Day 116: So far so good

Pretty well all of us in McGill's MLIS program seem to share a kind of quirky personality trait: extreme unfounded anxiety. The vast majority of us blow every assignment out of proportion and panic about finishing it, panic about whether we've done it right, obsess, obsess, obsess.

Lesson 116: It's a good idea to have a quick and easy way set up to check your course standing.

I have an app called iStudiez Pro that will not only remind me of when my assignments are due and keep track of whether they're group or solo; it also keeps track of the weight of each assignment and allows me to input my grade for each one and see an up to date assessment of what my grade likely is in that class.

This is a Very Good Thing around the end of semester. With all the final projects due, it would be easy enough to panic and succumb to anxiety, so having something easily available that tells you "no matter what you do right now, you couldn't fail this course if you tried" is invaluable.

Based on the mark I got on my take-home portion of the metadata exam, I think I can hit at least an A- by getting 50% or better on the final paper.

Based on all the As I've gotten in web systems design, I just need to finish the group assignment and I'm golden.

That means that the only wildcards are Archives and History of Books and Printing. I've done fine on everything so far in Archives, but I still have two major assignments (term paper and take-home exam) to do. History of Books and Printing is a great course, but is only evaluated on one project, and I don't present mine till the last class of the term.

But all this to say, it's best to give my logical mind as much ammo against my panicky headless chicken mind as possible. So when part of my brain goes "OH GOD SO MUCH TO DO I'M GOING TO FAIL AT EVERYTHING AND BE A FAILURE" my logical mind can lay on the smack down and tell it to shut it's trap; there's nothing to worry about.

Day 113: The Artist Formerly Known As

Day 113 of my updates, and the 13th day of the month; all at the same time! Feels like some sort of celebration is in order!

Actually, celebration may be in order, just not quite yet. Because...

Today is the day I finally get around to fixing up this blog! You may have noticed that I haven't updated in quite some time. But this doesn't mean I haven't been writing. Oh no! I've been keeping notes, jotting down outlines... the posts have been here. Languishing unpublished. Waiting for me to have the time to give them a last look and hit publish. But between the absolute ridiculousness of my internet situation, assignments and midterms, schlepping back and forth to Ontario so often, and of course work, I haven't had the chance.

So what I'm going to do is get all the missed posts up, and provide a summary here linking to the most interesting posts.

When is a book not a book?
So that's why Canada's so ugly...
Websites are like Bicycles
Paper is not Vegetarian Friendly
ACCESS 2012 was a hell of a time!
Vanity Presses and Blogging
Bewick, Wood Cuts, and Money

As for today?

Lesson 113: Hokusai, and in fact Japanese woodblock printers in general, were the original Artist(s) Formerly Known As.

Japanese woodblock prints, like the famous image "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Hokusai, were sort of like posters for that age.

You could hang a picture of your favourite kabuki actor on your wall, or a picture of a beautiful woman.

But the artists of the prints changed their names like socks. They'd take on syllables of their mentor's name to show mastery of their style, inherit their mentor's name when he retired, take on a new name if they came out of retirement.

Hokusai went through an absolutely prolific number of names. When he eventually retired, he passed on his name to an apprentice. However, when a relative squandered their money, he needed to return to working life, but couldn't take his name back from the apprentice, so he changed it yet again.

I don't think I could be a scholar of Japanese printing... keeping track of the constant name changes would make me dizzy!

Day 111: Money money money money! MONEY!

In class today, one of the presentations was about an engraver named Bewick. Before Bewick, detailed illustrations in books were done with engraved metal plates, while only childrens' books were illustrated using wood blocks. This was because the grain of wood blocks meant that illustrations could only reach a certain amount of detail before you would just splinter the grain and ruin the image.

However, Bewick had the great idea of turning the block on its end and carving in the end of the grains rather than along and across the grains on the side of the block. This meant he was able to make gorgeously detailed wood block prints. He was actually able to make such detailed engravings in wood that they were able to use them to print money.

He also created the book "A History of British Birds", entirely illustrated with his gorgeous engravings, and really providing an everyman's guide to ornithology.

Lesson 111: Wood block printing was preferred to metal plate engraving for printing money.

This was because when a wood block was made of a super hard wood, like cherry wood, you could make millions of prints before the block couldn't print clearly anymore. Metal plates lost the ability to print clearly much much quicker.

The reason they used metal plates instead of wood blocks was because the extra detail you could get was very good at discouraging counterfeiting.

However, with Bewick's new method, you could get the detail needed to stop counterfeiters with the durability to print in more economical batches of money.

Everybody wins!

He also did the most adorable engravings of bats... Bats for Bats 2012!

Day 110: The Origin of Blogging?

I had wanted to make my own Hallowe'en costume this year. I was going to go for Batgirl, or a Weeping Angel. But ultimately, lack of resources and man hours nipped that plan in the bud. So I ordered a slammin' Batgirl costume online. But still no Hallowe'en costume. No sign of it.

I think this is going to wind up being another inpromtu costume Hallowe'en.

