If I asked you what world city was the first title holder of the UNESCO designation "City of Literature," I'm not sure Edinburgh would leap to your mind. It certainly didn't leap to mine; my first guess was London. But Edinburgh it is: the City of Literature.
I will cede the floor to Justin on discussing the role of Edinburgh in English-language publishing (hint: massive) because heck, it's what he studies. Instead, I'll write a bit here about some books with Edinburgh connections, and make some suggestions in case you want to pick up a book that gives you a peek into our current hometown.
Harry Potter Series, by J.K. Rowling
If you've been paying attention, you already knew this! Edinburgh has served as the place of writing and also as the inspiration for many aspects of this series, including locations and character names. I won't bother to describe the series, but the Edinburgh connection was new to me when I moved here.
Who might enjoy: Everybody in the world, apparently
The Inspector Rebus series, by Ian Rankin
Inspector Rebus is an Edinburgh police detective. The series began in the late '80s - I got a chuckle at the scene in the first book where Rebus mentions his pride and joy, a Japanese-manufactured tape deck - but is still going strong. I've only read the first book, Knots and Crosses, but I ran into many Edinburgh locations that make up my daily life. I particularly enjoyed the scene where Rebus walks from his apartment in Marchmont (where there's a particularly nice beer shop Justin and I frequent) across the Meadows (how we get to campus) through Greyfriars Kirkyard (where we went with Meghan to see the Tom Riddle tombstone) and into the Central Public Library (where I currently have five books checked out). I think they've moved the children's section since the book was published, but the reference room is exactly as described. I should know - I researched there last December!
Who might enjoy: Rebus is not a procedural mystery, which is to say, you are not given clues to piece the mystery together. It's a crime novel much more in the thriller vein. The first one was violent (about child kidnapping and murder) but very little violence happened "on screen." You didn't get passages narrated by the crazy killer, which I always hate. I can't vouch for later ones. It's more for fans of Tom Clancy or James Patterson than Agatha Christie.
The Sunday Philosophy Club Series, by Alexander McCall Smith
Another Edinburgh mystery series. (Edinburgh and crime just seem to go together... maybe it's the weather, which can politely be termed "atmospheric.") Actually, word on the street has it that Rowling, McCall Smith, and Rankin are pals, and sometimes get together for a cup of tea.
To be honest, I read this book two years ago, before Edinburgh was even a glint in my eye, so I don't remember much of the plot or the Edinburgh connections. McCall Smith is better known for his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series, which I prefer for its more lighthearted and chatty style. But if you like five-page philosophical digressions on Camus with your mystery novels (and I know you're out there), this may be a series you'd enjoy.
Who Might Enjoy: Seriously? I just answered that.
The Lymond Chronicles, by Dorothy Dunnett
Neither a mystery nor a book set in the present! The Lymond Chronicles is a massive six-volume series about a Scottish aristocrat named Francis Lymond, who becomes a key player in the political intrigue among England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and others during the early childhood of Mary, Queen of Scots. Lymond is brilliant, and watching him juggle plots and schemes while knowing he'll always somehow pull it out is great fun. His compatriots, sadly, do not always make it out with him (expect to lose many supporting characters along the way) and it's often Lymond's fault. Unlike superman James Bond heroes, he makes mistakes and changes and learns. I am about to start book 4, and I have been assured at a romance book forum I frequent that a thoroughly satisfying romance will conclude this series.
Edinburgh appears many times in the series. This website lists them all, but don't go there if you haven't read the series yet, as it's full of spoilers. One highlight for me was watching Lymond race up the Grassmarket to make it in time for a climactic sword fight in St. Giles' Cathedral. It doesn't look the same, as the building was Catholic during the 1550s but is Church of Scotland today, but if I moved some screens and altars around in my mind, I could get a very good idea of the setting. Bonus for Justin and me - a scene set at Tantallon Castle and a large chunk of the third book in Malta!
Who might enjoy: Anybody who likes a large but tightly plotted historical epic with a great lead character. Diana Gabaldon fans, fans of the Scarlet Pimpernel (with a higher tolerance for secondary character suffering), Scottish history buffs (many real people are part of the story).
Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson
I expect shrieks of outrage from Justin when this post goes up. He did a paper on Kidnapped last term in which he discussed the publication history of the book, including its selection as the first book for the "One Book, One Edinburgh" project. This was a City of Literature campaign to get everyone in Edinburgh to read the same book, and it included sponsoring a graphic novel adaptation of Kidnapped by the legendary Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy. Justin got a very good grade on this paper, but he gets an Incomplete for this blog post.
