Library launches "Europe's oldest book" appeal

LONDON (Reuters) - The British Library has launched an appeal to help it buy the oldest book in Europe, an "almost miraculous" survival from the Anglo Saxon period over 1,000 years ago.

The small volume was buried with one of England's most popular saints, Saint Cuthbert at a time when the country was being swept by continental invasions following the departure of the Romans, and despite its age is still in perfect condition with its original leather cover.

The Library is now just 2.75 million pounds from its target of 9 million pounds to buy the Cuthbert Gospel.

The book was loaned to the library in 1979 and has stayed there ever since but if the bid is successful it will stay there permanently.

It has also been agreed that if the gospel is purchased, it will spend half the year at Durham Cathedral, where the saint is buried.

St Cuthbert, also known as the "wonder worker of Britain," died in AD 687 and was buried on the Northumbrian island of Lindisfarne. He was widely regarded as Britain's most popular saint up until the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.

When Viking raiders invaded Lindisfarne in 875, a group of monks fled, taking Cuthbert's body with them. After seven years of travelling with the body, the monks finally buried the saint again at what became Durham Cathedral.

The book was found with him when his coffin was reopened in 1104.

The book, written in Latin, is the Gospel of John. After it was taken from the coffin it was placed in a new shrine behind the altar of Durham Cathedral.

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England by Henry VIII in the 16th century, the text passed to a series of private collectors.

Chief Executive of the Library, Dame Lynne Brindley, said in a statement: "The St Cuthbert Gospel is an almost miraculous survival from the Anglo-Saxon period, a beautifully preserved window into a rich, sophisticated culture that flourished some four centuries before the Norman Conquest.

(Reporting by Sam Watts; Editing by Steve Addison)

Global Communication & Ken Hollings At The British Library

Link: British Library events / Link: The Wire


As part of the British Library’s Out Of This World exhibition, regular Wire contributor Ken Hollings will be performing with the Radio Science Orchestra, on a bill alongside Global Communication (Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton).

The Radio Science Orchestra is led by writer and producer Bruce Woolley, and deals in bringing vintage electronics together with conventional orchestral instruments. Also on the bill are Global Communication, playing live for the first time in 15 years, recreating their 1994 LP 76:14, plus DJ sets from Jon Hopkins and Rob Da Bank. Attendees are encouraged to dress in "sci-fi glamour", or at the very least, in something silver. London British Library, 17 June, 7:30–11pm, £12.50.

Presentation board #3

Reworked library recordings

Above is the reworked version of the library noise. I also used the 3D Max output to cobble together some visual accompaniment.

3D Max image

Just been playing around in 3D Max to see how some of these internal images might be made for a virtual environment.

Stonehouse & Stromberg's The Architecture of the British Library at St Pancras

I had to create a special order for The Architecture of the British Library at St Pancras by Stonehouse & Stromberg. They do list it at Amazon but it's around 70 quid. So instead - for the bargain price of £2.50 - I got the university to loan a copy on my behalf. It was actually sent from the British Library itself.

Anyway, aside from liking the idea of a book on loan from the British Library that's about the British Library, it's a really useful resource. It has all the architectural plans alongside some tasteful photography. The layout is nice too but it's the accompanying text which explains more about what the architecture was trying to evoke that might assist in the upcoming design work. There seems to be a philosophy behind the environment that I may be able to incorporate when producing this project's deliverables.

If you are a bit flush, you can buy it here: The Architecture of the British Library at St.Pancras

Visualization with text

Already mentioned in the previous post, here is the (inverted) version with text.

Library rhythm

Hardly likely to be crashing into the Top 40 anytime soon, the above was a test to see how the noise from the British Library could be arranged. All the audio is sourced from those London recordings with snippets organised to create a rhythm. I've also cobbled together a quick and very rough visualization video using imagery generated by the audio itself - seeing as it was getting uploaded to Youtube.

David Toop website

I was reading up on David Toop given how his writing, curating and recording pushes into a number of experimental sound-related areas and noted the above on his website (http://www.davidtoop.com/). It's a flash animation where cubes shift from one side of the browser to the other. The user is encouraged to grab a cube and drag it to the speaker. Some are whizzing past while others are slower. And each plays a different sound: from what sounds like UFOs taking off through to jazz-edged interludes.

