Anyone doing typesetting or any design work involving text (print or electronic) should know the name Robert Bringhurst. If you don't, then shame on you. Go to Amazon (or wherever you buy books from) and get a copy of his Elements of Typographic Style. Read it. Learn it. Love it.

After you're through reading it, check out Richard Rutter's work-in-progress, The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. Rutter has an RSS feed set up for site updates; check out his blog for further details.

(thanks to typographica for the pointer)

I happened acorss the Posner Memorial Library collection at Carnegie Mellon University. They've digitised (photographed) a bunch of stuff.

One of the items is Quinque libri legis Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numeri, Deuteronomium with a date of 1539-1544. My Latin ... well, I don't really have any Latin, but I seem to be able to make out something about five books of the law (the book names gave it away, I know).

The text is in Hebrew. Here's the title page, where you can see the standard "Ex officina Roberti Stephani, typographi Regii." ("from the office of Robertus Stephanus, typographer to the king"?) which is the same line that appears on the title page of the 1550 edition of the so-called "Textus Receptus".

Here's the first page of Genesis. Now my Hebrew is only marginally better than my Latin (which isn't saying much) but one interesting item to note is that the first word of the book is printed as the title, the balance of the book takes off from there. From what I understand, this is standard for Hebrew editions (to use the first word as the title).

Typographically, the text is cool because you can see use of wide letters to justify the left margin.

So, my questions (if anyone happens to know):

1. The Posner Library only has the Torah. Did Bobby-Steve publish the whole Hebrew Bible?

2. Anyone know the basis of this edition? Surely it isn't L. Is it the same basis as the Ben Chayyim 1524-25 edition?

3. Does this edition contain anything textually significant?

4. What is the relation of this edition to the King James Version Old Testament?

A few weeks back, a colleague at Logos informed me that he had a really old Bible. I mean really old. Then he proceeded to loan it to me for a few weeks. This is, in all likelihood, the oldest book I will ever personally handle.

The Bible (New Testament, actually) is H. Hammond's A Paraphrase and Annotations Upon all the Books of the New Testament, Briefly Explaining the Difficult Places thereof. And it is in beautiful shape for something that is 330 years old. Check it out (apologies, the images in this post are a little large):

That's right. It's in what I'm guessing is the original binding and everything. The binding is weak, but functional. Let's open this baby up and check out the title page. All of these pictures are clickable. And I've got a few more online on my photo page.

This is the only spot that has an engraving of any sort, though a few different folks along the way have left their mark. You can see that this is the fourth edition of Hammond's work. The first edition was published in the 1640's ... during the England's Civil War(s). Charles I got his noggin' lopped off in 1649. Cromwell was Lord Protector from 1653-1658. This book was published after Charles II re-ascended the throne.

How's that for historical context?

Let's check out First Timothy. Here's the title page to the epistle. It has a lengthy introduction. Also, don't miss the notes in the margin. It's a little different, but for all intents and purposes, much of the same sort of thing we'd find in a "study Bible" today.

That's all well and good, but let's get into it, shall we? Below is a two-page spread (I told you that binding was still functional) displaying the first chapter of First Timothy. Take a good look at it, we'll go into some detail on the structure next.

To start the detailed look, let's poke around in 1Ti 1.1-2. Note the red boxes on the below image:

You should really click the above image and view it in a seperate window or tab. There are three parts to the page. The primary translation (and I don't know which translation the English is, if you do please let me know) is in the middle, with the box around it. You can see the verse numbers. Inside the middle box, after the words "Apostle of Jesus Christ", you'll see an asterisk. This points the reader to the margin, which notes the reading "according to the appointment" instead of the text "by the commandment".

In addition, see the right square bracket ']' ending the verse? This tells the reader that the entire verse is paraphrased in the other margin. Here the "paraphrase" says:

1. I Paul that (Act 13.7) was sent out and constituted an Apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the designation of him, who being God incarnate is both our Saviour and Lord to rescue us from the power of sin, and to rule and reign in our hearts, even he on whom all our trust and expectation and hope of good is founded and built;
2. To my dearly beloved Timothy whom I first converted and so begat to Christianity. I send my heartiest wish of all good from God our careful and loving father, and Christ Jesus to whom he hath committed all power in his church unto the worlds end.

