Those working on the material text may be aware of the glorious new enterprise that is Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. Created and edited by Gill Partington, Adam Smyth and Simon Morris, the journal exists both as a lavish large format physical production and an online marvel. Two issues have […]
Category Archives: paper
Article: On cardboard boxes and Andy Warhol
posted by mdever
A new article entitled, “The implied rummager: reading intimate interiors in Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules” by Anna Poletti published in the journal Life Writing offers “a speculative reading of a selection of objects and cardboard boxes from Andy Warhol’s monumental artwork, Time Capsules (1974–1984)” located at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Poletti explores questions of intimacy […]
Cutting up manuscripts or do you like my new ‘mystery bag’?
posted by mdever
Just catching up on the coverage of Sekrè, a German-Swiss startup, which is creating luxury handbags with “a secret” – namely, that they contain a fragment cut from a rare letter or document. Marketed with the tagline that “Every woman needs a secret”, the start-up – which claims Sekrè is the Haitian word for “secret” […]
NEW BOOK: On manuscripts, materiality and ‘thinking through paper’.
posted by mdever
New out from Palgrave: Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page. The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we […]
Image, Knife, Gluepot: Open access book
posted by mdever
While this title technically falls outside the period generally covered in this blog, the topic is nevertheless of interest to those concerned with paper and materiality. Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print by Kathryn M Rudy explores how manuscript pages and fragments travel through time. In her introduction, “Hybrid Books in Flux”, Rudy […]
The taste of the archive in the digital age: article
posted by mdever
Quite exciting to locate this article today via the Documentary Heritage News digest: Le goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique published in La vie des idées. Anyone familiar with Arlette Farge’s book will immediately recognise the reference and also the importance of seeking to extend her thinking into the digital era. By the time Farge’s wonderful […]
Brittle paper: what can it stand?
posted by mdever
Taking a literal turn in our thinking around materiality and the archived page, the following recent publications examine the mechanics of aged and brittle paper: “Comparing Non-destructive Mechanical Testing Methods for the Assessment of Brittle Papers – The Cantilever, Hanging Pear Loop, and Clamped Fold Tests” by Andrea K. I. Hall, Raymond H. Plaut and Patricia M. McGuiggan, […]
Mess and miscellany: new book
posted by mdever
Just released by OUP Canada is Angus Vine‘s new book, Miscellaneous Order: Manuscript Culture and the Early Modern Organization of Knowledge. This book will be of interest to scholars working on questions of materiality in particular. Vine examines the early modern manuscript miscellany, an object often dismissed in its disorder and mess. “Drawing on original literary and historical […]
New Book: Archival Afterlives
posted by mdever
Just out from Brill: Archival Afterlives Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives Series: Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, Volume: 23 Editors: Vera Keller, Anna Marie Roos and Elizabeth Yale “Archival Afterlives explores the posthumous fortunes of scientific and medical archives in early modern Britain. If early modern natural philosophers claimed all […]
Article: Of mind and matter: The archive as object
posted by mdever
In the following article in Archives and Records (39.1 2018) Peter Lester advances an argument about materiality and the nature of archival evidence. Of mind and matter: The archive as object Abstract Archives are not only sources of evidence and information; they are also material objects with physical, tangible characteristics such as size, weight and […]
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