Showcare Initials with airSlate SignNow

Showcare initials

hello and welcome to a virtual showcase of stanford's rare books and special collections materials i'm ben albritton i'm the rare books curator at stanford libraries and special collections in normal times we would invite you all into special collections to look at these materials in person but what i'll try to do today is give you a brief overview of some of the types of book arts related materials that we have here and hope that they'll serve as a teaser to bring you in and see these materials in person when we're finally able to i'd like to start by taking us back nearly 4 000 years to examine a cuneiform tablet one of the oldest pieces of textual material in the library and this is an object that records a simple transaction of grain but our colleagues in the digital production group here at stanford including astrid smith have provided the three 3d rendering of this object for us so that we can look in more detail at the impressions in clay that were left recording this transaction and while it doesn't match up to touching the piece or holding it in your hand i hope you can get a sense for some of the um the approaches here to recording text in a very very early time if we jump ahead a number of centuries millennia even we can look at another type of textual material that we hold here so these are papyrus fragments that we have in the collection these are organic material a plant material that's been pressed together to form a writing surface and as we scroll through we can see that they record a number of different types of transactions some are letters some are receipts or business transactions some are simple inventories and as we zoom in you can see the fragmentary nature of the pieces that we have here a lot of these are recovered from mummy cartonage or were recovered from mummy cartonage in the previous century but they still bare traces of of writing in ink even though there are a number of voids and if we look on the back of this particular fragment this letter we can still see some of the remnants of um adhesive material and paint and that sort of thing uh letting us know where this actually came from before it was um before it was entered into our collection one of the things that we can do now that these materials have been fully digitized and are being served with a protocol from the international image interoperability framework is compare multiple examples side by side to get a sense of differences between um survival in the the papyri or difference in texture or various other differences between multiple objects so one of the things we're going to do is grab this little triple af logo and drop it into another viewer where i've already set up the letter we were looking at before and here you can see we can set up a side by side comparison view of these two items and compare the survival rate of some of the papyri the structure of the papyrus that we see and we can see that plant material next we move into the second century with a legal document rewarding an auxiliary soldier with roman citizenship for him and for his children after honorable discharge after 25 years of service and this would have been possibly affixed to the wall a wall um and we can see just a little bit of the remaining text that's left on this object front and back um as we zoom in just a little bit further and it's thought that sometimes these may have been broken up and given to a soldier's children which is a potential explanation for the fragmentary nature of what we're looking at we're going to move ahead about 900 years now to a musical example showing a chant for the feast of saint paul and particularly the conversion of saul on the road to damascus and we're looking at text with musical notation interspersed and it's slightly simplified musical notation as you'll see a single red line marks the letter or the the note f and above them below it you can just make out dry point ruling for an array above and below like a stave and if we zoom in a little bit further you get a real sense of f both that f notation but also those little black dots which are follicles in the vellum itself and this hole that we're looking at here was probably also in the animal skin when this manuscript was created and you can see that the scribe has worked around that hole just a little bit possibly a bug bite or something else which really connects us to the the physical being that became this book now where does something like this come from as you'll see on the back side of this we get a real sense that this was a binding on a book so it was used to wrap the boards of the book as a decorative element and you can see the spine of the book running down through the middle there with the elements that are then folded over to finish the binding off we have a number of these kinds of fragments pasted over boards in the collection but they're not well cataloged and here you see my colleagues john and peter happily discovering one on the shelves in our storage area we always keep an eye out for these sorts of manuscript inclusions from about the same time within a few centuries about 963 we have a slightly different kind of object a simple transaction that's been recorded a deed of sale and you can see there's some decorative elements like the i in in nominee domini and that g and echo is particularly nice but then it also records the names of the people involved including um fluridia the wife of the the person selling the the land here and if we zoom back out we see some other decorative elements um particularly the name of the the witness here mouritzinus who served basically as the notary on this and then if we scroll over a little bit a wonderfully exuberant uh scribal signature so trusovario is the the scribe who wrote this text and the alphabet that he's using here is particularly interesting to look at extremely decorative extremely