But the show must go on!

Speaking of, today's lesson is one of those realizations I came to rather than a lesson I was actually explicitly taught.

Lesson 110: Vanity Presses can be viewed as a pre-cursor to modern blogging.

In the 1700s, wealthy aristocrats with too much time and money found a new hobby in this interesting new toy: The Printing Press.

They didn't necessarily have anything they wanted to print, no writing of their own, or particular author they wanted to be a patron to. They just knew that this printing thing was catching on, and they wanted to print something. So they made so-called Vanity Presses and printed beautiful books just to print something.

One of the most well known was called "Strawberry Hill Press". You may remember last year, I mentioned one Horace Walpole who's credited with bringing the term serendipity into use as we know it. He also opened one of these Vanity Presses out of his estate, Strawberry Hill. He had all sorts of grand designs about the castle, the press and his collections, etc.

But isn't that basically what we do with blogs? Lots of people don't know what they want to blog about, but they want to blog. We don't know what we want to say, but we want to say it. We have a new technology, and we want to use it, we want our voices to be heard.

I would totally run a Vanity Press out of my basement... Anyone know where I can buy myself a printing press?

Wait a minute, I live in an apartment... anyone know where I can get myself a basement?

Day 107: A Primer on Printing and Paper

Alright, so this won't truly be comprehensive enough to be considered a primer, but I just couldn't resist the alliteration!

I've briefly mentioned paper and book-binding before, but now I'm going to talk about paper and printing

Lesson 108: Paper can be made from any vegetative natural fibre.

When I was talking about scrolls and codexes, I mentioned that they used to make "paper" called vellum, which was treated calf skin. That's what they used for the longest time in book-making.

Paper as we know it was invented in the 2nd century in China, where they used it mostly for packaging. They also started using it for many of the purposes we use paper today; they made toilet paper, paper money, and even printed books. Arab traders learned the process in the 8th century and brought it home. They built paper-mills, made thicker pages and used the paper to make much lighter codices with silk covers able to do away with the heavy covers and clasps that had been needed to keep the vellum books from becoming wedges.

In the 11th century, the process finally made it to Europe.

In the beginning, the Chinese used hemp, and bark from the paper mulberry. In Europe, they used hemp and linen rags. Eventually cotton caught on too. It wasn't until the 19th century that they started using wood pulp like we do today. But where the rag paper was stable and lasted a long time, wood pulp paper is by default acidic and degrades quite badly.

But really, paper can be made of any cellulose, any natural vegetative fibre. You could make paper from the vegetable peelings you threw out while making dinner, or the grass trimmings from mowing the lawn. Heck! There's one company that makes notebooks out of paper using elephant poop as the source of vegetative fibre. The possibilities are endless!

Another fun fact: the paper they made for printing (I can't speak for modern processes) was *not* vegetarian friendly. Paper that had just been made, so called "fresh leaf", would actually wind up absorbing too much ink to print correctly. Kind of like trying to write with a sharpie on toilet paper; the ink bleeds out and becomes a formless jumble.

Instead, they'd treat the fresh leaf with gelatin so the ink would rest on the surface instead of leaking out all over the place.

So that's one more thing for the vegetarians: no Jell-O, Oreos or printed books.

That's harsh, man!

Day 103: When is a book not a book?

Books have not always looked like books.

But we knew that, right?

We knew that in Egypt, their stories were written down on walls and in scrolls of papyrus with pictograms. Ancient civilizations wrote on clay and stone tablets, or in wax on wooden tablets. Eventually they wrote on some form of "paper", though maybe not the pulpy kind we use today. They wrote on vellum, which was paper but made of calf skin. They wrote on paper made of rags.

Books have looked like pillars. Books have looked like walls. Books have looked like tapestries. Books have looked like scrolls.

And finally, books started looking like books. That's the codex form of books. But that form didn't really start showing up until the 2nd century and didn't really catch on until the 5th century.

But how did we go from spooling whole books on scrolls and having to scroll through the whole thing to find what we're looking for to these bound piles of paper that we can open to any point? What other forms could books have taken?

Lesson 104: In Burma, they created "Palm Books".

Turns out they did them in other places too, but today in class we got to see some Burmese Palm Books.

Basically they'd take palm leaves and cut the writing into them, then dry them and rub ink on them to dye the cuts. Each leaf would be numbered and they'd be bound between wooden boards. The string binding it all together was left long enough that it would wrap around the book holding it closed. To read it, you'd untie it and the pages open by fanning out.

They're really beautiful.

There are just so many interesting little anecdotes and entrancing particulates of information in the history of books and bookbinding....

Books used to need straps and clasps to hold them closed because vellum would swell when it got humid and deform the book into a wedge; unless a clasp was keeping it boxy and rectangular.

Paper as we now know it was developed in China and used by Arabs in the 8th century and didn't catch on in Europe until later.

Independent of all of this, Meso-Americans made codex style books where they whitewashed the pages before writing on them.

This class just speaks so much to my nature as an encyclopedia of useless knowledge!