Pretty cool huh?

But that's not all. Scroll down in the two-page image to get a peek at verse 4. You'll note a letter 'a' by the word "genealogies" along with a larger "a" out in the left margin. This refers the reader to further notes at the end of the chapter. I've reproduced the note below:

To get an idea of how longer passages work, I've provided an image of 1Ti 2.4-7 below. Keep an eye out for asterisks and daggers, and also check out the paraphrase along the way. Note that because this passage is on the opposite page, the paraphrase is on the right (outer) margin, the notes are on the left (inner) margin. You'll need to click the image to get the larver version, but the larger version should be readable.

The extended notes in this edition are really cool. Below, a note dealing with 1Ti 2.1 on "types" of prayer goes through the Greek words and even makes a reference to Pirke Aboth 3.2, providing both the Hebrew (with wide final mem!) and a translation of the Mishnah quotation. If you look at the bottom of the image (right column) you'll see he says "see Josephus", but he doesn't really give any help in finding the particular citation.

But still ... that is very cool. How'd we fall away from including this sort of stuff in our "study" Bibles?

Outside of this, there are a few indexes in the back, none of them very extensive. All in all, a very cool book. And it makes us, with our computers and word processors, look very weak indeed when it comes to researching, typesetting and publishing Bibles. Sure, it's not perfect. But almost every verse has the "paraphrase"; almost every chapter has several of the extended notes. There are a lot of good ideas in here (structure and feature-wise) that folks in Bible publishing today (print and electronic) would do well to examine and consider.

No, not necessarily.

Mark Simonson of Mark Simonson Studio tells us why, and gives an example.

Update (2005-06-21): Eli comments. I should explain — I know (and knew) that there is more to an italic-style font than slanting.* As regards slanting, the title of my post was poorly worded. Perhaps it should have been "And you thought 'italic font' just meant 'slanted' ... " or something along those lines. For this, Mr. Evans, I offer my humble apologies. Now: When are you going to start blogging again?

(Don't worry, folks, Eli and I are just having fun.)

* This is especially dependent on context as the term 'Italic' could indicate MSS of the "Old Latin" variety if the context were that of textual criticism or early versions of the NT.

This is the cool part of blogging. Someone you've never met but shares similar interests posts something in the morning. You read the post and have your own thoughts and interact with it and drop the original author a trackback, comment or email. He responds.

You meet someone who shares interests, and you're able to dialog about things, and hopefully all parties involved are able to learn a little something new.

That's what's going on right now between Roger Sperberg (at Electric Forest) and me. Our perspectives are a little different — from what I understand he's looking at portable devices (either dedicated reading devices or Palm/PocketPC style devices) and ebook content for those areas. My perspective due to my role at Logos Bible Software is different, thinking about delivering ebook titles in the area of Bible study and reference through the Libronix Digital Library System.

That said, I think Roger and I agree on the basics. Books are books, whether paper or electronic. Roger writes in his first post:

But the point is to look at the limitations of a print book and, without changing the essence of the material being presented, then to release the e-book from those limits.

And, of course, he's right. There are things that just need to be there for a book to be considered a book, despite the presentation technology (paper or pixels, fixed or portable). Roger refers me to a paper by Bill Hill from Microsoft titled The Magic of Reading (MSWord Doc). If it is the paper I think it is, it is worth reading — and I need to read it again, it's been awhile.

Roger and I are on the same page here. It's almost like there is, deep in the dark recesses of Plato's cave, the clear distillation of book-ness and in most instances it has only been reflected poorly in the electronic arena. The question isn't only technological, it is about what makes a book a book. Too often us techno-types get bogged down (or altogether too excited) about the technology and we forget the purpose: books are what people read and study. Roger continues in his second post:

So if I focus my argument on making books for the digital library instead of discussing the broader topic of ways of delivering information, it's because I agree [with Bill Hill] that books play a special role for us. Let's not re-invent everything just because we can.

Right on. We're still in agreement. And Brannan's First Law of Electronic Book Design ("Just because you can doesn't mean you should") apparently still holds. There is something about books that we're comforted by, that we're used to, and that we take pleasure in when we use them. So we need to shoot for that quality of book-ness when electronic editions of books are created. And we need to do this in the context of a digital library.

