Hello students, this is our course wordpress. During our first weeks of class, you are going to select a book or bookish object from Wesleyan’s library and archives. You are going to adopt this book as your “pet” and get to know it throughout the semester. I want you to really get to know this book, as you would a creature or person. If you are working on a medieval manuscript or book with a parchment substrate (that is, the support for writing), then you will literally be working with a object made of skin and flesh as you are made of skin and flesh! Books have personalities, quirks, lives. And these aspects reveal can reveal fascinating information about texts, cultures, and people too. You are going to examine every aspect of books as material objects: the text, the script, the ink, the paint, the binding, the smell. For a bit of fun watch this famous book historian longing to even taste rare books so he can get to know them better, in their totality: TASTE THE BOOK. Please do not eat your pet book.
We can only hope that by the end of this course you’ll be as eager book detectives as our Dr. De Hammel.
Four blog posts will be due this semester. Each post will focus on a different aspect of your pet book. They must be 600-800 words, and they must be illustrated. You are encouraged to take photographs and videos. You may choose to draw your book. You may choose to create a table or charts. WordPress has many tools through which you can add media to your posts. Consider what an illustration is for and how it interacts with your text, when you write your posts. Is you “illustration” elucidating your text? Is it enriching the text? Is it troubling or complicating the text? How? And (now that you are an author and book-maker) for what purpose? Thinking critically not only about your pet book but these posts themselves as a kind of ebook, will help you to become a more advanced semitician and book historian.
You are encouraged to comment on each other’s posts and you are welcome to work work on your posts collaboratively, though every student must adopt their own book.
Your first step in adopting your pet book will be to visit Wesleyan’s special collections and archives. Their website is here: https://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/sca/
PS The tagline of this blog is a reference to this book with a thrilling cover: PET ROCK MANUAL. Have fun!
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