Lab 4: Thinking with the Codex

The two texts from our visit to the archives I have chosen to focus on are Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph (1852) and George W. Pierce, Principles of Wireless Telegraphy (1910). These two books cover very similar topics (at least it seems that way to someone who knows nothing about the topic) and at first glance might seem very, very similar in makeup besides the colors of the covers. The older of the two books has very papery, brittle pages while the newer’s are much softer and easier to handle. The older’s margins are larger but the fonts both books use are practically identical. The two are bound very similarly, they both have the old book smell, and besides some differences in section headings and ways information is broken up they seem to be very comparable books besides being printed almost 60 years apart from each other.

The biggest difference between the two texts that I can discern is the intricacies of their diagrams and images. These books both dealing with similar scientific topics rely on schematics and tables and graphs to help convey information. Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph, the older of the books has very simple images with little text surrounding them to help explain what’s there. The tables we see are set up using dots to seperate columns instead of the typical tables we are used to. There are no graphs in sight.

Principles of Wireless Telegraphy comes out decades after and provides the reader with much more intricate images (drawn and photographs), tables, diagrams, even a map. The text is interwoven with images to help explain and label what we see. The discrepancy between the images in one book to the other might be simply explained by the fact that intricate images were’t necessary in the older book, maybe books from this time were capable of having the more intricate images that we see in the newer book but they just weren’t necessary for this particular one.

I believe, however, that the technology surrounding imaging in printing advanced from 1852 to 1910. As Professor Cordell showed us in class we receive images in books because of stamps that were laid with the text when printing, separated using furniture. The images we see in the newer text have labels woven throughout the diagrams which would require a skilled hand to lay the text with the image and fill the empty space in between making everything flush. Printers by 1910 probably had discovered how to do this more elaborately than they could in 1852. As we see in the video with Stephen Fry and his experiences with the Gutenberg printing press it took immense amounts of effort and time just to structure one page in a book and then print it. With this in mind we know how difficult it must have been for the printers of these two books to lay image with text.

Of the texts provided to us on the course schedule the most scientific and similar to the two texts I’ve already chosen to work with is Charles Darwin’s Nature Printing, a journal of leaves and flowers from the mid 18th century that is a great departure from the two telegraphy books. Predating the other two works by 100 years here we see a much simpler way of expressing scientific knowledge than we see printed in 1852 and 1910. It is handwritten by Darwin over impressions of the plants he encountered and wished to document. The pages are yellowed and his cursive scrawl is hard to discern at times. I don’t mean to say that a hand written diary being compared to two printed texts is indicative of the fact that printing was developed from the time Darwin died to the time the two telegraphy books were published, because this isn’t true. It’s just interesting to see the different ways text can manifest when they share similar topics (science in general) and are from different time periods.

I also don’t mean to say that these three texts don’t indicate anything about the time period and the way printing looked at these points in history because they can tell us a lot. Maybe a printing press wasn’t readily available for Darwin to reproduce his work or maybe he just figured that with his leaf impressions a printed journal would be impractical. By the time the other two texts were published printing was probably readily available for authors to produce their work. We can tell a lot about works from their physicality and in this case I received absolutely no information from the actual text of these three works but so much from everything else about them.