It's documented here simply as the record of something that is a bit of fun - a little add-on. Yet it's also indicative of how often we encounter one thing that's readable via one sense as an indicator of something that's more usually understood through a different sensory ability. For example, those TV adverts where someone places a new air freshener and suddenly we have a depiction of clean and curvy vapours emanating from the product. I suppose that's what I'm trying to do here: create a visual metaphor for this 'essence' of the British Library [an essence that has already been reduced to just its sonic manifestation].

Syntax font

According to the British Library's brand guidelines, the typeface that should be used at all times - across all forms of external and internal communication - is Syntax*. Here's what the (sometimes unreliable) Wikipedia has to say about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax_%28typeface%29:

Syntax is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by the Swiss typeface designer Hans Eduard Meier (born 1922) in 1968, and released in 1969 by the D. Stempel Schriftgießerei (type foundry) of Frankfurt am Main. It is believed to be the final face designed and released by D. Stempel for foundry casting.

The original drawings were done in 1954; first by writing the letters with a brush, then redrawing their essential linear forms, and finally adding balanced amounts of weight to the skeletons to produce optically monoline letterforms. In the period 1968–1972, Meier worked on additional weights and variations to the Syntax typeface. In 1989, the original foundry metal design was digitized by Adobe, which also expanded the family to include bold and ultrabold weights, resulting in a family family of 4 romans and 1 italic (in lightest weight) fonts.

Meier described Syntax as being a sans-serif face modeled on the Renaissance serif typeface, similar to Bembo. The uppercase has a wide proportion, and the terminals not being parallel to the baseline provide a sense of animation. The lowercase a and g follow the old style model of having two storeys. The italics are a combination of humanist italic forms, seen in the lowercase italic q, and realist obliques, seen in the lowercase italic a, which retains two storeys, unlike in other humanist sans-serif typefaces like FF Scala Sans and Gill Sans, where the a has a single storey italic.

*There is an additional note on the brand guidelines that Arial may be used where Syntax is unavailable.

Print and bookcloth reference

I made a bit of an impulse purchase at Ratchford. Faced with rolls and rolls of bookcloth, I found myself saying "red" when asked what colour I was looking for. Then confronted with a pile of different reds, I ended up - in a state of confusion - opting for a two tone product that is a red woven thread across a blue background (above).

I had expected Ratchford to be a shop where I could just browse and agonise over materials for ages but it's predominantly a wholesale company. So when someone was taking time out from dealing with a massive order to assist with a poxy metre of book cloth and a few other sundries, it made sense to be that bit more decisive. So this snap decision has suddenly informed the colourway for the finished product. (The red, by the way, was to keep it working within the British Library's brand guidelines.)

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact it has just focussed what I'm doing with the print aspect as I have something definite for it to work alongside. So I've subsequently developed a treatment for the photography that I believe compliments the hue of the cover.

Also I was re-reading my undergraduate dissertation the other day [not for fun - just because there are parts of it that are relevant to my PhD application] and I had interviewed the boss of Azuli Records about how they approached the design for the label when it first launched. Despite being based in London, Azuli capitalized on what was then a demand for American releases by faking their origins and positioning itself as a New York label. The tracks were even shrinkwrapped and had a Stateside telephone number on them. Anyway, they were saying that a problem with the early logo design was that the US labels used old printing presses for the details on the records. Over here in the UK - where the records were manufactured - the print was of a superior quality. To combat this slick printing, they did some photocopies of the original logo to rough it up a little before handing this more ragged artwork to the printer. The suddenly more lo-fi interpretation suddenly had the authenticity required to be able to charge a couple of quid more for a record assumed to be an import.

This inspired me to see what would happen if I was to try out a similar approach with the photos: so that they were printed and re-scanned so they lose some of their sheen. The reason for this was to try and capture some of the qualities of the print that had first caught my attention when looking at vintage paperbacks. I had toyed with the idea of carrying out some traditional printing techniques but - as Amy discovered with last semester's project and Dave has found out through his current work - more contemporary processes can be much more convenient. So the above is an attempt to put some of the graininess into the print without resorting to derivative Photoshop filters. They have also been printed on cream coloured paper just to knock back the tones that bit further (while also relating to the kind of cheap buff stock that is used in paperbacks). I'm also suggesting that these re-scanned versions then be printed on quality white stock just to give some contrast between the imagery - that will then have some sort of heritage feel - and some crisp typographic elements. I also tried out the same re-printed method out with the logo (below)

2'03"

I tried to upload a MP3 of track one to have it play here via a flash player. However it's not working correctly and has been uploaded as a Youtube video instead.

Discarded track 1 visualization idea

This idea isn't really working for me but it was just a bit of playing around to see how documentation of the environment coupled with visualizations of the sound might come together to give an impression of noise within the space. The bars represent the processed version of track one - or 2'03" as it is now known.

I have some more abstract images that I might try alongside the visualizations. I'm feeling it has to get beyond the figurative for it to be truly suggestive of what is a completely different sense to seeing. I've already pointed it out to Nicky (as I thought its layout was relevant to her project), but the Tomato book 'Process' is a bit of an influence right now as it has this visceral quality to it that I'd like to try and emulate here.

Downloading British Library audio

Following a trip to Ratchford to pick up some book making equipment, I've downloaded the audio recorded at the British Library. Next I'm going to import the wav files into Acid and edit them down so that they become the final tracks. I've also decided that the tracks won't have titles but be identified by their running time. This is a reference to John Cage's silent composition known as 4'33" - although my recordings are far from silent. Some are pretty chaotic actually.

British Library photos

British Library project

As mentioned in the previous post, this project has moved on from being one primarily concerned with comparisons between the noise in different libraries and has become one about documenting how it occurs within a specific space. As yesterday's visit might suggest, I've opted for the British Library.

The British Library is iconic given the fact that it is required by law to carry a copy of every book that is produced in the United Kingdom. And, while its architecture divides opinion, I felt it was an interesting environment.

What especially interests me is the balance between this very weighty tradition and the more abstract aspects of the building. Located somewhere between these two elements is this thing called noise. As discussed in last week's group tutorial, I want to [half-jokingly and half-seriously] create something that reflects how the sounds of the British Library have a quality that carries the essence of all this information and intellectual endeavour. I mean, the amount of people who go to study there suggest that the environment has more than wi-fi when it comes to that ability to inspire. So in terms of deliverables, this has become about the ability to commodify this essence: maybe in the way that, say, "Holy Water" is bottled at Lourdes.

So now I'm developing the idea of selling the sounds of the British Library as a package. Something that can be perceived as a potent study aid or an 'environment enhancer' that may suddenly turn your Jackie Collins paperbacks into weighty tomes. Perhaps while instantly increasing your IQ. But then also something that is more of a curio: a novelty gift if we have our tongue firmly in our cheeks.

Above is a quick interpretation of how it could be packaged using one of the photos I took yesterday. It also uses the design layouts that are used in existing British Library material. The plan is to produce it alongside some kind of print product that will explain more about the environment, the British Library's work and the sounds that were recorded.

Interestingly, they already sell CDs of birdsong and rainforest sounds in the British Library's gift shop.

Visit to the British Library

I took a trip to the British Library today and hopefully got everything I needed. I recorded some of the sounds around the building and took plenty of photographs.

Although while I was there, I felt myself more attracted to the architecture of the place rather than the books. The recordings also seem to be noisier than I had expected although that might be because I am studying this perceived "silence". Subsequently the (fuzzy) image that I had in my head about what this project might look like has disappeared.

I also paid particular attention to the gift shop given that the focus of this project is now to use silence as a commodity and specific environments as a sign of quality to create a marketable product. More on that all later once I've had time to digest and post the material that I collected today. Plus the train journey helped me get on top of my reading while I managed to attack a chunk of the report too. On reflection, it wasn't a bad day at all.

(The above image, by the way, is today's checklist.)