An Obscure and Timeless Manuscript

"Realistically, it's [the ambition to collect every book every published in a single, privately-held collection] not doable. There were too many cities printing too many books."
"It's great to have it all [an immense library representing the sum total of all the world's published books], but it's pointless if you can't find your way around it [know where each book is in its specialty niche, filed in order and readily retrieved]. That's one of the great things about his thoroughness, and how meticulous he was. He annotated all his books the same way."
"When you see a book that belongs to him, you know right away. He always puts the call number in the same place, int he same way. Any scholar that was not familiar with Columbus's library and its very unique cataloguing and referencing system couldn't have recognized it [the "book of summaries"].
"I didn't know it was THE missing catalogue. I had found the only surviving copy. I didn't think for a second it would interest anybody. Most of us [historian-scholars] go through our entire careers looking at documents that interest our colleagues, a relatively small circle of scholars. I didn't really realize  how important it was, the magnitude when I saw it."
Guy Lazure, historian, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario

The Libro de los Epítomes, a manuscript summarizing the contents of Christopher Columbus' son's library, was discovered at the University of Copenhagen. ( Suzanne Reitz/Arnamagnæan Institute)

"It's an extraordinary object. He was trying to prove himself his father's legitimate spiritual heir even if he wasn't his father's legitimate son by building a universal library which had every book in the world in it."
"He personally went around and bought books on these extraordinary book shopping sprees where he was purchasing thousands of titles at a time."

"How print really revolutionized the world was by making it possible to distribute cheap print — you know, information in news sheets and popular ballads and erotica and weather forecasts and things like that. But no one at the time actually thought of collecting this stuff."

"This was someone who was, in a way, changing the model of what knowledge is. Instead of saying ‘knowledge is august, authoritative things by some venerable old Roman and Greek people’, he’s doing it inductively: taking everything that everyone knows and distilling it upwards from there." "It’s much more resonant with today, with big data and Wikipedia and crowdsourced information. This is a model of knowledge that says, 'We’re going to take the breadth of print – ballads and pornography and newsletters – and not exclude that from the world of information'."

Edward Wilson-Lee, literature professor, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, U.K. 

Books have a special place in the human imagination; books that chronicle history, botany, medicine, science, geography, wars, and human experience. Novels are actually chronicles of human experience. One of the most serious crimes against intellectual freedom was to condemn certain books as unworthy of existence, and to destroy them. Bonfires to burn books proscribed by dictatorial regimes, libraries, like the fabled library at Alexandria, Egypt with its vast collection of manuscripts of the ancient world represented an irreplaceable loss when it was burned in 48BC as an act of war.

Bibliophiles and just ordinary people who love reading books aspire to own their own libraries of books. They provide education and entertainment for the fertile mind, eager to learn. Ownership of a vast store of books enables a busy mind to take its choice of stimulation at any given time, but it is entirely feasible that private libraries holding copies of classic literature as well as scholarly treatises, histories and technical books will never be entirely read; the human trait of acquisitiveness leads people to amass collections and take pride in them.

Printing Press - HISTORY

www.history.com 

 

Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son took his inner resources in a direction to explore that which appeals to the human mind and spurs the imagination, just as  his father used vast material resources in his exploration and discovery trips around the unknown Americas. He was said to have acquired a library of 20,000 books of his day representative of every book ever published, but not actually every book ever published was represented in his collection; some 4,000 volumes remain in existence now, housed in the cathedral in Seville, Spain.

Professor Guy Lazure had gone to Copenhagen for a research project looking for a manuscript in a Scandinavian archive, holding some 20 books from 15th-Century Spain. Known to be an expert in the history of Seville the archive's director asked if he would examine whether within that modest collection anything of note was represented. A massive book of 973 folded leaves of paper with close to 2,000 pages caught his interest, as perhaps representing an index but it had no title page, no author credit and no indication what the tome might represent, much less why it would be among old Icelandic and Scandinavian literature.

It took him a bit of thought before the realization struck that he had come across the only surviving copy of two originals of the collection of summaries of Hernando Colón's collection of summaries of his book collection, called the Libro de los Epitomes; "book of summaries". A Danish ambassador to Spain in the 17th Century bought it from a Spanish noble at a time of economic decline in Spain. It languished in obscurity ever since, its historical value and provenance unrecognized. This discovery was made in 2013, when Professor Lazure spent a few hours poring over the vast manuscript.

