OED Can’t Save Me: nonligatured vs unligatured

If two type letters are connected, the connection is known as a ligature. If letters are typically connected but not in an individual case, the adjective to describe the situation could be nonligatured or unligatured. But which should it be?

The Oxford English Dictionary does not help. A full-text search has neither negative form. In positive form, ligatured seems to be more common for medical uses. And for printing, the OED offers the term “in ligature” for the positive case. The opposite, “not in ligature,” could be produce “not-in-ligature type,” a horrid adjectival form–to my eye. Alright, so it’s Google Books for this.

The term unligatured is more frequent than nonliatured, but most references seem to come from medical writings. Refine the search, so now it’s a competition between quoted “unligatured type” and “nonligatured type.” And the winner is, “unligatured type,” in use by the best authorities, Journal of Printing History and the journal Text.

Case closed.

A Brief Guide to Naughty Illustrations in American Literature

In a Washington Post article “We’re Teaching Books That Don’t Stack Up,” Nancy Schnog, a high school teacher, cites a research report from the National Endowment for the Arts. According to that report, which you can read here, “The percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period.”

Schnog despairs of engaging readers’ attention in the classroom with “the pictureless chains of black print.” If type without illustrations is the problem, why don’t we read the illustrations? On occasion, my students (first-year honors students) confessed to being bored by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and befuddled by Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. But then we started reading the illustrations. Jo-Ann Morgan in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (University of Missouri Press) has pointed out that the most suggestive illustration in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is when Eva has her hand on Tom’s thigh [fifth one down in the list]. This illustration is part of the “yes, I’m going there” and “spirits bright” chapter. It’s hard not to wonder if she’s still interested in the fascinating things in Tom’s pockets. As long as Eva is a child, everything’s innocent, I suppose, but Stowe is slyly subversive, almost daring one to read something untoward in this relationship between man and a child who by this point must be approaching the age of Nabokov’s Lolita. Perhaps you recall what she said, “I want him.” Hammat Billings, the illustrator, took it and ran with it.

One of my students also started examining closely the illustration on the front of Reed’s book. I think he or she had lost interest the in-class discussion. We were reading the edition with Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware on the cover. On realizing the activity of the Mammy character, the entire class was floored. I was speechless, and the class exploded into laughter. I had not noticed the cover previously, but it’s quite provoking, and quite appropriate for Reed’s novel.

What I believe is the most fascinating variant in American Literature is a recent discovery, the frontispiece illustration for the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Ted Genoways has pointed out that there are two versions of the illustration. In the revised version, Walt Whitman’s package is more prominent: he’s “wellhung” in the poet’s pregnant phrase. See Genoways’s fascinating essay in Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays, edited by Susan Belasco, Kenneth M. Price, Ed Folsom. Genoways’s discovery is phenomenally important. It’s not as if we didn’t know Whitman’s work was about his penis, but that he was displeased with the size of his package in the illustration we didn’t know. And this stunning variant in perhaps the second-most important work in American literature went unnoticed for 150 years.

And don’t forget the terribly naughty illustration in Huckleberry Finn. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see the most recent full dress scholarly edition (based on the manuscript) from the California Twain. It’s the first illustration of Uncle Silas. But the California editors don’t do the illustration justice. They’ve reduced the size. And they omit the page’s running head, which reads “In a Dilemma.” Yes, you guessed it, Uncle Silas was exposed in an altered illustration, probably by some joker in the print shop. Not by Kemble the illustrator, Twain or the publisher: they feared that Uncle Silas’s exposure would cut into the book’s sales. And the offending illustration in printed copies was ruthlessly sought out and removed.

There you have it, a brief guide to naughty illustrations in canonical American literature. I close with a challenge to all 17-year olds: Read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It’s not just me: even Reader’s Digest approves. But after you’re trained to find naughty bits, you ought to try Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, though Reader’s Digest does not approve.

If someone is suspicious of your motives, I would recommend a small lie: don’t tell them that you’re reading the whole work to see if you can find naughty bits. Explain to them that a college professor assures you that the enlargement in your world view will compensate you for the harm that you suffer from exposure to these prurient works. Better yet, now that you’ve gained practice in lying, don’t tell them that I’m a college professor: corrupting the youth is in our job description. I’ve not yet acquired Socrates’s taste for hemlock.

“clar over tother side the current”: Where’s the “of”?

The passage in the post title is an oddity from Sam’s speech in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which he explains to Arthur and Emily Shelby how Eliza escaped from Haley. This is the earliest version. Though other versions differ slightly, no authoritative version restores what seems to be missing, the “of.” Here are the versions:

and thar she was, clar over tother side the current on the ice, and then on she went, (National Era 113)

and thar she was, clar over t’ other side the current, on the ice, and then on she went, (Jewett, 1852, I: 112)

and thar she was, clar over t’ other side the current, on the ice, and then on she went, (Jewett Million, 1852, 31)

and thar she was, clar over t’other side the current, on the ice, and then on she went, (Jewett Illustrated, 1853, 101)

and thar she was, clar over t’ other side the current, on the ice, and then on she went, (Houghton Osgood, 1879, 89)

I assume that Sam elided the “of,” and Stowe intended it to be elided, and stuck with it. And, by the way, Stowe’s adaptation for Mary Webb’s dramatic reading, The Christian Slave (in the ILL copy I’ve borrowed) also lacks the “of.”

Project Gutenberg proofreaders can’t stand it. So go to Google, and search for two versions of the phrase, with and without the “of,” in quotes. And then search Google Books. The public’s corrected electronic text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, more often than not, restores the “of,” which is not missing.

BookSnap and Canon Powershot, Affordable Book Scanning

I wonder whether this would be a good way to go for affordable high-quality book scanning.

Atiz Booksnap ($1,595)

2 Canon Powershot G10, $410.00 each (free shipping) at B and H Photo

2 Canon Powershot S5 IS, $250.00 (free shipping) at B and H Photo

With G10, grand total (before tax and shipping) is approximately $2,600. With two Powershot S5 IS cameras, grand total (before tax and shipping) is $2095.00.

I’d appreciate the advice or comments of anyone with experience. Can one get from camera megapixels and focal length to DPI? How does one go about the calculation?

UPDATE:
I ended this last post with a plaintive question. But I began to think, and this ain’t rocket science. I remember telling Les Harrison that one needs to think about books in order to think clearly about digital humanities. If this is beyond the reach of my humanities brain–and I spent ten years in desktop publishing including a bit of pre-press–I need to get rid of that claim that I’m doing “digital” things.

The largest object that I need to capture is a page in the Jewett’s 1853 illustrated edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The page size is 5 1/2″ by 9″. For capture of the pages, one actually needs to think of the pages as being about 6″ by 9 1/2″ because (in my opinion) a scholarly image capture should also include the cover and the page edges. A color chart and a ruler might also be desirable, so one should allow for a width of 7.5″ and height of 11.” So far, so good, because BookSnap can capture 10″ by 14″. But I also need to capture at an archival quality rate, which is higher than 300 DPI. From my days at Special Collections, 600 DPI was considered archival quality.

Note that my copy of National Era is captured at 450 DPI, which at 26″ by 19″ was at the upper limit of powerful image capture software of that day and took about 4 minutes per scan and produced 85 MB TIFFs. This was not funny when I tried to transfer 160 files from one server to another across the LAN. But that just meant I did not think clearly enough to know that a portable hard drive connected to a FireWire port was a more sensible option. The LAN connection between Special Collections and IATH didn’t cover a distance of 50 yards, so sneaker power was more sensible.

But, to get back to business, to capture a page image of Jewett’s 1853 illustrated edition I need to capture 600 dots on each inch of a 7.5″ X 11″ rectangle to have an archival quality scan, that is, 4500 dots by 6600 dots. Go to Google and search for “dpi and megapixels,” and near the top is this article from camera reference called photofolio, which even includes a handy guide for testing in PhotoShop. I have GIMP on home computer, so I guess I’ll test there. 7.5″ X 11″ at 600 DPI is a huge file, 269 MB, and thus straining the limits of computer power at my disposal.

But why be sensible? We want to push the limits to create a high-quality and (hopefully) a long-lasting project. Can we do it with a G10 or an S5 IS camera? G10 has effective resolution of 14.7 megapixels and S5 IS has effective resolution of 10 megapixels. In any case, I would ideally want to archive a rectangular image of 4500 dots by 6600 dots, which is 29,700,000, which in megapixels is 29.7. 30 megapixel cameras cost as much as a car. So that won’t happen on my project budget. Time to recalculate, after I sleep and think. But I do think the G10 would be preferred.

UPDATE 2:
I think I made a mistake. I did not distinguish between how much space GIMP wants to manage the file and how big the saved file is. So here is the revised calculation.

7.5″ X 11″ at 600 DPI (29.7 megapixels in memory) is an 85 MB file.
7.5″ X 11″ at 450 DPI (16.7 megapixels) is an 47.8 MB file.

Let’s trim the empty margin and reduce space for color swatch and ruler.

7″ X 10″ at 600 DPI (27 MP in memory) is a 75 MB file
7″ X 10″ at 450 DPI (14.1 MP in memory) is a 56 MB file

Hey, I think that this can work. I’ve moved from a high-end 20+ thousand dollar camera four years go to an off-the-shelf solution. As I have a smaller page size, I believe that the project can achieve comparable results with $2,600 in equipment. It’s on the edge, but it’s on the cutting edge of affordable off-the-shelf equipment. More importantly, it’s what can be done within the budget.

At very least, for the three smaller editions with margins (Houghton Osgood at 5.5 X 8, Paperback at 6 X 9.25), it will be quite doable. A grant to purchase some capture would still be available for large pages. And having equipment in-house will probably suggest other avenues to explore, including Webb’s Christian Slave, which beckons, and perhaps (woe be me) HM Writings Edition. Large-paper edition of that just might work too.