Please note: My Postulation "Why We Love Print Books" focuses on physical, printed materials that are accessible for sighted or fully-sighted individuals. More can be said about the immense worth, both personal and pragmatic, of braille books and other physical resources specifically designed to be accessible and comprehensible to individuals with blindness or limited vision. If you would like to add to this discussion, please contact me to share your ideas.
Below are some Book Images and further thoughts from Professor Kermode. You may Right-Select the image and choose "open in a new tab" to view it larger. Copyright for these images belongs to Lloyd Kermode.
 |
1. Female book ownership and relationship of early modern women to books (both manuscript and print) = growing field. This is a 1660 royalist book owned by one “Mary Dalton, “ with a funny portrait apparently of King George II facing up to some kind of goose(?) |
 |
2. Competing ownership signatures within two(?) families or related family units — [with] women getting in there! |
 |
3. Embroidered bindings, often by women, often psalters or other religious books, indicating their value as artistic objects as well as divine text. (You can find good images of embroidered bindings online) |
 |
4a & 4b. Another use of “bookish” art – 17th C wooden “book boxes” used to store a collection of herbs [from a Dutch museum] |
 |
4a & 4b. Another use of “bookish” art – 17th C wooden “book boxes” used to store a collection of herbs [from a Dutch museum] |
 |
5. Title pages often have ownership signatures on them; sometimes old ones are crossed out and new ones written in. If the book is politically sensitive like this one on the civil war in England 1642-49, then a later owner may decide to cut out the old name with scissors rather than risk having someone see that old name in a book in his library. (That’s just a guess about what’s going on here, but notice that the old name was already crossed out—so to cut it out suggests it was an embarrassing/dangerous name.) |