The Year of the Horse

Er ya yin tu / PL2475 .J4 1801
Guo Pu, Er ya yin tu (Beijing? 1801) / PL2475 .J4 1801

The Rare Book Collection celebrates the Chinese Lunar New Year and the beginning of the Year of the Horse with images from an edition of the Er ya yin tu. The famous Chinese dictionary/encyclopedia was first compiled during the Han Dynasty (260 BCE – 220 CE). The woodblock-printed edition above (1801) is based on the text annotated by the scholar Guo Pu (276-324), which became the preferred version during the Song Dynasties (960-1279). The RBC’s Er ya yin tu—which translates as “Approaching the Correct”—was featured in the spring 2013 Wilson Library exhibition The Encyclopedic Impulse.

The Chinese zodiac has a time cycle of twelve years, each year being named for a different animal. Those humans born in a particular year are believed to share some of the traits of its animal. And so, 2014’s babies to come are forecast to be intelligent, popular, and clever, as horses are judged to be.

Tonight is the night for firecrackers and red envelopes, as well as horses, according to Chinese tradition. Happy New Year!

BSA Annual Meeting at Bibliography Week

UNC Curator of Rare Books and outgoing BSA President Claudia Funke presided at the annual meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America last Friday at New York City’s Grolier Club.

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There, she had the great pleasure of introducing the BSA’s annual speaker, Matthew Kirschenbaum, associate professor at the University of Maryland and one of the leading researchers and thinkers in the digital humanities.

Prof. Kirschenbaum gave the talk everyone in the bibliographical community needed to hear: “Operating Systems of the Mind: The Bibliographical Description and Analysis of Born-Digital Texts.” Exploring John Updike’s use of his first computer, as well as his typewriter ribbons, Kirschenbaum highlighted key aspects of technology that have serious implications for analyzing computer-generated texts. The address was both profound and witty, and beautifully plotted and illustrated.

Those who were unable to attend in person, look for the lecture’s printing in the December 2014 issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. 

Bibliography Week in NYC

Today in NYC, Bibliography Week begins: five days of events and meetings hosted by the nation’s leading organizations for the study of books and their history.

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Bergdorf Goodman store window with “Cary Collection” of “vintage books,” available through the 7th floor Decorative Home department.
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Maria Fredericks, Morgan Library book conservator, ponders light levels of the Fifth Avenue display as UNC curator Claudia Funke snaps away.

Just a stone’s throw from some of the principal proceedings, Bergdorf Goodman, one of NYC’s upscale department stores, is oddly in sync. Its Fifth Avenue windows feature a collection of “vintage books” for sale through its Decorative Home department.

Bibliography Week, however, looks at books as more than mere wallpaper or window dressing. Topics to be examined in lectures include the unauthorized publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the bibliographical analysis and description of born-digital texts. The annual meetings of the Grolier Club, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the American Printing History Association will also highlight ongoing programs, publications, and business.

And of course, there will be plenty of time for informal but serious book talk over a glass or two. . . .

Siberia in Chapel Hill: A Blad for the Blog

It’s forecast to feel like Siberia here in the Southern part of heaven. So we’re dressing for it in our Northern sweaters. And turning to our Travel Book Collection for tales of frosty lands.

J.W. Buel, Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia (Hartford, Conn., 1883) / Travel DK26 B93 1883
J.W. Buel, Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia (Hartford, Conn., 1883) / Travel DK26 B93 1883

This volume has to have one of the most evocative of 19th-century decorated bindings—with its images of an angel, chaos, a shackled prisoner, and icicled letters. However, looking for the story inside, one is disappointed. The book is a salesman’s sample, a dummy book, or “blad,” and has only a hundred of the title’s 545 pages. Blads were used by traveling salesmen as samples of books that could be purchased by subscription. On the inside front cover, specimen spines of alternative binding styles were customarily mounted, as shown below.

SpineThe back of this book features a notice on “Conditions of Subscription,” which lists the price in a cloth binding at $2.50 and a leather one at $3.00. It stipulates that the book is for sale by subscription only “and will never be for sale in book stores or on railroad trains, and persons desiring to purchase must do so from the canvassing agent.”

subscrThe terms further state that “Persons signing their names in this Prospectus as subscribers, will be expected to receive and pay for the book when delivered by the Agent, only on condition that the complete book is as here represented.” Of the twenty-two individuals subsequently signing, seventeen requested that the book be bound in leather, a decision that mystifies us, enamored as we are of the pictorial binding.

To view this book’s cloth covering—and the decoratively patterned coverings of the RBC’s stewards—come out of the Chapel Hill cold and get warm inside Wilson Library’s North Carolina Collection / Rare Book Collection Reading Room.