John Dee gifs part the second

Following the success of the John-Dee-inspired gifs I put together for #musgif day in October 2015, our publicist asked if I could make a few more to use in the promotion for 'Scholar, courtier, magician'. So I duly obliged.

Watch #JohnDee revealed by x-ray in a circle of skulls. Read about it in today's @guardian https://t.co/wdlngTc5SQ pic.twitter.com/mp9H9aq5n9

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) January 18, 2016

Thief! See how the man who stole #JohnDee 's books tried to write his name out of history https://t.co/GRJfyVlHj6 pic.twitter.com/iFeiL8FLzW

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) January 13, 2016

The magical manicule hand of #JohnDee A Christmas gif(t) from our new exhibition open 18 Jan https://t.co/GRJfyVlHj6 pic.twitter.com/32Riqurpei

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) December 21, 2015

I was quite blown away by how popular all of the gifs were, and with the fulsome praise and enthusiasm they received especially among the early modern history crowd on Twitter.

Thought I could not be more excited about this conference. And then they start giffing marginalia. #marginaliamonday https://t.co/UUEcFxqH5o

— Liesbeth Corens (@onslies) December 22, 2015

@onslies @RCPmuseum heartily concurring. Gifs that are fabulous AND educational!

— Kirsty Rolfe (@avoiding_bears) January 13, 2016

They were picked up by various media outlets, too.It wasn't such a surprise to see one crop up on Hyperallergic, but New scientist used them, too. Pretty cool. (Although, if I'm honest, the fact-checking in that December 2015 article leaves a something to be desired. The more recent review is rather better, but gif-less, seeing as it went out in print.)

The gifs are successful because they fun to watch and because they add something to the understanding and experience of the books and painting by showing things you can't see from a photograph or from seeing the static item on display.

Watch this space for a post or two about how I did the photo editing on Dee's over-written signature and how I made the gifs.

Rare books gifs - John Dee, volvelles, apples and things

Culture Themes is a twitter account that organises monthly themed days on Twitter, primarily for museums. This month it was museum gifs - #musgif - and I put together a couple for the RCPmuseum account from some of the star objects from the RCP's forthcoming John Dee exhibition.

To make the first three gifs, I set up the department camera on the department tripod and took a series of photos, stop-motion animation style. Then I layered up the individual images in Photoshop (other editing software is available), cropped them, resized them and saved them as gifs. To make the last, I took a pre-existing photograph and played about with it in Photoshop.

It was quicker and easier that I thought it would be, and I'm delighted with how well the gifs show off the materiality of the books.

If you like rare books gifs, then have a look at what's being posted on Tumblr at places like University of Iowa Special Collections.

Rotating volvelle from #JohnDee's copy of Trithemius' Polygraphie (1561): a cipher disc in action! #musgif #histSTM pic.twitter.com/uH29g9xQZi

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) October 21, 2015

One of twelve volvelles in Trithemius, Polygraphie, 1561. The title written on the fore-edge of this book suggests that it belonged to John Dee. It's a book about cryptography, and the volvelles are cipher discs used to encoding or decoding text.

3D book engineering illustrates Euclid's Elements of Geometrie (1570). #JohnDee #musgif #rarebooks #WoodcutWednesday pic.twitter.com/dRR7HXYDSN

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) October 21, 2015

Three-dimensional geometry explained with foldout diagrams in Euclid, trans Billingsley, The elements of geometrie, 1570. This was the first English translation of Euclid, and John Dee wrote an extensive preface to it.

Get close to the material text: a wormhole (& #JohnDee's annotations) in Quintilian (1540) #musgif #rarebooks pic.twitter.com/oLhmVpQ9d6

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) October 21, 2015

A very hungry bookworm works its way through John Dee's annotated copy of Quintilian, Institutionum oratoriarum, 1540. 

In the spirit of #musgif day, here's Parkinson's the crab apple (1640) re-imagined. #WoodcutWednesday #AppleDay2015 pic.twitter.com/4zCMKOK4xB

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) October 21, 2015

Crab apple tree in Parkinson, Theatrum botanicum, 1640.

The RCP library has the largest known collection of books from John Dee's library. They're catalogued online in the library catalogue.

 

Addendum: I ended up making another three John Dee gifs and wrote up how I did it.

Pressed flowers in books revisited

One of the things I'd like to change about my working life is that I don't currently find time to keep up with the research that's being done about, and using, rare book collections.  This is a pretty major omission, really, given that supporting research is one serious why 'my' collection exists and is made available. I'm sure I would be making much better decisions about all sorts of procedures and practices if I had a greater understanding of what academic readers would like to know and the research questions they're trying to answer. And I suspect I may not be the only one who feels like this...

So imagine my delight when a historian friend of mine stumbled across my post from last year about discovering, preserving and describing preserved plant specimens in rare books.  She writes:

I was fascinated by how librarians deal with the issue and just want to say that it would be great if catalogues did mention specimens enclosed in books. You will see why from the attached paper I wrote some time ago - the bit about loose specimens in books is towards the end of the article. The idea that librarians can decide whether a specimen is 'relevant' or not, fills a historian like me with dread! As does moving the specimens from their locations in the book without noting their original location. But I can see that loose specimens would seem a problem to librarians. 

...

I completely take your point about librarians and lack of time, and the difficulty of coping with something so out of the ordinary realm of cataloguing practice.  But perhaps if they knew that these scraps of plants might have significance this might make them feel it was more worthwhile to add the info to the entry.

The attached paper was:

• Anne Secord, 'Pressed into service: specimens, space, and seeing in botanical practice', in David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds, Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011, pp. 283–310.

So there you have it folks - it *is* worth carefully recording and keeping this things when we find them. If only there were time and staffing enough to describe all these copy specific features in the detail we'd like to.

If you have other examples of where going the extra cataloguing mile has helped research or other outputs, I'd love to here them.