It was only much, much later, when his attention focused on a biography written by a colleague of his, Edward Wilson-Lee, in his The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books that focuses on this story of the vast book collection, that it dawned on Professor Lazure that his experience and discovery had great current importance. Out of this coincidental discovery has come a resolve to digitize the manuscripts for a virtual reconstruction. It will be done eventually, as long as the financing becomes available.

Hernando Colón was the son of Christopher Columbus, born out of wedlock and therefore not his father's heir. (Insitucíon Colombina, Seville)

Social Media Bondage

"This decline in reading print media -- particularly the decline in reading books -- it's concerning."
"Reading long-form texts like books and magazine articles is really important for understanding complex ideas and for developing critical thinking skills. It's also excellent practice for students who are going on to college."
"Does digital media displace the leisure time people once spent on legacy media? We find that the answer is yes."
Jean Twenge, professor of psychology, San Diego State University

"This is not the way we treat things that we want to teach children are pleasurable. [by coercing children to read, by temporarily restricting their Internet time until a time-frame dedicated to reading has passed] I mean, think about it. You would never think of coercing your child into having a piece of cake."
"[Modelling good reading through example is fundamental]. That almost goes without saying. If you're nagging your child to read and you're just sort of on Instagram [yourself] all the time, why in the world would they take that seriously?"
Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology, University of Virginia

Image – iStockphoto: Disobey Art

Dr. Willingham wrote Raising Kids Who Read, and Dr. Twenge is the author of iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy -- and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood -- and What That Means for the Rest of Us, one title snappy and to the point, the other groaningly verbose for a title, but both indicating the concern that these two academics feel for the generations for whom reading is no longer a valued skill nor a source of limitless pleasure and entertainment.

According to research published by the American Psychological Association, adolescents in North America are twinned to their electronic devices; texting, scrolling and engaging in social media for hours on end daily, vastly preferring that medium to reading books and magazines, in print or long-form media. In 2016, one in three American high school seniors chose not to read a book at all for pleasure, while 82 percent of those in 12th grade daily succumbed to the social imperative of visiting Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

In contrast, back in the 1970s, about 60 percent of high school seniors read a book, magazine or newspaper each and every day; now, only 16 percent of high school seniors reported having done so. Early in the 1980s the slide in rates of reading legacy media began and steadily increased in the next several decades. And then along came smart-phones and high-speed Internet with widely available access, sweeping everyone along in the frenzy of being cool and connected.

Image – iStockphoto: Disobey Art

Screen time for high-schoolers -- including television -- rose steadily, tripling from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s, the study points out. And while 12th-grade students reported about six hours devoted every day to digital media, tenth-graders devoted five hours and eighth-graders four hours, amply demonstrating that given the choice, teens prefer to pick up their devices in favour of a book any day of the week, any hour, any time.

As in most things, a gender differential was noted, with girls visiting social media sites more frequently than boys, who preferred to spend more of their leisure time on video games, in a predictable twist. Dr. Willingham recommends parents focus on the need to separate their children from their screens, but without resorting to enforced reading; not to deprive the teen of his/her phone assuring a return in 30 minutes once that time has been gainfully spent reading.

To begin with, the environment in which children live should be one where books are a casual yet important part of what is on offer as an option, rather than banning devices. A good way to impress the importance of reading on teens is to ensure that they are familiar with books being the first choice of leisure-time reading for their parents; setting that vital example as a subconscious clue to values and choices.

"Litter your house with eye-catching titles", is the advice of Dean-Michael Crosby, teacher at a school in England, whose advice to parents is that leaving books in the living room, the kitchen, even bathrooms has the potential to provoke interest in young people, curious about their contents.

(iStock)

The Desecration of Academia

"When I was a student, despite being deeply interested in comics and making them, it never occurred to me to do something with them as my work. It simply wasn't a possibility."
"And now I [get] to make comics at the highest level of study and teach them."
"If they [the public] can learn to look at themselves and the world in a slightly different way, they can discover new possibilities for how they can be in the world."
Nick Sousanis, post-doctoral fellow, comic studies, University of Calgary

"If there was a generation that resisted comics as literature, that generation is now gone. The battle has been fought and won."
"I  hoped people would understand, and clearly they did, that I'm a writer first. My main interest is story, and story structure. Regardless of the form or genre they were writing in, students appreciated my helping them get their story up on its feet structurally."
Scott Chantler, cartoonist, Waterloo, Ontario

"We've seen a definite transformation in terms of attitude toward comics and a recognition that they might not necessarily want to put them always on par with the great classics of literature, but definitely that they are a valuable form of reading."
"There are a lot of people working very hard but for not much remuneration [attempting to ply a living producing comics]."
Benjamin Woo, professor of communication studies, Carleton University

IDW Publishing

There you have it, academia surrendering to the new discipline of literary (?) comics. All right, comics generally as a medium for story-telling. Japanese manga led the way into public acceptance, no doubt. I once wandered through a manga shop in Tokyo and swiftly wandered my way back out again, finding nothing therein to arouse my interest; in fact if that exposure did anything it evoked in me a swift and total distaste in the knowledge that thinking adults would gravitate to the form of literary expression that manga represented.