jupilant our next object is a 13th century manuscript but as you can see it's bound later so this is a 19th century binding done by an englishman living in paris capturing the um the red and white roses of um of england but if we look inside a little bit we can explore this book in a little bit more detail so it's a small prayer book not much bigger than my hand and you can see that the text is very clear a beautiful hand with some decorated initials throughout but of particular interest to us is the provenance of this piece so in the top right hand corner you can see winchester named but if we look at the bottom we've got elizabeth the elizabeth of york um the the 15th century early 16th century tudor queen so this was in her possession even though it had been created in the 13th century she was using it some 200 300 years later um and you get a real sense of connection with the owner of this book and we can look in some detail through the book at various inclusions and changes that have been made here is a later bookmark that's been added which at the moment is overlaying a beautiful initial but if we look in an incredibly ornamented 13th century initial here in this book and so probably a book for private prayer perhaps the text was laid out this way to make it a little bit easier to read um one more um very nice ornate t here so you can see that great detail grey care was taken in decorating this manuscript even though in general it's fairly simple and it's in its layout but if we look at the end of the book we can also see some later damage that's been done so somebody probably in the 19th or 20th century put a chemical reagent on top of the text to try to recover it thereby damaging the manuscript as they were doing that so a wonderful example of a medieval book that lived a very long life many centuries of use before it made its way to stanford in comparison let's take a look at a 15th century book of hours another prayer book probably for private prayer but here very decorated so the book starts off with a calendar listing all of the feast days per month which could give you a guide to where the book was from or who the intended audience was for this with red and brown inc interspersed but throughout we have these wonderful openings that are highly decorated and provide a space and a moment for contemplation within the book and as we can see that there are there's textual elements there are decorative elements and then there's a painting and we can take a quick look at this um this peacock facing us at the bottom of the page on the rectum and birds throughout here within this foliate border one up in the right hand corner as well seems ready to burst into song so richly decorated in these openings throughout and the initial here also is is rich with foliage within a blue d we can also take a look at some of the artistic elements on the left hand side on the versailles and we have christ crucified but there's a fair amount of damage that's been done to the painting itself possibly through touching over time and as we scroll down we can just see that this is a well-planned border around this illustration a quick overview look through here you can see that those wildly decorated pages are punctuated by many pages of text throughout so moments of ornate decoration within an otherwise fairly fairly straightforward text to close with this one we can take a quick look at the the day of resurrection and as we zoom in a little bit you can see that the text itself has been damaged there's still some fantastical birds in the borders but the depiction on the the left hand side on the verso of the page has christ on a rainbow with the dead rising from their graves and the angels sounding the trumpets so some wonderful detail decorative detail in this reflecting both the text that's in this prayer book but also providing a visual space for contemplation and prayer within the book itself i'd like to move now to a set of 15th uh primarily 15th and 16th century manuscript pages that the the berks robert and catherine burke have put on deposit at stanford because this is something that i would really have liked you to be able to see in person these are manuscript art decorated initials that have been cut out of choir books and this was a vogue in the 18th and 19th century and even into the 20th century saved for their art rather than their liturgical or musical content and we'll look at one page uh with an initial that depicts the three mary's at the tomb and you can see this wonderful dragon uh forming an initial a within which a story is being depicted and here we have the angel in the empty tomb the three mary's arriving all within the arms of this dragon who is uh forming an a for uh angelus and here again we see some wonderful work in the decorative borders including faces uh within um something that looks like foliage it's a very decorative border with a coat of arms which allows us to provide some sense of the the provenance who this might have been created for and as you can see on the back much like our book of hours this is a very plain musical manuscript on the non-decorated pages a liturgical manuscript that is as we continue to move through the burke collection i'm going to take you to one of my favorite pieces here because of its incredible rich detail just covered in gold so this is a depiction of christ with david playing the sultry and as you can see it's it's just bursting with gold throughout and if we zoom in a little bit we can see some of the foliate borders here and then we see the a nun associated with the convent for which this manuscript was produced and david playing a wired uh strong instrument the saltery and hidden within the gold leaf that's overlaid on this page is the chalice and wafer symbols of the mass and the communion if we move up we have christ with his book all within this riot of color and gold and then the borders a wonderfully