New Books in Library Science

On today’s program, I talk with Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle about their new book, The Art of the Bible Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World, published by Thames and Hudson (and distributed in the United States by W. W. Norton) in November 2016.The book looks at 45 featured manuscripts from across the globe and through 1,000 years of history, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Queen Mary Psalter, the Canterbury Royal Bible, the Old English Hextateuch, the Welles Apocalypse, and the Paduan Bible Picture Book, among others. With more than 300 illustrations, which have been meticulously color corrected for this new book, the authors shed light on some of the finest but least-known paintings from the Middle Ages and on the development of art, literature, and civilization as we know it.Dr. Scot McKendrick is the head of Western Heritage Collections at the British Library. His publications include Codex Sinaiticus: New Perspective on the Ancient Biblical Manuscript; Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe; and The Bible as Book: Transmissions of the Greek Text.Dr. Kathleen Doyle is the lead curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library. She was the co-curator, with Dr. McKendrick, of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded exhibition, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, and the lead investigator for the Royal Manuscripts follow-on project, editing with Dr. McKendrick the volume 1,000 Years of Royal Books and Manuscripts.Together the authors also edited Bible Manuscripts: 1,400 Years of Scribes and Scripture, published by the British Library in 2007.To view some of the illuminated manuscripts discussed on this program, visit the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts at https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/.You can also follow @blmedieval on Twitter, which is linked to the authors’ Medieval Manuscripts blog.Garrett Brown is the host of New Books in Biblical Studies. He is a publisher and editor and blogs at noteandquery.com. Follow the channel on Twitter @newbooksbible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scholars and commentators have used metaphor in an attempt to describe the Web since public access began. Think of ideas like the information highway, cyberspace, the digital library, etc. In her new book, The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2014), Payal Arora, an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, takes a novel approach to the use of metaphor by examining the parallels between public common spaces and Web 2.0. In the book, Arora uses an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the historical, geographical, political and social issues related to public parks. In so doing, Arora, provides a foundation for how policymakers, organizations and individuals may conceptualizes the debates surrounding common spaces, particularly Web 2.0. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Darnton, Author and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard, discusses the future of libraries, the Digital Public Library of America project, challenges in creating a national online library, the role of libraries in the digital age, and the challenges they face in preserving the republic and the vision of the founders.

The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The opening is the illumination of a grave as you, the reader, turn on a light to read the sunken stone. In the space between these two moments, each centered on a thing displayed (a map on a wall, a body under your feet), the story of a third object emerges from amid the threads of the people, languages, relationships, wars, and seas with which it has been entangled for more than 400 years.Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer (Bloomsbury, 2013) explores the secrets of a map in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. In a beautifully written historical mystery, Timothy Brook follows the map from its arrival at the Library after the death of a late owner, a scholar who helped found the field of international law and found himself jailed by two kings along the way. Brook takes us backward through the historical currents that informed the visible features of this map, those features including a compass rose, a gourd with Coleridgian resonances, a network of sea routes, a pair of Gobi Desert butterflies, and much more. As it changes hands among a host of characters that include a business man trading in cloves and pornography from Japan to England, an unlikely teacher and student of the Chinese language, Samuel Purchas of Purchas his Pilgrimage, and a trouble-making lawyer, the map traces a global history of the seagoing world before it comes to rest on a wall next to the flayed tattooed skin of a Pacific Islander, and ultimately on two library tables before the gaze of a curious historian. It is a wonderful story and a fascinating mystery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

WorldCat is the largest online catalog in the world, accessing the collections of more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. Using the catalog, a subject search of particular sports turns up the following tally of book titles in the world’s libraries: Boxing: 5164, Hockey: 7083, Cricket: 10,881, Horse... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the last thirty years, Jonathon Green has established himself as a major figure in lexicography, specialising in English slang. During this time he has accumulated a database of over half a million citations for more than 100,000 words and phrases, and these are the basis for the vast, authoritative and widely acclaimed Green’s Dictionary of Slang (Hodder Education, 2010), winner of the Dartmouth Medal as the American Library Association’s ‘outstanding reference work of the year’.Slang’s definition is itself perhaps elusive, but to Green it is ‘counter-language’, by analogy with ‘counter-culture’, and possesses the same vivid qualities: it is irreverent, subversive and fun. It is, however, also important for what it tells us about how people live, interact and think, and is worthy of serious study.In this interview we do not attempt to summarise the A-Z of slang (nor even the C-F), but we do talk about slang’s relation to culture, the history of its lexicography, and the day-to-day work of its researchers. We talk about the benefits of the internet for this work, as well as the limitations of user-generated alternatives and the challenges they pose to the professional scholar. And inevitably, we bring together the themes of the Oxford English Dictionary, canonical literature and comic-book porn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We don’t think much about institutions. They just seem to “be there.” But they have a history, as Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton show in their important new book Reinventing Knowledge. From Alexandria to the Internet (W.W. Norton, 2008). The book deals specifically with institutions in which knowledge has been created, preserved, and transmitted: the library, the monastery, the university, the Republic of Letters, the academic disciplines, and the laboratory. In clear, readable and spicy prose, McNeely and Wolverton show how each of these institutions was created, how they developed, and how they have been molded to novel purposes in successive ages. Reading Reinventing Knowledge is especially enlightening in that it demonstrates an important fact about history: the present is always assimilating and transforming the past. As McNeely and Wolverton show, our beloved “ancient” institutions are actually quite modern in their form and function, if not name. What we call a “university” would be unrecognizable to a “university” student of the 15th century. It turns out that the more things change, the more they change, though we tend to call them by old names. This is a terrific book, a model for the way popular history should be written. It should find a wide audience. Go buy it.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices