Manuscripts, Books, Pixels

   Our giant bookfair has come and gone, quashing the idea that the printed book has had its day. $430,000 dollars made for Lifeline in one three day weekend flogging secondhand books, CDs, records and games and puzzles. Some kinds of books are less alive than others. It seems that fewer people want to buy paper dictionaries these days. Well, why would they I guess? They seem to be following in the wake of encyclopaedias, which plenty of people want to give away, but nobody wants to buy. It's all on the internet.
   They do want to buy lots of other kinds of books to hold in their hands and turn the pages. Kindle editions and other e-books might be making some inroads, but people still want something to put on the shelf. Classic English literature sold well, even though all the titles are available in e-books for free. Apart from the touchy feely thing, I wonder if the deficiencies in the capability to properly reference cheap e-book editions is keeping student of Eng. Lit. still hunting for cheap paper versions.
  Meanwhile, back in the land of pixelated manuscripts, I have recommenced updating graphics and reformatting pages. Yawn!!! When I get totally bored with this, I will reveal to you a tantalising scrap of bookbinder's waste which shows just how bad legal Latin was becoming by the 16th century.

Times A'Changin', but Same Old Complaints

In my ransacking of the internet for old books of specialist interest, I recently downloaded a book by one A. Wright entitled Court Hand Restored. It is so old that even Google was happy to let me have it, and I wanted it because it has loads of useful information relating to the reading of English legal documents, such as Latin versions of surnames and placenames, abbreviations and strange piggy Latin words found only in English legal documents.

While it was trundling along printing, I read the introduction, which proved to be a little piece of history in itself. The book was originally written not for historians, but for lawyers. The author grudgingly admits that there is probably some sense in legal proceedings being recorded in English, a relatively recent development when the book was first produced, rather than the traditional Latin, but this had resulted in a whole generation of legal clerks who had neither the linguistic or paleographical skills to read and present the primary source material for historical cases; necessary given that the English legal system is based heavily on precedent. The author suggests at the end of the introduction that some historians might also perhaps find it useful.

Now it seems that the English legal system has not actually collapsed under the weight of ignorance, but now historians are complaining that deskilling in these kinds of historical disciplines means that political and social decisions are being made from a position of historical ignorance, and even the curators of the evidence, archivists, are rarely adept in the language and paleography of the oldest of the documents they are curating.

This is happening just when there is some increase in popular interest in ransacking old records by folks interested in their family history, and in the collection of antique memorabilia. There does seem to be a lack of awareness of how recent some changes to things such as legal systems have been. I have been sent images, and seen other examples for sale, of 17th and 18th century documents that people were sure were medieval. I even bought one just for fun.

It is an enigma that the faster things change, the less people want to believe that change has happened in the recent past, and they less they believe that we can cope with change in the future. But what would I know? I'm so old I can remember when there was no such thing as the internet. My granddaughters think it is hilarious that when I was at school we didn't have smartboards, we had inkpots.