rendered dragonfly so finely detailed that we can see the veins in its wings and its eyes and if we scroll a little bit to the left here a rabbit hidden in the border as well some fantastic artistic elements tucked in here this multi-colored bird hiding below and then various dragons and fantastical flowers and shapes included throughout so i really encourage you to come back and visit the burke collection either online or in person when you have time oh and we should also note that this is just one very large initial b for this particular page so the textual element is there as well i'll provide the the website for that at the end of this presentation let's move into the the printed era now and most of you will know of gutenberg and his famous press and stanford's lucky enough to own a leaf from the gutenberg bible and the first impression that you probably will get is that this looks very much like the manuscripts we've been looking at in terms of textual material and as we zoom in a little bit further we can see that there are printed elements but then also handwritten elements hand decorated elements within this book so a multimedia sort of presentation with print material and handwritten decoration if we look at the back of this leaf it becomes a little bit more clear that in fact the initials have been added by hand so it would have taken somebody some time to do this and it's a nice interim between what we think of as full printing and the manuscript period which preceded it we put a number of our beautiful books into an exhibit the website will be at the end of this presentation which i encourage you to come in and explore in more detail and this includes material that's been digitized by astrid and her team over the years and chosen by john mustain my predecessor in this job and other curators one particularly interesting piece in here is our euclid incunable and so this is a geometrical a book describing geometry but you can see that care has been taken to decorate it nicely with the with the fly leaves there and then we can take a look at the the book arts details including black and red printing and then wonderfully ornate borders and initials and then added in mathematical diagrams throughout so really a tour de force of book creation and book printing with rooms for decoration or room for decoration within the elements as well by hand and if we scroll down a little bit further just give you a sense of the overall scope of the book we can take a look at some of the more detailed diagrams here and the fact that it would have taken quite a lot to compose this for the press and then have it printed up without too many errors we'll jump ahead to another of our scientific books now and as you can see this is the the cedarius nuncius for the story messenger of galileo galilei a wonderful scientific text that we're very lucky to have in our collection and once some of the things that make it particularly important are the depictions of celestial observations included with the text so a picture tells a thousand words and galileo was particularly good about providing telescope observations throughout his his text that provided rich scientific detail for his readers it's a fairly short text but one of my favorite openings is this depiction of star fields throughout constellations and as a printing element i just think it's absolutely beautiful where you have the regular text and then these artistic star elements put in as as diagrams for the text so another tour de force of the printing art to mix text and these various scientific uh and observational elements like this double feature of the moon uh with a lot of detail including um craters and uh and other geographic features the last of our books that we'll explore in some detail takes us right up into the 19th century with something from the kilmscott press and i chose this particularly because it harkens back to our medieval print and manuscript books as you saw it was bound in leather and has a very simple title page much like the incunables do in our collection small table of contents but then a wonderful lavish decorated opening to begin the text and this looks very much in terms of layout and design i like the book of hours that we were examining just a little while ago where we have fully borders a riot of detail going on and then mixed in with red and black printing text and some illustrative elements as well so an incredible piece of book art from the kelmscot press in the 19th century right down to the details of of the decorators if we move ahead in the book a little bit it becomes much more simple as we move into the next couple of pages but there are still wonderful decorative elements that harken back to the early printing periods from the 15th and 16th century and that concludes a brief tour but i wanted to point to some things that are coming in the near future as well one of the things that we're doing is trying to collect more arts and crafts calligraphy examples and we were lucky enough to be able to buy at auction three pieces from phoebe anna trakwar the arts and crafts superstar of the scottish arts and crafts and her decorative elements here studies of medieval manuscript letters as well as some wonderful calligraphy which should enter the collection in the next couple of months and then be available so thank you for joining me for that quick tour nothing beats seeing these things in in person so please come and visit us when you can everything that i've shown you today is online along with many other thousands of objects and i've given the links here but i do just want to extend an open invitation to everybody viewing this to come see us in special collections when covet is over and you can get in touch with me directly or with with our department at the website provided here to make an appointment and come see material and we look forward to meeting you in person someday thank you you