Kidnapped is set in the 18th century (1700s, for people like me who can never do that math correctly). It's an adventure tale originally published for young men (oh, Justin must be twitching now!). Most of the narrative takes place outside of Edinburgh, with a few exceptions near the beginning and end. It features the famous description of Auld Reekie "smoking like a kiln." I also liked the description of Grassmarket (the same one featured in Lymond):
"The huge height of the buildings, running up to ten and fifteen storeys, the narrow arched entries that continually vomited passengers, the wares of the merchants in their windows, the hubbub and endless stir, the foul smells and the fine clothes, and a hundred other particulars too small to mention.."
Writing in the early 19oos about the mid 1700s and applicable to the early 2000s (see image here). Nicely done, Bobby Louie Stevie.
Who might enjoy: According to Justin, everybody. Good for all ages. Stevenson's writing is clear and vivid and does not read at all as if it's one hundred years old (he's sort of like Orwell that way).
The Highland Countess, by Marion Chesney
You're not getting through this list without at least one romance novel. The Scottish/Highland subgenre in romance is colossal. Edinburgh is Lowland Scotland, so many romances don't actually include scenes here, but The Highland Countess does. I'm including it as a representative for every tartan-covered novel with a claymore-wielding Laird and semi-Scots expressions like "dinna fash" and "wee lassie."
Actually, I love Marion Chesney. My mother probably hates her, because of the time I misplaced a library book called Deborah Goes to Dover and we had to pay for it. I still have no idea where that book is. The Highland Countess is a similar plot to many Regency London-set novels, but it provides a fun alternative setting. I remember the scene in which the heroine, moving into her husband's apartment on the Royal Mile, reflects on some of the same human smells mentioned above by Stevenson. Edinburgh, historically, has not been a salubrious place.
Who might enjoy: Anybody who enjoys clever, short stories with happy endings. This is a very mild romance as far as... well, "romance" goes. Safe for most readers.
Honorable Mentions: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, by Arthur Conan Doyle.
(They're public domain, so if you click on the above links, you can read them online for free!)
Honorable Mentions because these books are ostensibly set in London, but any reader paying attention can pick out Edinburgh elements. Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, has foggy closes and passageways that could only be Old Town Edinburgh. Like Kidnapped, it was chosen as a City of Literature book (of Doyle's work, they chose The Lost World instead of a Holmes novel. It's good but not Edinburgh-y).
Additionally, both feature characters based on real Edinburghers. The double-life of Jekyll and Hyde likely drew on the story of Deacon Brodie, an upstanding Edinburgh cabinetmaker and councilman who just happened to moonlight as a burglar to pay for his gambling habit. Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on one of his professors at the University of Edinburgh, a man named Joseph Bell. The professor was noted for his keen sense of observation and his process of logical deduction. Today, the university has a Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning (very fitting, one must say.)
Who would enjoy: Jekyll and Hyde is a very readable and highly engaging classic. Don't assume you won't enjoy the book just because you know the plot twist. As for Sherlock Holmes - well, don't judge the books by the movie. Anybody could enjoy these. They are not violent and move quite quickly. Personally, I love the short mysteries, which come in collections. The longer mysteries tend to be padded out in the last two-thirds by an extensive victim/perpetrator backstory - of the longer ones, I can only recommend Hound of the Baskervilles without reservation.
And that's not even all the books with Edinburgh connections out there. If you run into another one, leave a comment on the page here and tell me what you thought of it!
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
13 February 2010
24 November 2009
Robert Smail's Printing Works, Innerleithen
Wow, two posts in 24 hours! Don't get too used to it: we've got a bit of a backlog, so we're trying to catch up.
Anyway, last Wednesday Nana and I took a field trip with my book history program to Robert Smail's Printing Works, in Innerleithen, in the Borders.
Robert Smail's, a National Trust for Scotland property, is a working 19th-century print shop and stationery store that doubles as an industrial heritage museum. The property owns and operates an iron hand press and a variety of later-19th-century powered presses. They still do jobbing work--posters, tickets, brochures, etc--but most of their revenue these days comes from visitors like us.
Now, as a book history dork, I could go on for hours about all the details of how work got done in this kind of shop, but I'll spare you. (Though I'd be happy to elaborate if asked.)
