Anna Reynolds

Hi everyone this fragment feels your pain

The news is out! I'm thrilled to share that I rediscovered eight 17th-century paper objects made by schoolgirls when @SuttonHouseNT was one of Hackney's many female academies. These paper cuts are an extremely rare example of an art form written about by Hannah Woolley (1/2)

Very much enjoying the angry annotations of an early 19C reader who thinks Malone is an ‘audacious despoiler’, possessed by a ‘licentious unauthorised spirit of alteration’. In short, ‘This fellow ought to be hang’d.’

The academic fantasy

Early mod. folks — has anyone, to your knowledge, written about the masque depicted in the memorial portrait of Sir Henry Unton? Painted c.1596 - 1606 according to the National Portrait Gallery and showing a masque of Mercury and Diana. My brief search only returns two articles.

I own one 17C printed book, and its paper feels very thin/light to me. In the archive tomorrow to make wild guesses about manuscript paper, I guess!

Folks who regularly handle both early modern and modern handmade paper: does 100 gsm sound reasonable for a good-quality white paper sheet? More? Less? *In service of a very exciting but wholly nascent project I hope will get started very soon*

Fellow paper nerds, does anyone know a source that specifies the weight of typical early modern paper sizes? I.e, how much a sheet of foolscap, pot, or royal paper might weigh?

A pleasure to read Victoria Button's review of our 2021 collection *The Paper Trade in Early Modern England* in the most recent Renaissance Quarterly 📖

The Little Apple Bookshop is 27 years old today! Wow, that means we must both have been 14 years old when we opened it. Impressive, huh? The Maths doesn't lie! 🎂🤔🧮 🪇

@paul_salzman Very excited to read more about this in the future! I don't suppose there are any hints you've come across of women re-using almanacs as waste? I expect it must have been quite common, but so rare for any evidence of such ephemeral practices to have survived...

A privilege to follow in the footsteps of Lori Humphrey Newcomb and Sarah Lindenbaum and have a chance to look at Frances Wolfreston’s annotated Poor Robin almanacs. I do have a few new thoughts in a projected small book on early modern women and almanacs.

@eoin_price @GreenWill92 Seconded!

@GreenWill92 A robe for to go invisible

@shakedsetc So beautiful! These 'laminate' bindings are very common in the sixteenth century. I believe in the seventeenth century pulpboard becomes more common (when the waste paper is pulped and reconstituted into boards).

One nice little touch is though the front board is ripped, it allows you to see that it was made of compressed sheets of discarded pages from other books.

Here is my P Ovidii Nasonis Amatoria. It’s tiny, 16mo (sextodecimo), and was printed when Henry VIII was still alive. The font is Aldus’s roman, but I don’t know which editor’s work it reflects—Andrea Navagerio?

@abbiegarrington @LizzieSwann1 😊

@torcheculs @LizzieSwann1 Everyone has been saying what a great talk - a highlight of the week, you were! Congrats on your book.

This was a real treat, in which @torcheculs suggested waste paper might make wholly different affordances for the hand, & that Donne uses book unbinding as an answer to the poet's quest for an analogous experience to death. Thanks for 'visiting' (& thanks to chair @LizzieSwann1).

Are you interested in #rot? Join me and the fabulous @atarbuck for a fun afternoon of deliquescence and decay! Please spread the word: we want to be omnidisciplinary, & warmly welcome all pertinent (& some impertinent) contributions. forms.gle/BD4sGYaVPReTh4…

@MarieAllitt Oh dear god 🤮

Um, you can’t say it’s a 12 month post and then say it might be shorter

Good news, the Higher Education Academy has confirmed that, after many years of doing it, I can in fact teach. (I am now a Fellow of the above)

@madeline_cct I study when books get wasted and thrown away, and there's a certainly type of person who finds the idea of a 'prestigious' (i.e. old) book being recycled or reused painful and offensive 🙄

This this this. The fetishisation of books as inherently wonderful is deeply elitist and often smugly so.

@Tamarajatkin I discovered my great-great grandfather was a 'Calender Man', which I believe is part of the industrial papermaking process. Book history is obviously part of DNA! 😂

Turns out my great-great-great grandfather was a bookbinder. Knew my love of blind tooling and limp parchment had to come from somewhere 🤣