07w30:1 The Notebook

Posted July 23rd, 2007 by timothy. 2 Comments

Good Reads Mailing List | 2007 week 30 number 1 (The Notebook)

Truth be told, I prepped this Goodread a day before the hardrive on my notebook computer crashed, and so I’ve had to do it all over again. Which I think is worth sharing, given the subject matter of this GR – the traditional paper notebooks, a medium endangered by fire but not by mechanical failure and magnets. It’s now become a cliché statement to say that as our the data of our world moves further and further toward the digital, the danger of losing it all one day becomes greater and greater. Nevertheless, it is statement worth repeating given that notebooks have always been about the repition of passages and quotes that can become cliché through their preservation.

This GR is celebrating the digitization of some notebooks, particularly those of Leonardo Da Vinci, a hardcopy of which is now viewable at the Art Gallery of Ontario over the summer. This notebook (Codex Forster I) having achieved Da Vinci’s dream of flight to arrive here from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum last visited our city when it was exhibited at the ROM during the summer of 1998, where I first got the chance to see it. Going by the poster and mismemory, I thought the AGO was exhibiting the same spread as the ROM had, and yet, through one of the links below, I was able to remember correctly and see that the AGO is exhibiting pages 6v|7r while the ROM had shown 15v|16r. Further, the ROM had kept the pages open with a clear vinyl strap, whereas the AGO has the book displayed in an angled cradle, in its own illuminated box, beneath a piece of glass without a transparent vinyl holder. At the AGO it is accompanied by a flash animation (‘Geometrical Solids’), which can aslo be accessed at the same link.

Secondly, a section on commonplace books, the old name for what we now call notebooks, or as some have argued, blogs. This selection was inspired by hearing Anthony Grafton’s wonderful lecture on the Slought Foundation website, which is there available as an AAC file, and which I’ve also made available as an MP3.-Timothy

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Leonardo’s Notebooks

Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks | V&A Museum
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/ac/forstercodices/

e-Leo | Biblioteca Leonardiana
http://www.leonardodigitale.com/login.html
// sign in (‘accedi’) with user: goodreads pass: goodreads and then click on `sfoglia i manoscritti` and the chose the notebook from the left hand menu (`Madrid I, Madrid II, and Atlantico)

Commonplace Books

Literary Honeycombs: Storage and Retrieval of Texts
Before Modern Times | Anthony Grafton
AAC file (from Slought Foundation)
MP3 file (Goodreads Mirror)

Commonplace | Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace
“Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests”.

Long S | Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
The long, medial or descending s (Å¿) is a form of the minuscule letter ‘s’ formerly used where ‘s’ occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example Å¿infulneÅ¿s (“sinfulness”). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s.

From Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library

Commonplace Books | Beinecke Rare Book Library
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/compb.htm

Osbourne b205 | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Osbourne/

William Hill’s Commonplace Book | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/hill/

Sartaine most holsome meditations | Peter Mowie
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/sartain/

Johann Sigmund Kusser’s Commonplacebook
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Kusser/

Tobias Alston’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/alston/

Robert Herrick’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/herrick/

Richard Cromleholm’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Cromleholm/

William Camden’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/camden/

The Book of Brome | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/bookofbrome/
Manuscript Guide

MS327 | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/ms327/

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