https://ar.pinterest.com/lambethpalaceli/

read [[Dan Allosso]] in Actual Books

Sometimes a physical copy of a book gives one information not contained in digital scans. Allosso provides the example of Charles Knowlton's book The Fruits of Philosophy which touched on abortion and was published as a tiny hand-held book which would have made it easy to pass from person to person more discretely for its time period.

Newton's notebook was done in a tête-bêche (French for "head-to-toe") style in which he flipped the notebook over and began using it from the back to the front as a means of starting a second notebook within to separate the contents.

Collection in Focus: Sir Isaac Newton's Pocket Memorandum Book<br /> by The Morgan Library & Museum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Zpo5yla7w

More details and a digitized version of this memorandum book at https://www.themorgan.org/collection/isaac-newton/memorandum-book

https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9943764163503681

https://colenda.library.upenn.edu/catalog/81431-p3xh3p

Guzman-Lopez, Adolfo. “How A Centuries-Old History Of Indigenous Mexico Inspired These College Students To Change Career Paths.” LAist, November 1, 2023. https://laist.com/news/education/florentine-codex-getty-digitization-project-higher-education.

Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 5 - FINALE - Leather Tooling - Brass Hardware - Final Assembly <br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7LCldA51XE

Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 4 - Paring and Applying Leather https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9j9MqyoyYA

Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 3 - Wooden Boards, Carving & Mortising, Attaching the Covers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzJujQGBbak

Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 2 - Trimming & Rounding, Edge Decoration, Sewing Endbands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFRrbxyjerE

Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 1 - Folding Pages, Endpapers, Piercing & Sewing<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFuWfhESpFc

https://www.academia.edu/community/VDDN6V

Evina Stein has a nice list of digital manuscript databases

https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/event/11338479

Parchment has two distinguishable sides:<br /> hair, which is usually darker and may show follicles (and even hair itself when poorly scraped) and<br /> flesh, which is usually lighter.

Most planned manuscripts' bindings have the hair side of the parchment facing hair sides of opposing leaf and similarly the flesh facing flesh.

Because of additions and potential mistakes in binding there are places in LJS 101 in which hair faces flesh and vice-versa. This "mistake" can provide an indication of binding procedures or mistakes in them.

Notes from event on 2023-09-07

Used as part of the Carolingian educational program (rhetoric)

As of 2023, it's the oldest codex manuscript in Philadelphia

Formerly part of the (Thomas) Phillipps Collection (MSS Phillips appears on p1); see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Phillipps

There is some green highlighting on portions of the text

contains some marginalia and interlineal notations

Periermenias is the Greek title

Underdotting of some of the letters is used to indicate deletion of the text (used like striking out text today)

There are two sets of Carolingian script in the book, likely by different hands/times.

Shows prick marks in parchment for drawing lines to write evenly.

Has a few diagrams: squares of opposites (philosophy); color was added in XI C or possibly later

folio 45 switch to newer MS copy to continue text

Poem in last few lines with another text following it

parchment is smaller in one section at the end.

Another poem and then a letter to an abbott with a few pages in between (likely misbound) - quire of 12

Book starts with grammar, then Boethius translation of Aristotle, and then a letter. This could be an example of the trivium put together purposely for pedagogy sake, though we're missing all of their intended purpose (it wasn't written down).

https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/event/11148297

9th-century copy of Boethius's Latin translation of Aristotle's De interpretatione, referred to in the manuscript as Periermenias, with the shorter of two commentaries that Boethius wrote on that work. Replacement leaves added in the 11th century to the beginning (f. 1-4) and end (f. 45-64) of the manuscript, in addition to providing the beginning and end of the Boethius (which is probably lacking 2 gatherings between extant gatherings 6 and 7), include the Periermeniae attributed to Apuleius in the medieval period, a poem by Decimus Magnus Ausonius on the seven days of Creation, a sample letter of a monk to an abbot with interlinear and marginal glosses, and other miscellaneous verses, definitions, and excerpts. Dot Porter, University of Pennsylvania, has determined that two groups of leaves are misbound; leaves 5-12 (the original order appears to have been 5, 9, 10, 6, 7, 11, 12, 8) and leaves 53-64 (the original order of the leaves appears to have been 61, 62, 53-60, 63, 64).