The basic process is this:
At Smail's, you can watch just about every step of the process except the fourth (you get to watch step five in the gift shop!). But you actually get to do step one in the compositor's room, where visitors compose their names (upside-down and backwards) and have them printed on a little keepsake bookmark.
The highlight of the tour: I got to use a special "ff" for my name!
That little thing I'm holding is called a "compositor's stick," or just plan "stick." You put the type line-by-line into the stick first before putting it into the forme.
The second highlight, though, was the machine room, where the heavy-duty stuff is kept. The machines still in use included a wacky pedal-powered clamshell press, an enormous old cylindrical poster-printer, and a blisteringly fast German windmill auto-feeder. None of which terms made any sense to me until I saw them in action! Alas, I forgot my memory card, so I only have this picture to share, which shows the pedal-powered clamshell in the lower-left and one of the older auto-feeders in the upper-left.
The machine room also included a paper guillotine that can easily cut through a stack of paper as thick as your arm in one swipe. Yikes.
In any case, the day was full of fun facts. It turns out that several English idioms come from printer's jargon: out of sorts, for example, means that one or more of the boxes (aka, "sorts") in your typecase is empty. Upper case and lower case, of course, come from the fact that capital letters were kept in the top half of the typecase, and when you're taking type off the form and sorting it back into the case, it's important to mind your p's and q's, as those letters are almost identical in most fonts.
On the whole, the trip made for a very fun day, and I'd definitely recommend a trip to a print shop if there's one near you. It's fascinating how easy it is to ignore how what we read is put together!
Anyway, last Wednesday Nana and I took a field trip with my book history program to Robert Smail's Printing Works, in Innerleithen, in the Borders.
Robert Smail's, a National Trust for Scotland property, is a working 19th-century print shop and stationery store that doubles as an industrial heritage museum. The property owns and operates an iron hand press and a variety of later-19th-century powered presses. They still do jobbing work--posters, tickets, brochures, etc--but most of their revenue these days comes from visitors like us.
Now, as a book history dork, I could go on for hours about all the details of how work got done in this kind of shop, but I'll spare you. (Though I'd be happy to elaborate if asked.)
The basic process is this:
- Arrange all the bits of type you want to show up on the page in a big rack called a forme--this is called "compositing."
- Stick the forme (or a copy of the forme called a stereotype) in the press.
- Insert paper; ink the stuff on the form; impress; lather, rinse, repeat as needed.
- Fold, cut, bind the finished product; clean and maintain the machine; put the type back where it belongs.
- Profit.
At Smail's, you can watch just about every step of the process except the fourth (you get to watch step five in the gift shop!). But you actually get to do step one in the compositor's room, where visitors compose their names (upside-down and backwards) and have them printed on a little keepsake bookmark.
The highlight of the tour: I got to use a special "ff" for my name!
The second highlight, though, was the machine room, where the heavy-duty stuff is kept. The machines still in use included a wacky pedal-powered clamshell press, an enormous old cylindrical poster-printer, and a blisteringly fast German windmill auto-feeder. None of which terms made any sense to me until I saw them in action! Alas, I forgot my memory card, so I only have this picture to share, which shows the pedal-powered clamshell in the lower-left and one of the older auto-feeders in the upper-left.
The machine room also included a paper guillotine that can easily cut through a stack of paper as thick as your arm in one swipe. Yikes.
In any case, the day was full of fun facts. It turns out that several English idioms come from printer's jargon: out of sorts, for example, means that one or more of the boxes (aka, "sorts") in your typecase is empty. Upper case and lower case, of course, come from the fact that capital letters were kept in the top half of the typecase, and when you're taking type off the form and sorting it back into the case, it's important to mind your p's and q's, as those letters are almost identical in most fonts.
On the whole, the trip made for a very fun day, and I'd definitely recommend a trip to a print shop if there's one near you. It's fascinating how easy it is to ignore how what we read is put together!
09 October 2009
Why the History of the Book Matters
One of our readers posed an interesting question in an e-mail to the two of us today, which in true grad student fashion I took as a cue to pen a huge missive that tried to cover the whole history of the book in the Western world in one go.
I'm posting my response here because whenever I tell people I'm studying book history, they usually have no idea what that means, but after I talk about it a little, they perk up, usually because they realize how pertinent the questions book historians ask are to the present day.
The e-mail in question, in describing the book as a technology (which one of the many approaches book historians take), first asked what the Romans meant when they said "liber" (the root of "library"), then raised the question of what the internet will do to books and periodicals in their printed forms. Here was my shamefully long response:
The book (codex) as we know it dates from Roman times. Somewhat apocryphally, its invention is attributed to Julius Caesar, who used little booklets of parchment (papyrus doesn't fold easily) for sending messages--in booklet form, you could conserve parchment by writing on both sides, and the message was easier to conceal and carry. The codex really caught on among Christians--this was the first time you had readers of a low-enough class that they had to worry about conserving parchment. Plus, the codex scriptures were easier to smuggle, and they made cross-reference easier.
The printing press, of course, caused scribes to freak out, but it also caused great consternation among the elite readers of the late manuscript age, who worried about the possible political effects of widespread, relatively cheap print. They also worried that print would allow too many authors and too many books to be preserved--an early fear of information overload.
Then, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the boom in literacy and letter writing, the piecemeal introduction of cheap postal service throughout Europe, the spread of periodicals across class lines, the end of perpetual copyright, and the increased commercialization and industrialization of the publishing industry, sparked an information revolution with some striking similarities to what we're seeing now. By the late 19th century, in England at least, nearly everyone was literate, nearly everyone kept up correspondence with people throughout the country and even throughout the empire, there were enough publication venues available that a large number of amateurs could participate in the public debate, and there was simply so much text out there that no one had near enough time to read everything they wanted to read.
During this time, the London publishing companies fought long and hard to stave off the collapse of their old business model (selling extremely expensive, well-made books, in small print runs, to private and public libraries), and only gave in when a) they realized people who couldn't afford books were simply borrowing them from libraries and friends and copying their favorite passages out longhand, and b) they couldn't compete with the cheap editions pouring in from Ireland and Scotland, or with the cheap serials and periodicals being published throughout the Isles. Quite a few old-model London publishers failed--the ones that still survive from that time (Routledge, Macmillan) were the ones who adapted and moved downmarket with a publishing model still in use today: bring out an expensive edition (like hardback) for the libraries and the early-adopters, then a cheaper edition (like paperback) for the majority of readers. The most successful writers were the ones who adapted to the new technology of the periodicals--journalists, and fiction writers who would syndicate their novels. The most successful literary men of all--the new professional agents--were the ones who developed expertise in the complicated new markets created by these new technologies.
I think this is partly why I'm interested in studying the "long 19th century" (1780-1910ish): it's a period of extremely rapid and near-total transformation in how (and which) people read and write, not unlike our own. Parallels abound: e-mail vs. cheap postal service; web magazines, blogs, vs. old periodicals; the three-volume novel vs. the DVD (both of which circulate mainly through rental, and both of which spawned cheap, pirated versions). In the 19th century, some formats and some business models died as a result of the new technology--the three-volume novel, the patronage system of author support, the annual and quarterly volumes of reviews--while some new formats and business models arose in their places--the inexpensive one-volume novel, professional commercial authorship, weeklies and dailies.
Some won, some lost, but on the whole I think we came out ahead: more readers representing a wider slice of society, more reading material, more democratic participation in the public sphere. I think the same is happening now. The new technologies are better for some uses: for example, I don't think anyone needs to write legibly anymore, as long as they can read their own handwriting--we type or speak most communication with others today. Most periodicals don't lose much, and in fact gain a lot, in digital format. I'd say the same for reference materials.
But I still think books are the best tool available for research or cross-reference: the computer screen is basically a scroll, and anyone who has tried to flip through different parts of a PDF (curse you, end notes!) knows what a disaster that can be. Books also work off the grid (a lot of us are too clumsy to take a Kindle anywhere near a bathtub), and the whole display element of owning books is lost in digital formats. Finally, as a firm believer in writing in books, I don't plan on giving the codex up anytime soon. But the newspaper? Online. News television? Online. Reference sources, databases, and archival information? Online. But Jane Austen? Dan Brown? Carla Kelly? The Bible? Sure, digital forms will peel some of the buyers away, but I have a feeling the codex forms will stick around.
Of course, one of the great things about studying book history (as opposed to old-school English lit) is that the people you talk to often have opinions on what you study, because these questions actually touch every literate person's life everyday. So: what do you think? Will the internet kill the book? Wound it? Destroy civilization as we know it?
I'm posting my response here because whenever I tell people I'm studying book history, they usually have no idea what that means, but after I talk about it a little, they perk up, usually because they realize how pertinent the questions book historians ask are to the present day.
The e-mail in question, in describing the book as a technology (which one of the many approaches book historians take), first asked what the Romans meant when they said "liber" (the root of "library"), then raised the question of what the internet will do to books and periodicals in their printed forms. Here was my shamefully long response:
The book (codex) as we know it dates from Roman times. Somewhat apocryphally, its invention is attributed to Julius Caesar, who used little booklets of parchment (papyrus doesn't fold easily) for sending messages--in booklet form, you could conserve parchment by writing on both sides, and the message was easier to conceal and carry. The codex really caught on among Christians--this was the first time you had readers of a low-enough class that they had to worry about conserving parchment. Plus, the codex scriptures were easier to smuggle, and they made cross-reference easier.
The printing press, of course, caused scribes to freak out, but it also caused great consternation among the elite readers of the late manuscript age, who worried about the possible political effects of widespread, relatively cheap print. They also worried that print would allow too many authors and too many books to be preserved--an early fear of information overload.
Then, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the boom in literacy and letter writing, the piecemeal introduction of cheap postal service throughout Europe, the spread of periodicals across class lines, the end of perpetual copyright, and the increased commercialization and industrialization of the publishing industry, sparked an information revolution with some striking similarities to what we're seeing now. By the late 19th century, in England at least, nearly everyone was literate, nearly everyone kept up correspondence with people throughout the country and even throughout the empire, there were enough publication venues available that a large number of amateurs could participate in the public debate, and there was simply so much text out there that no one had near enough time to read everything they wanted to read.
During this time, the London publishing companies fought long and hard to stave off the collapse of their old business model (selling extremely expensive, well-made books, in small print runs, to private and public libraries), and only gave in when a) they realized people who couldn't afford books were simply borrowing them from libraries and friends and copying their favorite passages out longhand, and b) they couldn't compete with the cheap editions pouring in from Ireland and Scotland, or with the cheap serials and periodicals being published throughout the Isles. Quite a few old-model London publishers failed--the ones that still survive from that time (Routledge, Macmillan) were the ones who adapted and moved downmarket with a publishing model still in use today: bring out an expensive edition (like hardback) for the libraries and the early-adopters, then a cheaper edition (like paperback) for the majority of readers. The most successful writers were the ones who adapted to the new technology of the periodicals--journalists, and fiction writers who would syndicate their novels. The most successful literary men of all--the new professional agents--were the ones who developed expertise in the complicated new markets created by these new technologies.
I think this is partly why I'm interested in studying the "long 19th century" (1780-1910ish): it's a period of extremely rapid and near-total transformation in how (and which) people read and write, not unlike our own. Parallels abound: e-mail vs. cheap postal service; web magazines, blogs, vs. old periodicals; the three-volume novel vs. the DVD (both of which circulate mainly through rental, and both of which spawned cheap, pirated versions). In the 19th century, some formats and some business models died as a result of the new technology--the three-volume novel, the patronage system of author support, the annual and quarterly volumes of reviews--while some new formats and business models arose in their places--the inexpensive one-volume novel, professional commercial authorship, weeklies and dailies.
Some won, some lost, but on the whole I think we came out ahead: more readers representing a wider slice of society, more reading material, more democratic participation in the public sphere. I think the same is happening now. The new technologies are better for some uses: for example, I don't think anyone needs to write legibly anymore, as long as they can read their own handwriting--we type or speak most communication with others today. Most periodicals don't lose much, and in fact gain a lot, in digital format. I'd say the same for reference materials.
But I still think books are the best tool available for research or cross-reference: the computer screen is basically a scroll, and anyone who has tried to flip through different parts of a PDF (curse you, end notes!) knows what a disaster that can be. Books also work off the grid (a lot of us are too clumsy to take a Kindle anywhere near a bathtub), and the whole display element of owning books is lost in digital formats. Finally, as a firm believer in writing in books, I don't plan on giving the codex up anytime soon. But the newspaper? Online. News television? Online. Reference sources, databases, and archival information? Online. But Jane Austen? Dan Brown? Carla Kelly? The Bible? Sure, digital forms will peel some of the buyers away, but I have a feeling the codex forms will stick around.
Of course, one of the great things about studying book history (as opposed to old-school English lit) is that the people you talk to often have opinions on what you study, because these questions actually touch every literate person's life everyday. So: what do you think? Will the internet kill the book? Wound it? Destroy civilization as we know it?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
