for the history of art and design: printers’ ornaments are miniature works of art that have been sorely neglected, perhaps because they have fallen through the conceptual gap between “text” and “illustration”. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the conceptual difficulty posed by ornaments. How do we distinguish between the illustrative and the decorative? What roles might ornaments have played in the interpretation of hand-press period texts at their first appearance? How can we “read” printers’ ornaments? The visual turn in literary studies is leading textual editors to ask these sorts of questions, and we are beginning to feel the need for an interpretative vocabulary for ornaments, for both research and teaching. The creative use of digital tools will be integral to the shaping of this new critical vocabulary.

Keith Maslen, an Honorary Fellow of the Department of English and Linguistics here, is one of the top bibliographers to have studied ornaments for handpress printer identification, so it is a great pleasure to be able to hear from Dr. Wilkinson about where the future of such scholarship might lead.

        MS Qur’an (c.1846)

The latest Special Collections Exhibition opens today.  It was inspired by an inventory of Middle Eastern and Islamic language materials that was recently compiled by Dr Majid Daneshgar, former lecturer at Theology and Religion at the University of Otago, now the University of Freiburg, Germany.  Arabic, Persian, and Turkish books and manuscripts are on display, mainly from the collection of the Rev. William Arderne Shoults (1839-1887). Some of the printed books are scarce; the manuscripts unique. There are a few modern publications in the exhibition. These are mainly from the library of Charles Brasch (1903-1973), who was an archaeological field assistant at Tell el Amarna, Egypt, from 1933 to 1935.

Choice travel and history books are also on display that not only help contextualise the language-based items, but also convey a wider picture and greater understanding on this area of the world. Importantly, the exhibition has a largely historical focus, with items displayed grounded in a past stretching back to antiquity.

Some of the items on display include editions of George Sandys’s A Relation of a Journey begun An: Dom: 1610 (1615; 1632); David Roberts’ superb The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia (1856); Thomas Erpenius’s early Arabic grammar entitled Rudimenta Linguae Arabicae (1628); a first edition of William Jones’s A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771); Robert Wood’s stupendous The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart (1753); Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1933); and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935). Language materials include a unique Qur’an (c.1846); a unique manuscript of Euclid’s Elements i n Arabic (c.1800); an Arabic Bible printed in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1811); a Hebrew Bible printed c.1611; and Arthur Lumley Davids’s A Grammar of the Turkish Language (1832).

The exhibition runs to 1 June 2018.
Hours: 830am to 500pm, Monday to Friday

This event looked too irresistible not to draw readers’ attention to it.  Deadline is 31 May and full details and application forms are available online from http://www.regenttheatre.co.nz/show_event/books-as-art/.  And even if you don’t create a piece yourself, you may well wish to go along and purchase one, on Friday 8 June.

The University Book Shop and the Department of English and Linguistics invite you to join other knowledgeable readers and a keen fan who will offer some reasons for title’s deserved reputation and spur conversation about why a neglected classic deserves your attention.  Fun evenings, great company in a lovely venue, and you might even learn something.  All welcome

For anyone who needs more literary stimulation following Helen Bones’s talk, you can continue the conversation in the Octagon with their series, “Sense of Wonder.”

Join author and expatriate Helen Bones for a fresh look at the received wisdom that New Zealand writers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries had to leave colonial shores to find success. In this talk, entitled ‘”Throwing up the Sponge”: New Zealand writers and the Expatriate Myth’, Bones will draw on her new book, The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand writers and the colonial world (Otago University Press, 2018). What did it mean to be a New Zealand writer? What was the relationship between New Zealand and wider colonial and transnational networks? Join us on Tuesday 13 March at 5.30pm in Castle D Lecture Theatre to find out more.

This talk is also sponsored by Otago University Press. Copies of The Expatriate Myth will be available to purchase at the event for a special price of $30.00, cash only.

Dr Helen Bones is a New Zealander living in Australia, where she teaches history and researches with the Digital Humanities Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.