Ask The Expert - Foxing - FIZZ Gallery

https://de-crypt.org/

https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2023/02/knights-hospitaller.html

https://mittelalter.hypotheses.org/22292

reply to u/stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10qw4l5/are_there_symbols_for_supported_by_or/

In addition to the other excellent suggestions, I don't think you'll find anything specific that that was used historically for these, but there are certainly lots of old annotation symbols you might be able to co-opt for your personal use.

Evina Steinova has a great free cheat sheet list of annotation symbols: The Most Common Annotation Symbols in Early Medieval Western Manuscripts (a cheat sheet).

More of this rabbit hole:

• Steinová, Evina. Notam Superponere Studui: The Use of Annotation Symbols in the Early Middle Ages. Brepols, 2019.
• Cappelli, Adriano. The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography. University of Kansas Libr., 1984.
• Coulson, Frank, and Robert Babcock. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography. Oxford University Press, 2020.
• Lindsay, W. M. Notae Latinae. Cambridge University Press, 2013. https://archive.org/download/notaelatinaeacco00lindrich/notaelatinaeacco00lindrich.pdf.
• Bains, Doris. A Supplement to Notae Latinae (Abbreviations in Latin Mss. of 850 to 1050 A.D.). Cambridge [England] University Press, 1936. http://archive.org/details/supplementtonota0000bain.

(Nota bene: most of my brief research here only extends to Western traditions, primarily in Latin and Greek. Obviously other languages and eras will have potential ideas as well.)

Tironian shorthand may have something you could repurpose as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes

Some may find the auxiliary signs of the Universal Decimal Classification useful for some of these sorts of notations for conjoining ideas.

Given the past history of these sorts of symbols and their uses, perhaps it might be useful for us all to aggregate a list of common ones we all use as a means of re-standardizing some of them in modern contexts? Which ones does everyone use?

Here are some I commonly use:

Often for quotations, citations, and provenance of ideas, I'll use Maria Popova and Tina Roth Eisenberg's Curator's Code:

• ᔥ for "via" to denote a direct quotation/source— something found elsewhere and written with little or no modification or elaboration (reformulation notes)
• ↬ for "hat tip" to stand for indirect discovery — something for which you got the idea at a source, but modified or elaborated on significantly (inspiration by a source, but which needn't be cited)

Occasionally I'll use a few nanoformats, from the microblogging space, particularly

• L: to indicate location

For mathematical proofs, in addition to their usual meanings, I'll use two symbols to separate biconditionals (necessary/sufficient conditions)

• (⇒) as a heading for the "if" portion of the proof
• (⇐) for the "only if" portion

Some historians may write 19c to indicate 19th Century, often I'll abbreviate using Roman numerals instead, so "XIX".

Occasionally, I'll also throw drolleries or other symbols into my margins to indicate idiosyncratic things that may only mean something specifically to me. This follows in the medieval traditions of the ars memoria, some of which are suggested in Cornwell, Hilarie, and James Cornwell. Saints, Signs, and Symbols: The Symbolic Language of Christian Art 3rd Edition. Church Publishing, Inc., 2009. The modern day equivalent of this might be the use of emoji with slang meanings or 1337 (leet) speak.

https://abbreviationes.net/

https://www.scribesofthecairogeniza.org/

https://genizalab.princeton.edu/events/2022/princeton-machine-learning-and-future-philology-symposium

Was this recorded?

Much like earlier scribal errors, there are textual errors inserted into digitization projects which may have gone from documentary originals, into handwritten (translated) copies, which then were copied manually via typewriter, and then copied again into some digital form, and then changed again into other digital forms as digital formats changed.

As a result it is often fruitful to be able to compare the various versions to see the sorts of errors which each level of copying can introduce. One might suppose that textual errors were only common when done by scribes using manual techniques, but it is just as likely for errors to be inserted between digital copies as well.

Benjamin Richler, A Guide to Hebrew Manuscript Collections (Jerusalem, 1994), 2nd rev. ed. (Jerusalem, 2014). For an entry on the Geniza, see ibid., 79–81. See also entries for specific libraries and collections.

This has hints of the stereotypical Borscht Belt humor seen in "you never call, you never write" and Jewish mother disappointment.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Princeton Geniza Lab on Twitter (@GenizaLab)</span> in "New join for this letter from a disconsolate mother to her son in al-Ushmūnayn (Upper Egypt), 1146–54 CE. Found by @OdedZinger! https://t.co/w86PRW7eew https://t.co/ldRvosxY2a" (<time class='dt-published'>12/16/2022 10:10:53</time>)</cite></small>

https://guides.lib.ku.edu/medieval-and-early-modern-manuscripts/resources-introduction

A few weeks back I joined the Schoenberg Institute's ongoing series "Coffee with a Codex" which featured two manuscripts the Penn Libraries have relating to Rhetorica ad Herennium. One is MS Codex 1630, a 15th century copy of the text itself, and MS Codex 1629 which is a 14th century commentary on Rhetorica.

As a few here are interested in some of the older memory texts and having access to older copies from the Renaissance is rare, I thought I'd share some of the resources from that session including photos, descriptions, and the videos themselves which have recently been posted online. For those who are interested in these spaces, I hope this is as much of a treat as I thought it was.

A blog post with some details, links, and great photos: https://schoenberginstitute.org/2022/03/09/ms-codex-1630-ms-codex-1629-rhetoric/

A short video introduction to the MS Codex 1630: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpFbbHgNQ4

And here's the full 30 minute video of the walk through session of both manuscripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6Qdgz93Ec&list=PL8e3GREu0zuC-jTFRF27a88SzTQ6fSISy&index=8

Full digital copies of both books and bibliographic details for them can be found below: Ms. Codex 1630: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9958935643503681

Ms. Codex 1629: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9958752123503681

The pecia system was one in which university students would rent portions of manuscripts from stationers and then manually copy them to ultimately end up with their own full copies of the books they were reading or studying.

Some copies of extant manuscripts have indicators that they were used or produced by this pecia system.

Leaf numbering was seen in the Middle Ages, but printing in the Renaissance greatly increased the number of books with page numbers.

https://schoenberginstitute.org/2022/03/09/ms-codex-1630-ms-codex-1629-rhetoric/

: lemmata ; a heading indicating the subject or argument of a literary composition, an annotation, or a dictionary entry.

I wonder how much Captcha technology may have helped to remedy this in the intervening years?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1390636720501231621.html

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2021/10/publication-of-500-year-old-manuscript-exposes-medieval-beliefs-and-religious-cults/141767

https://mss.pennpress.org/home/

In parchment manuscripts one will often see small pin prick holes in the parchment which indicates that a hole in the animal skin was repaired during processing. Usually after curing and before use the thread from the repair is removed leaving only the small holes.

Rarely, but occasionally, the thread will still remain in the final manuscript. An example of this is LJS 418, f 3r where one can see the thread left in the page.

Smudged or worn lines on manuscripts may be indicative of a manuscript having been unbound and potentially folded and possibly carried during regular use.

LJS 418 f. 6v shows an example of this pattern though the manuscript was later bound.

Where exactly do we situate note taking? Certainly within the space of rhetoric, but also as Ann M. Blair suggests within the history of reading.

What else? manuscript studies, psychology, others?

http://web.ceu.hu/medstud/manual/MMM/glossary.html

http://web.ceu.hu/medstud/manual/MMM/home.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjZAdPX6ek0

Osculatory targets or plaques were created on pages to give priests

Most modern people don't touch or kiss their books this way and we're often taught not to touch or write in our texts. Digital screen culture is giving us a new tactile touching with our digital texts that we haven't had since the time of the manuscript.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-SpLPFaRd0

Skins soaked in lime to loosen the hair from the skin in a rudimentary washing machine.

Scraping the meat side while stretched on a frame

Drying for a day or two, then cut them out.

Great set of resources and links.

Downloaded a copy to work through them. Some I've run across in the past.

[[Cynthia Turner Camp]]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKBJkf2xbqI

I've heard the word "hand" as in the phrase "an operator's hand" used in telegraphy to indicate how an experienced telegraph operator could identify the person at the other end with whom they were communicating by the pace and timbre of the code. I've particularly heard reference to it by code breakers during wartime. It's much the same sort of information as identifying someone by their voice on the phone or in a distinctive walk as seen at a distance. I've also thought of using this idea in typing as a means of secondary confirmation for identifying someone while they input a password on a keyboard.

I wonder if that reference predates this sort of similar "hand" use for identifying someone, if this may have come first, or if they're independent of each other?

This looks like a fun read to track down.