tech issues

Hey all,
So in my ongoing battle with the blogging program I have encountered another glitch. I had written up my visit to the King James Bible exhibit and scheduled it to appear today because I knew that my other blogging days were full of different posts. I got on to check that it had come up, and come up it did, but retroactively on the day that I originally wrote it, 11-17.
I have surrendered to the fact that Internet is smarter than me therefore I cede the victory to Internet and include here only a link to my post that hopefully you will enjoy especially since it has mastered the art of time travel.

Standardization of Spelling correlated with increased literacy

Ok so here is the topic I am interested in but I need you guys' help with a compelling thesis. I'm having trouble because the two events do seem to be correlated and I want to argue for causation but at best any evidence is circumstantial and the arguments rather circular.
How can I improve this statement?
The increase of literacy during the Renaissance made greater standardization of written language necessary to preserve meaning and understanding.

Print Distribution and Dissemination Thesis Idea

The idea I had for my thesis (and my entire paper) is about how the distribution of books in Europe during the Renaissance Era positively influenced humanity in regards to communicating knowledge, particularly in the scientific field of study.

I will most likely be using these sources:

Cheselden, William. The Anatomy of the Human Body. Printed for H. Woodfall, R, 1763.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (2E).  Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Huff, Toby E.  The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (2E).  Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Natural Library of Medicine. A Catalogue of Seventeenth Century Printed Books in the National Library of Medicine. Bethesda, Md, 198.

Porter Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.

Rhodes, Dennis E. Studies in Early European Printing and Book Collecting. The Pindar Press, 1983.

Sarton, George. Appreciation of Ancient and Medieval Science During the Renaissance. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955.

Webster, Charles.  The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform.  Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. 1975.

typography thesis draft 1: Comparing the two Renaissances of Typography

I just wanted to "claim" my idea for a thesis. This immediately came to my mind during class:

Reminiscent of the transition from handwritten to print, eReading has its advantages but these should not come at the sacrifice of the beautiful and purposeful typographical design of the original print medium.

I'm concerned that the focus is too modern, but I really want to compare and contrast these two transitions.

On the Fabric of the Human Body

Who has ever heard of Andreas Vesalius?  Most of you probably haven't.  But I am sure that every one of you has benefited from his work.  While I was doing research last week for my annotated bibliography on print and medical knowledge, I ran across a lot of information on this guy, Andreas Vesalius.  Vesalius is known as the father of modern anatomy and was able to make such a huge impact on our modern knowledge of the human body specifically because of the printing press.  Vesalius published his great work De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) almost a hundred years after the Gutenberg's invention of the printing press but it still was a huge step forward for the medical revolution.  I was pretty impressed by all of the pictures that were printed in his book, so I wanted to post a number of them here to show the great detail and complexity of the body that the printing press allowed Vesalius to show the world.

Some interesting additions from Thanksgiving

So, for thanksgiving I got to go to my sister's wedding in Hong Kong. I notices several things that we had mentioned in previous blog posts or comments that I took pictures of and thought would be good to pass on to you all.

The Renaissance of font design

Shockingly, I decided to blog about fonts again. Fonts are so simple, we interact with them on a daily basis and yet they are also intricate pieces of art and vitally important in the clear presentation and dissemination of knowledge. I really have become obsessed with fonts as of late. This can probably be attributed to the fact that I am working at a graphic design firm and am surrounded by people who appreciate the subtle art of font design. 

The Renaissance marked an influx of secular knowledge with the movement known as humanism. Scholars in during this period of time turned to the ancient wells of knowledge from the Greeks and Romans. With this new wave of secular information new more legible, clear, simple and secular fonts were required. It was the first time in the history of typography where artisans looked to the past to influence their font designs. Latin and Greek culture and art heavily influenced the type design masters of this era. Improvements in the actual printing methods and machines brought new inventions within the typography realm. Designers were starting to introduce ideas of wider margins and clean typesetting. The Renaissance truly influenced all areas and aspects of life and learning; font design not excluded. 

page from Aldus Manutius' book on Aristotle

all Aldine books bear his logo

The first person I would like to highlight in my exploration of Renaissance font design is Aldus Manutius  (1450–1515). Aldus was a humanistic scholar that through his tutoring of the wealthy Pio family acquired his own printery in Venice. From this printery he published Greek and Roman classics, including a five-volume set on the works of Aristotle. One of his main focuses was to print small format books at low cost to scholars. His biggest contribution to the world of type was that he designed the first Greek alphabet typesetting. He also invented a space saving Latin font based off Italian cursive fonts. All his books (called Aldine books) bear his logo of a dolphin and an anchor and a dolphin.