Roger and I start to differ when we take into account different reading platforms, when we start to move from general ebook theory into the reality of delivering content to a platform. Admittedly, I'm a little biased because I have a vested interest in thinking about the platform that Logos Bible Software runs on. The platform that Logos targets is the Windows user (and now the Mac user too!). This means desktops, laptops and a few (though increasing) TabletPC users. Logos is about providing libraries of content (customizable and expandable) to its users. We focus on Bibles and Bible reference tools; so think commentaries, dictionaries, foreign languages, ancient languages, and all sorts of assorted study guides, topical resources, cross-reference resources and the like (currently over 4,000 titles, and counting!). But because Logos delivers to a desktop/laptop doesn't mean that the importance of electronic editions that have that sense of book-ness isn't still there. We strive to do that as much as possible. Some of these areas are:

• We preserve paragraphing and attempt to emulate the typeset page within font and display constraints. So we don't have paged material for display, typically, because we have a continuously scrolling and re-sizable environment.
• We do, however, encode page breaks from the printed resource for citation purposes, and we do allow users to view a "visual filter" that puts page numbers in the text flow so they know where they are in the book.
• We encode subject/author indexes with the entries attached to articles. Thus users can search specific books, sub-collections or their entire custom library for subject index entries.
• Books are organic things, typeset as they were to convey certain information. We do our best to preserve this. We don't stuff every book into the same "global template" as if we really think all top-level headings must be 16 point Arial bold. That would be ridiculous. The book display should remind the user of the printed version, especially if the user is familiar with the printed version. So we select a serif or sans-serif font in accordance with the book's style; font sizes and weights and whitespace are all handled similarly.
• We encode all sorts of bibliographical metadata in the resource through including MARC record content for most every text resource, along with similar metadata in a Dublin Core style. This information is used within the application in numerous contexts, from browsing the library by Library of Congress subject, or author, or title; down to generating sub-collection or library-wide bibliographies in a number of formats, to appending a citation (in the user's preferred format) to copied excerpts. Why do this? Well, one aspect of book-ness involves considering how the book functions within the context of a collection of books (a library).

In his third post, Roger adds these final words:

My point in my post is not that e-book publishers don't know that they should or could link more, bring in other texts and pictures, and so on, but that you and I, as bringers-about-of-the-future, as Prometheans of publishing, have TWO obligations to meet if we are to succeed: we must find the things (hyperlinks in your case, motion graphics for process in my example) that print books can't do AND then execute these capabilities in such a fashion that in every other aspect we humans still regard the object we are reading as a book.

Remember too that every criterion I could list as to what makes a book could almost be met by magazines and newspapers and web pages — and CD-ROM publications too — and that I claim a special role for books. Hill's title claims the magic for reading and not for book-reading, and so maybe I'm on thin ice when I argue from this position. But it's why I focused on books instead of information retrieval as the key issue for libraries going into the future. Many people won't agree with me; and perhaps you won't agree with me, but that would be their and your prerogative. But my story is we've got to keep an e-book really booklike, and I'm sticking to it.

Agreed. Though I'd amend the last sentence in the first paragraph to say something like "... still regard the object we are reading and using as a book." Not all books are read or used in the same way. My context means I think much more about reference books; books that are accessed randomly and not necessarily sequentially. Many of these aren't books that are read from cover to cover but are read as they are consulted in discontiguous pieces. But Roger's bottom line, " ... we've got to keep an e-book really booklike" is spot on. I'm glad to hear it.

Too often (particularly in electronically representing reference books) the book-ness is stripped through concessions to technology. We don't want to do that at Logos. Bob Pritchett and other colleagues of mine have been able to instill a healthy value for the art of typesetting. It's why we're interested in looking at books (and at codices and scrolls from before the age of the printed page) to see how they communicate information. It's why I get jazzed when I look at the Complutensian Polyglot and realize that not only are the different language editions of texts aligned in columns, but through a superscript letter system they're actually aligned at the word/phrase level — and that in a book that was published in 1522!

There is something about the book. If Bill Hill says it's magic, he may be right. But we do need to do our best to not mess it up when we make electronic versions of things.

Thanks, Roger, for starting to write about these sorts of things. I'm looking forward to the sorts of topics y'all over there at Electric Forest have planned to blog about in the future.