But of course manga also explored and exploited the gritty side of human society and perhaps that was their real attraction for their readership. In Canada, no less a literary figure -- honoured by some and detested by others -- than Margaret Atwood has issued comic books and isn't that fascinating. Some might interpret that state of affairs as Ms. Atwood declaring her talents as a writer fit for comic book format and content, and some would be hard put to disagree.

Comic photo for a comic writer

Who might have imagined that academia might ever stoop so low as to offer courses in comic book literature? The very linkage of comic books and literature is breathtaking in its audacity and the breadth of its arrogance. Nick Sousanis represents what is put out as a growing cadre of 'scholars' who have emerged into the light of academic acceptance hastening to celebrate comics as a serious academic study field. Gag on that, if you will.

If you won't, then consider this from 1 Corinthians 13:11 : "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, I talked as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things." That recognized fitness of chronology and thinking pursuits from antiquity to the present has resonance here. Pictographs represent an undeveloped mind struggling to understand what language will eventually answer far more elegantly and precisely than a picture.

But there it is, public acceptance of comics has long been a fact. A visit to any bookstore or library will invite those inclined to peruse the offerings of comic book publications. So that the child in the otherwise-reluctant reader of books can dally and tell themselves that they're indulging their inner child and simultaneously reading literature of an adult variety, even while they clearly are not. If the classics are now published in cartoon form, they have been cartoonishly edited and diminished.

This is an opinion of someone who treasures both reading and literature, someone quite obviously reluctant to be unpegged from tradition. Quite the opposite, for example, of Scott Chantler the cartoonist who was slotted into a three-month appointment as writer-in-residence at the University of Windsor's English department. Which to traditionalists represents an academic travesty, but to Mr. Chantler, recognition too long in arriving.

That a Holocaust memoir was produced and won a Pulitzer Price is something I cannot even imagine, let alone come to terms with. Nor does it appear possible that Carleton University professor of communication studies Benjamin Woo merited a Governor General's Gold Medal for his PhD dissertation on nerd culture: comic books as nerd culture? Aren't 'nerds' imagined as closet intellectuals?

The final blow to literary sanity is that Nick Sousanis presented a comic book format in his PhD dissertation at Columbia University's teachers college. Is nothing sacred any longer?

"Critical Inquiry" Merges Comics and Academia

Comic Book Resources

Richard Dawkins Perplexed by High Number of Jewish Nobel Prize Winners

October 29, 2013 2:30 pm

Author:

Zach Pontz

Tags:

Atheist Jewish Jewish Nobel Jewish Virtual Library muslims New Republic Nobel Peace Prize Richard Dawkins Trinity College tweet

Richard Dawkins. Photo: Wikipedia.

 

The usually self-assured biologist, author and atheist Richard Dawkins expressed his bewilderment at the disproportionate amount of Nobel prizes won by Jews in a recent interview with the New Republic, saying he is “intrigued by” the  “phenomenally high” number of Jewish laureates.

Addressing the controversy surrounding a Tweet he wrote during the conferment of Nobel prizes earlier this month, Dawkins offered up something of a mea culpa, stating: “That was unfortunate. I should have compared religion with religion and compared Islam not with Trinity College but with Jews, because the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes is phenomenally high.”

Continuing, he said: “Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison. Ironically, I originally wrote the tweet with Jews and thought, That might give offense. And so I thought I better change it.”

Asked why he thought it is that Jews have won so many Nobel Prizes, Dawkins was forthright with his uncertainty.

“I haven’t thought it through. I don’t know. But I don’t think it is a minor thing; it is colossal. I think more than 20 percent of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews.”

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, since the Nobel was first awarded in 1901 approximately 193 of the 855 honorees have been Jewish (22%). Jews make up less than 0.2% of the global population.

This year 6 of 12 laureates were Jewish. The 13th laureate, for the Nobel Peace Prize, was awarded to an organization and not an individual.