Granjon, designed by Robert Granjon is considered
to be the closest typeface to the original Garamond

Adobe Garamond font
 The differences in the two fonts above are very subtle.
Can you find them?

Claude Garamond (1480–1561) was a Parisian publisher and font designers. He was one of the most famous type designers of his time. I mentioned this in my bibliography post. I mentioned in my post that his work is so famous that it is still in use today and that Harry Potter was printed using Adobe Garamond. He first gained popularity in 1541 when three of his Greek typefaces were used in a royal book by Robert Estienne. His inspiration for these three fonts came from the handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, the King's librarian at Fontainebleau, and his ten-year-old pupil, Henri Estienne. His influence spread beyond France with his Roman typesettings that followed in the 1540s. His work is still considered to be among the finest within the realm of typography. 

from Troy's famous work Champ Fluery

The last person that deserves attention is Geoffroy Tory (1480-1533). He was one of the prominant  printers of Paris during the beginning of the sixteenth century. His most famous work is the the theoretical treatise on the design of Roman capital letters in 1529. Tory followed the common practice of the day of finding relationships between the proportions of type and the shape of the human body. Thus Tory was known for drafting letters with geometrical aids to better analyze their resemblance to the human body.

Thus concludes my brief examination of the Renaissance of font design with a look at three prominent designers and their individual influence on typography. Thank you for everyone bearing with me as I explore a particular branch of knowledge that frankly I love. I think it is so interesting how we often disregard the subtle beauty and pure art involved with typography. We are surrounded by type everyday and yet we don't actually pay attention to it. How can something be in our face but we don't truly see it?

The Story of the Dictionary (and my discovery of it)

The English Dictionary is the second most purchased and most used book behind the Bible only.  Of course, there isn't just one dictionary or version of it, just like there are multiple versions of the Bible.  Nevertheless, it is a popular book.  But as one renown dictionary maker (also known as a lexicographer) said, it is meant to be browsed in, not read cover to cover. 

There are several parts of language, and one of them is the actual words that are used, the vocabulary or the lexicon of a language.  This is what a dictionary is meant to help with at its fundamental level: allow people to understand the lexicon of the language.  That is why the first dictionaries were what we would call translation dictionaries and have two different languages in them, usually comparing Latin to some other language.  Later the idea developed to define the vocabulary of one language, creating monolingual dictionaries.  Then the development of ordering a dictionary in alphabetical order was introduced by Englishman Robert Cawdery, which became such an intrinsic part of dictionaries that books that don't do anything similar to a dictionary (define the lexicon) have acquired the title because of the alphabetical listing of their entries.  Then, finally there was the idea of an American dictionary, because our version of English was different from the British, and that's how Merriam-Webster became a household name. 

But really, you don't want to hear the story of the dictionary.  You would much rather hear about my story in the library finding out about dictionaries.  I dislike the fact that we have to put our annotated bibliography in alphabetical order, because that doesn't fit the order of the story, so I have numbered them in chronological order if you want a continuous story of discovery. 

Annotated Bibliography: Censorship in Elizabethan England

            For my annotated bibliography assignment, I decided to learn a little bit about censorship in Elizabethan England. Censorship is a topic that I’m very interested in, but it’s such a huge topic that I wouldn’t have known where to start if I was just researching anything to do with it, so I wanted to narrow it down somehow. The Tudors made for some of my favorite English royal drama, Elizabeth I is one of my favorite people, and Shakespeare was producing his work during the Elizabethan and Jacobean (Stuart) Eras, so I decided to learn everything I could about censorship in the Elizabethan Era. There weren’t very many books on that specific topic, but I was able to find several books in the library in which the issue was at least addressed on some level, and I used interlibrary loan to have a few other books sent over.

Print Distribution and Dissemination.

As you can tell from my previous blog posts, I am intrigued by the idea of printing and how it affected society today. I'm grateful that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press during the Renaissance Era, because it changed how people back then and even still today receive and distribute knowledge. Without it, the education system, the legal system and many other aspects of society today would be completely different and would most likely be more oral based and involve a great deal of memorization.

To show my appreciation for print, distribution and dissemination during the Reniassance Era, I decided to do some investigating on this subject. I searched the Harold B. Lee Library and made my way to the fifth floor to scope out some books on the topic.

Visiting the Crandall Historical Printing Museum

A few weeks ago, I rode my bike down to the Crandall Historical Printing Museum. It wasn’t my first visit to the museum, but in fulfilling the “field trip” requirement for our class unit on printing, I decided to go back. I thought it would be interesting to see what my impressions of the museum were this time around. Here are a few of the thoughts I left with: